All you have to do is be with the breath and get a sensitivity to what kind of breathing feels good and how heavily to focus on the breath so that you don’t put too much pressure on it, but you don’t put too little pressure on it.

"So if you’re looking for happiness outside, you’re going to have to fight other people off, whereas if you’re looking for happiness within, nobody going to be able to take your sensation of your breath away from you. That’s yours. Nobody else can come and say, “I want that sensation of the breath,” or “I want that sensation of the body as you feel it from within,” or “I want your sensation of your mind.” They can’t take it. It’s yours.

So you’re free to work with these areas of your awareness that are totally yours. They can be cultivated. They can be nourished. You can breathe in a way that gives rise to ease. You can think of the breath energy spreading through the body to take that ease everywhere in the body so that you feel bathed all around, out to the skin. That’s something you can do with this territory of yours. You can spread your awareness so that it’s not just confined to one little topic. It fills the whole body with a sense of expansiveness. You can think thoughts of goodwill [mettā]: “May other beings share in the same kind of happiness.” They may not have your particular sensations, but this possibility of getting the mind to settle down like this is something anybody can develop if they’re interested and if they put enough effort in. And you realize it’d be a good thing. You gain the well-being of concentration. There’s no thought that, “I want this alone and I don’t want anyone else to have any sensation like this.”

It becomes more and more automatic to relate well to the breath. You realize that all you have to do is be with the breath and get a sensitivity to what kind of breathing feels good and how heavily to focus on the breath so that you don’t put too much pressure on it, but you don’t put too little pressure on it. When you get that sense of the right touch, you see how good this is. The natural response is that you’d like other people to be able to do this as well. The world would be a much better place if we could all do this."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Greed & Distress with Reference to the World"