Make it a habit to breathe through any tension in the body, and make that your default mode as you go through the day. Can you go through the day with a sense of your spot in the body where you stay focused? Keep that open and relaxed.

"When you get angry, you breathe in a certain way, and it’s become habitual. It builds up tension, builds up pressure in different parts of the body. When that gets unbearable, and you decide, “I can’t stand this any longer, I’ve got to get it out of my system,” the anger has hijacked your breath.

So you want to learn how to get it back, to reclaim the breath, make it yours. Breathe in a way that breathes through the tension, that releases the pressure. If pressure builds up in the neck or the head, think of it dissipating down the shoulders. Think of Hakuin’s image of a big ball of butter on top of your head, melting, and the butter is going down your head, down your neck, down your shoulders. If the pressure builds up in your chest, think of it going out the arms, out through the palms of the hands. We’ve had our habitual ways of working with the breath energies in the body, even when we didn’t think of them as breath energies, that relate to the flow of the blood in the body, the pressure we put on the body as we breathe in.

We can learn how to undo those habits, to reclaim the breath. This also helps us deal with feelings. Like the feeling of irritability, something unpleasant someplace in the body, that aggravates the anger: All too often, we carry around a lot of tension in the body, so that when little things happen, they seem much bigger than they are. It’s like a person carrying a huge load, and then someone puts another box or two on top. Ordinarily the box would not be too much, but placing the boxes on top of the load that the first person is already carrying makes the load too much. So the person weighed down just throws everything back at the other person: “How do you expect me to carry all this?” The second person didn’t know the first person was carrying so much. If you carry a lot of tension around in the body, a lot of irritability, your fuse gets shorter.

So make it a habit to breathe through any tension in the body, and make that your default mode as you go through the day. Can you go through the day with a sense of your spot in the body where you stay focused? Keep that open and relaxed."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Question Your Actions"

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