Just maintain this sense of being with comfortable breathing. You can make the range of your awareness as large as you can. You can fill the body with it if you want. Or you can focus on one spot or one section of the body.

"Focus your attention on the breath. Take a couple of good long, deep in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the sensation of breathing in the body. Focus your attention there.

And then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Make it shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Or you can try in-long and out-short, or in-short and out-long. See what kind of breathing feels good. If you find something that feels good, stick with it for a while until it doesn’t feel so good anymore, then you can change again. The needs of the body will change as your mind begins to settle down.

If your thoughts begin to wander off to something else, remind yourself that you’re not there for that. You’re here to develop some concentration. So you drop those thoughts and you’re back at the breath. No matter how many times you wander off, you just keep coming back to the breath.

When you do come back, reward yourself with a breath that feels especially gratifying. When we talk of “breath” here, it’s not so much the air coming in and out of the lungs through the nose. It’s more the flow of energy in the body, which you can feel anyplace in the body at all.

Then, as the breath gets comfortable, think of that sense of ease beginning to spread through the different parts of the body, so that the energy flowing through the body feels good all the way in, all the way out. And just maintain this sense of being with comfortable breathing. You can make the range of your awareness as large as you can. You can fill the body with it if you want.

Some people, though, when they start out, find that being aware of the whole body is a little bit too distracting. So you can focus on one spot or one section of the body and make that your home for the hour. If you leave home, you want to have good reasons. Otherwise you just stay right here."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Talk to Yourself"

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