Some people feel rapture as a tingling through the body, their hair standing on end. For others, it’s gentler — a sense of balanced, full well-being.

"What we’re working on here is something that’s called piti in Pali. You can translate it as rapture; you can translate it as fullness; you can translate it as refreshment. The basic meaning is that it feels really good, really nourishing. The Buddha lists it as one of the energizing factors of awakening.

It’s also a kind of food. There’s that passage where he says that, when we meditate, we feed on rapture like the radiant gods. The problem with the word rapture is that sometimes it seems too intense for the way some people experience it. Some people feel it as a tingling through the body, their hair standing on end. For others, it’s gentler — a sense of balanced, full well-being. Some people feel it in waves coming over the body. And for some people it’s so intense that the body starts moving.

The intensity is not a measure of the intensity of your concentration. It’s more a measure of how starved of energy the body’s been feeling. If it’s been feeling really starved, the sense of rapture is going to be extremely intense. If the body hasn’t been starved, the rapture or refreshment will be more gentle. Sometimes you may want it to be intense but it’s not going to be intense, but that doesn’t matter. Be very patient with it. Again, if you start pushing it too much, it withers up. Have a strong sense of allowing the energy to be there and to radiate out. If it’s going to spread, it’s going to spread at its own rate. You just try to maintain your balance right there on the cusp of the present and it’ll do its own thing."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rapture" (Meditations6)

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