As everything is allowed to relax, you gain a sense of fullness, rapture and refreshment where you don’t feel anything physically is lacking right now. Then you can bathe in a sense of ease.

"If you’re grim about the meditation, you’re missing an important part, which is that, for the mind to settle down, you want to settle down with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. Think of your sense of the body as a whole crowd of little feeling points, sensation points. In the normal way we breathe, we run through the body in the course of the day in a way that tends to squeeze these points. But here you give them a chance to open up, to blossom, to grow all over the body.

What you’re actually doing is relaxing the muscles in your blood vessels, the little tiny, tiny muscles all along. Allow them to relax everywhere. Relax your nerve endings. What happens here, as everything is allowed to relax in this way, is that you gain a sense of fullness. These are the seeds for what the texts call piti: rapture, refreshment, a sense of fullness where you don’t feel anything physically is lacking right now. Then you can bathe in a sense of ease.

When a sense of comfort arises, you have to be careful to keep your awareness as broad as possible, either going through the body section by section, or just thinking “whole body” all at once. Otherwise, if you get a slight sense of comfort in a narrow constricted range, the mind tends to curl up around that sense of comfort, and basically goes to sleep. Even if you’re not really sleeping, you lose the clarity of your awareness, the clarity of your alertness. This is what’s called delusion concentration — the Pali term is moha-samadhi. It’s pleasant, but it doesn’t accomplish anything in the mind.

The real sense of well-being comes when you have this full sense of the body. All your nerves that get frazzled by being tense or being stressed out: When they’re allowed to experience a sense of fullness like this, that’s what nourishes them, energizes them, so at the very least, the physical energy in the body is wholesome, helpful, healing, and it can’t help but have a good effect on the mind."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Hobo Mind"

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