Mindfulness of Breathing in Practice (extract)

"You explore variations in the breath to see which ways of breathing will be energizing — to provide the refreshment — and comfortable, to provide the pleasure. When those feelings have been activated, you expand your awareness to fill the whole body and let those feelings spread throughout the body as you’re aware of it. As we noted above, this is where it’s very helpful to think of breathing as a whole-body process, so that the pleasure and refreshment can spread along with the flow of breath energy.

In this way, you have body, feelings, and mind all occupying the same space: Awareness and a feeling of pleasure and refreshment fill your sense of the body. You energize the body in this way — this corresponds to the step of gladdening the mind in the third tetrad — and then you calm bodily fabrication. In other words, you let the breathing grow calm."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Undaunted: The Buddha’s Teachings on Aging, Illness, Death, & the Deathless"

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