You can experiment: longer breathing, shorter breathing, deeper breathing, more shallow breathing, heavier or lighter. As you experiment, you begin to see that your actions, your decisions, your choices really do make a difference.

"When we work with the breath, it may seem like a detour but it’s not. When you’re with the breath, you’re in the present moment. As you work with the breath to make it comfortable, to make it energizing, whatever the body needs right now, you’re making it easier and easier for the mind stay in the present moment.

Why is the present moment so important? Because this is where you’re making all the decisions in your life, the things you’re going to say, you’re going to do, you’re going to think. It’s important you try to do these things skillfully. Now, you can get yourself worked up and tied up in knots about making mistakes, so to prevent that, that’s another reason why we work with the breath: so that you’re coming from a state of ease and well-being. The more ease and well-being you can feel in this way, the easier it is to make the right choices, the easier it is to admit your mistakes when you see them, so that you can respond to the mistakes in the right way — “right way” here being in the way that’s most effective in putting an end to suffering.

The mind does have a tendency to create a lot of suffering for itself. We all want happiness. Everything we do and say and think, every intention we have, is an attempt at finding happiness or finding at least some pleasure, and yet it often turns around and creates a lot of suffering. This is why you have to bring a lot of alertness, a lot of mindfulness, bring your full attention to what you’re doing, the choices you’re making, so that you begin to understand why it is that even though we aim at happiness, at pleasure and ease, we create suffering, misery, dis-ease. We’ll see it’s largely because we’re not paying attention to what we’re doing and we’re not paying attention to the results of what we’re doing.

This is another good lesson you learn from paying attention to the breath, because you can see immediately that the way you focus on the breath will have an immediate effect on how you sense the body, and on the mind’s ability to stay in the sense of well-being. It happens right away. If you clamp down too hard on the breath or you force the breath in a mechanical way, it’s going to get harder and harder to stay with a sense of ease in the present moment. The dis-ease will appear immediately. So you try to notice: What kind of breathing would feel good right now?

This is an area where you can experiment: longer breathing, shorter breathing, deeper breathing, more shallow breathing, heavier or lighter. As you experiment, you begin to see that your actions, your decisions, your choices really do make a difference. You also gain a sense of competence that you can do this. You can learn. There’s that old saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but it doesn’t really matter what age you are. You can watch your breath and you learn from it no matter what your age."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right & Wrong Decisions"