You’re in charge. Thinking of the breath this way puts you more in charge of what’s going on in your sensation of the body. You were here first. The breath is here first. The pain is secondary.

"Dealing with pain: Pain tends to get glommed together with the earth element, your sense of solidity in the body. Of course, that makes the pain seem solid. So to get past that, you learn how to question the solidity of the pain. You experience the breath before you experience the pain: Think of it in that way. We have a subconscious tendency, when there’s a pain, to allow the breath energy to flow up to the pain and then stop. Well, that makes it worse. We tighten up around the pain in our childish desire to put a boundary around it, to keep it from spreading, and then the energy can’t go through. We feel that the pain is there first and the breath comes second. So reverse that. The breath is first. The pain is second.

And the breath is something other than pain. It’s a physical element, but pain is something else. It’s that sharpness, that heightened sense of displeasure or discomfort. But once you untangle it from the solidity of the body, you begin to realize it’s a lot more fluid and insubstantial than you thought before.

Ajaan Chah has a nice analogy. He says it’s like you’re sitting in the one seat in the house, and all the other things that come have no place to sit down. They’re there at your pleasure. They come and they go, but you’re the one in the seat. You’re in charge. Thinking of the breath this way puts you more in charge of what’s going on in your sensation of the body. You were here first. The breath is here first. The pain is secondary. It’s not the case that the pain has moved in and laid claim to it and pushed us out, unless we allow ourselves to be pushed out and give the seat up to it. We were there first. The breath is there first."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dethinking Thinking" (Meditations8)