"Now, sometimes, simply watching [greed, anger and delusion] come into the mind will be enough to make them fade away. As Ajaan Lee once said, they get embarrassed if you really look at them intently. There are other times though, when they won’t go away, no matter how much you look at them, in which case you have to fight them off. You have to be proactive in preventing them or, if they’re already there, proactive in getting rid of them. An important skill in the path is learning when to be just an observer and when to be more proactive. Again this falls back on the concepts of skillful and unskillful, which are so basic to everything.
So this is one of the reasons we work with the breath in both ways, both being proactive and simply watching it, so as to get a sense of when it’s skillful to manipulate the breath, vary the length of the breath, the depth of the breath, quality of the breath, when to move the breath energy around the body; and then when to have a sense of just simply sitting there and watching the breath.
Simply to accept things as they are is basically to deny something else, which is that you have power, the power to change the present. One of the skills you have to learn is exactly how much power you can exercise skillfully at any particular moment. When things are going well, how do you maintain them? What do you do in order to keep them going well — because sometimes all you have to do is just keep watching, watching, watching, and that’s enough. Other times you have to interfere, to help things along, in order to keep them going well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Equanimity of a Cow"
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