The armor you get with the breath creates a force field around you. If you have the pleasure of meditation and can carry some of that pleasure into daily life, you find that you’re not quite so hungry for unskillful pleasure.

"Watch out for the way the mind will often say, “Well, this is just the way things have to be. How can a mind function without some greed, aversion, and delusion?” It may not put it quite in those terms, but you have certain ways of talking to yourself that seem to be a normal part of how you survive in life. You come to think of them as your armor as you go through the day. Well, remember what armor is like. It’s big and clunky and it weighs you down.

The armor you get with the breath, though — if you’re fully with the breath and the breath energy is good — creates a force field around you, where the things that you used to have to fight off with your spite or malice or whatever, you can deflect without having to use any of those unskillful mind states. You need to develop some confidence in the breath until see that you don’t really need these defilements. When you see that you don’t need them, you can begin looking more carefully into, well, why do you like them?

They provide a certain amount of pleasure, but if you have the pleasure of meditation and can carry some of that pleasure into daily life, you find that you’re not quite so hungry for unskillful pleasure. When you find the mind going for it, you realize it’s just out of habit. Again, it’s not automatic that doing the concentration and having a sense of well-being will starve these defilements or keep you from going back to them. It’s so easy to drop the concentration and go back to your old ways because they’re habitual. But if you’re determined that you don’t want to be led around by the nose by these things, that’s when you have a chance of resisting their power."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Defilements"

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