So allow yourself to be totally immersed in the breath. Whatever thinking you’re doing, you’re evaluating, thinking about the breath, ways of making it more comfortable, more energizing, whatever’s needed right now.

"You want to think about the breath very consistently and evaluate it very carefully. Give it your full sensitivity. How does the breath feel? Where do you feel it? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what can you do to make it feel more comfortable? What way of experimenting with the breath is too heavy-handed, and what way is just right? These are things you have to find out by paying full attention, being very, very sensitive.

Ajaan Fuang’s most frequent meditation advice was: Be observant. Watch the breath. Watch how the mind relates to the breath. Then try to figure out how can you get the two of them together, more and more snugly, more and more consistently, so that you’re with the breath all the way in, all the way out; then all the way in again, all the way out again, without break. You find that it interests you because, after all, the health of the body depends on the breath energy. At the very least, you want to make sure the breath energy is flowing well in the different parts of the body. It’s free medicine, and here’s your chance to tap into it. Each breath is an opportunity to learn something new about the breath — about how the in-and-out breath relates to the energy patterns in the different parts of the body, and how your awareness of those energy patterns in the different parts the body will affect the in-and-out breath. The influence goes both ways.

Ask yourself: Which parts of the body seem to be holding back from the breath? Which ones are deprived of the breath? Allow them in on the breathing process so that nothing is held back. You’re totally surrounded by the breath. It’s on all sides and it’s constantly flowing. We like to put little borders around it, saying that this is where the in-breath begins and that’s where the out-breath begins, and this is how far the breath energy goes. But the breath by its nature is not anything you can fence in like that. There’s breath energy that’s constantly flowing in one particular direction — it might be up, might be down. There’s breath energy that spins around in place in different parts of the body. There’s the in-and-out breath. Lots of different kinds of energy, and they all mingle together. If we try to place a fence around the breath, what we do is we end up depriving different parts of the body of the energy that they need.

So allow yourself to be totally immersed in the breath. This is why the Buddha when he was talking about mindfulness of the body, didn’t say just kayasati, which would be mindfulness of the body. It’s kayagatasati, mindfulness immersed in the body, totally surrounded by the body, totally permeating the body. Whatever thinking you’re doing, you’re evaluating, thinking about the breath, ways of making it more comfortable, more energizing, whatever’s needed right now."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Path Is & Isn’t the Goal"

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