If you think of the whole body as a breath energy field, you can breathe in and out of various places that you might not have thought of before. You can breathe in and out of the shoulders, in and out of the eyes.

"If you think of the body as being a solid lump and you’ve got to pump the breath into it, that’ll affect the way you breathe, affect the level of pleasure you can get out of the breath. It restricts a lot of your possibilities. But if you think of the whole body as a breath energy field, you can breathe in and out of various places that you might not have thought of before: breathing out of the sides of your rib cage; thinking of the breath coming in from the left and the right as you breathe in and going out the chest you breathe out. Or you can breathe in and out of the shoulders, in and out of the eyes.

See if there’s someplace in the body that you’ve never thought of as breath before, and experiment with it: As you breathe in, think of the breath energy coming in right there. You don’t have to pull it from anywhere else. It just comes straight in through the skin. Notice which parts of the body, when you do this, have an especially good effect on how you experience the breathing, so that it feels more fulfilling, as opposed to struggling to get the breath in or to move the breath around. The breath energy is already there, and it’s simply a matter of nourishing it, filling up a little bit."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power of Perception"

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