The more you get sensitive to the breathing and its impact on the body, the more you see that it’s going to have an impact on the mind. You can adjust the breath, work the breath energies in the body so that they have a good impact.

"So we’re learning the skills we need to bring to our experience, and we start with the breath. This is one of the fabrications, as the Buddha calls it: one of the intentional elements we bring to experience. Try to get really sensitive to how you breathe. Most of our lives, we’re interested in other things. The breath gets pushed into the background. It goes on automatic pilot. As a result, we don’t get as much out of it as we could. So now as we meditate, we’re learning to be more sensitive to this dimension of our experience. The more you get sensitive to the breathing and its impact on the body, the more you see that it’s going to have an impact on the mind. You can adjust the breath, work the breath energies in the body so that they have a good impact. At the same time, you’re priming yourself to be alert, at the very least, to what you’re bringing with the body, because the body is where emotions get lodged.

A thought comes through the mind, and it’s not just a thought. It goes deep. It digs into something in the mind, hits a nerve, and your breath changes. Say anger comes: It’s going to hit the way you breathe. Then the way you breathe is going to have an impact on the hormones in the body and the way you feel the body. Sometimes you get to the point where you can’t stand the sensation of how the body feels while you’re angry. You’ve just got to get it out of your system. For most of us, the way we get it out of the system is unskillful. We start saying things and doing things that we later regret, or if we don’t regret them, sometimes we go into denial about the harm we’ve done — neither of which is very good. So it’s good to learn an alternative skill for getting things out of your system in a harmless way.

You breathe through the tension, breathe through the distorted breath, iron things out, smooth things out so that, at the very least, the body doesn’t get hijacked by the anger."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Mind Comes First"

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