Breathe right the stress and physical or mental tension as soon as a thought appears. Dissolve it away. Then wait and be quiet for a while. Something else will begin to form, and you zap that, too.

"In the course of working through these [breath] energies, you get more sensitive to how thoughts form. The formation of a thought has both a physical side and a mental side, and the breath is the ideal place to see this. After all, it is a physical property, but of the physical properties, it’s closest to the mind and the most sensitive to what’s going on in the mind. When a thought comes up, you can see that it reverberates both in the body and in the mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to, as they say in Thai, continue the weave of the thought.

As soon as a thought appears, you zap it. In other words, you take that skill you have of breathing through patterns of tension, and use it wherever you sense any tension around the inchoate thought. You don’t have to even think of whether it’s physical or mental tension at that point. But there’s an act of construction, an act of fabrication, beginning to put things together, and there’s going to be some tension and some stress there: Breathe right through it. Dissolve it away. Then wait and be quiet for a while. Something else will begin to form, and you zap that, too. A part of the mind may say, “This is getting boring,” or “This is kind of dumb. You’re not thinking about anything.” Well, zap that thought as well. And try and catch these things as quickly as you can."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Stake Out" (Meditations12)

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