Thich Nhat Hanh on anapanasati – mindfulness of breathing:

You should know how to breathe to maintain mindfulness, as breathing is a natural and highly effective tool which can prevent dispersion.  Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.  Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya on vipassana insight:

There is no need to go around, trying to find the object. In this meditation, we pay attention to the working, meditating mind, and to cultivating wholesome mental qualities. As such, we can use any object to cultivate awareness, develop Samadi, and gain insight into the nature of phenomena.

Remember that it doesn’t matter how many times the mind thinks, wanders off, or gets annoyed about something; it is OK, just as long as you can become aware of this. With practice, you will begin to see the objects and see how the mind feels, how it reacts, and how it functions.

Shunryu Suzuki on conceptualization and zazen:
A Zen master said that the way we cook is to prepare each ingredient separately – rice is here and pickles are over there – but when you put them in your tummy, you don’t know which is which. The soup, rice, pickles, and everything get all mixed up. As long as rice, pickles, and soup remain separate, they are not working. You are not being nourished. That is like your intellectual understanding or book knowledge — it remains separate from your actual life. Zazen practice is mixing the various ways we have of understanding and letting it all work together.

This is the secret of the teaching. It may be so, but it is not always so. Without being caught by words or rules, without many preconceived ideas, we actually do something, and doing something we apply our teaching.

SAMA~ SONG – a poem from The First Free Women

Like a dog forever
getting ready to sit,
all day and all night I circled my cushion.

These days,
body and mind
sit together
like old friends.

Since we aren’t getting anywhere,
they eventually decided,
why not have a seat and try to relax?

There are many paths.