The fact that you’re paying careful attention to the breath moves you into the area of feelings as a frame of reference. Ask yourself: What kind of feeling are you fostering in the way that you’re being attentive?

"You focus on the breath. As [the Buddha] said, the fact that you are paying careful attention to the breath: That, in and of itself, is a feeling. It’s a strange statement, that an act of attention would be a feeling. I think what he’s referring to is the fact that feelings are fabricated. They come from some potentials from the past: the fact that you have this body in this condition right now, this mind in this condition right now. It comes from a lot of things you’ve done in the past.

But those things from the past are just potentials. What you intend to do right now can decide which potentials you’re going to focus on. These present intentions play a very large role in determining which actions in the past really will have an impact on the present moment. It’s almost as if you could go back and change things from the past — or at least you change the effect they have. You want to take advantage of that. Ask yourself: What kind of feeling are you fostering in the way that you’re being attentive? In this way, the fact that you’re paying careful attention to the breath moves you into the area of feelings as a frame of reference, which is the territory of the second tetrad."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Meditation: The Second Tetrad"

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