Meditation The Complete Guide: Techniques from East and West to Calm the Mind, Heal the Body and Enrich the Spirit by Patricia Monaghan & Eleanor G. Viereck.  New World Library: Novato, California 2011.

• Meditation involves choice.  You choose to be present - now, now, now, and now.  Meditation is a practice of training your attention by focusing it on something in the present moment, such as a flower, a candle, a sound or your own breath.  Through the practice, the mind settles down. (P.1)
• Meditation in not a relegion.  It is not a doctrine or something to be acquired.  Meditation is play rather than work.  While you are playing, your mind is open.  As long as you practice with a lightness of approach, you will experience freedom from desire and ambition. (P. 1)
• Meditation deals with something that is within us and can lead us to a state of grace.  The term grace comes from Christianity, but the experience is common to all spiritual traditions.  Grace is a gift that can heal us, guide us, and give us a sense of meaning.  Whether you call the source of this gift God or soul is not important.  You may call it the higher self, inner wisdom, theta-wave activity, peace, the inner ground of being, goddess, or natural law.  Whatever you call it, you can benefit from coming into harmony with it.  (P. 5)

Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges by Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara. Shambhala: Boston 2014.

• Meditation is about training the body and mind.  Let the body settle; let the breath settle; let the mind settle.  Don’t worry about whether your practice is working; don’t judge your performance; don’t tell yourself stories or find other ways to avoid this very moment.  These are just ways of separating from your deepest intention and your meditation. (PP. 127 – 128)

• When meditating, don’t concern yourself with trying to get to some particular place or state of mind.  Each day’s meditation will be a little different, just like the rest of life.  When you’re sitting, you may realize that you’re thinking about something else.  At that moment, take a deep breath and recognize that, in that moment of realization, you have come back to now. If we practice daily, soon we are able to stay more often in that space of pure awareness without an object.  Just breathing, just being present – we call this being naturally unified. (PP. 129 – 130)

 Care of the Soul in Medicine by Thomas Moore.  CA: Hay House, 2010.

• A quiet environment is not a passive one. In a quiet space, you can hear your thoughts and feel your emotions.  That’s why noise is often a defense against experiencing your life.  Many people don’t want to know what they are experiencing. (P. 48)

A More Ardent Fire: From Everyday Love to Love of God by Eknath Easwaran. CA: Nilgiri Press, 1979.

• We become what we love.  Whatever we constantly dwell on shapes our desires, our decisions and finally our destiny.  This is the basis of meditation: we become what we meditate on. (P. 28)

• As soon as you see a hostile thought, shoot it down with a mantram.  It doesn’t matter if the thought seems justified or not; that is part of the camouflage.  Don’t stop to ask questions; don’t wait for it to land and give you a password – shoot.  At the beginning there may be a number of wild shots, but by repeating the mantram until the thought drops out of sight.  After a while, with a lot of practice, you will be able to pick off an invading resentment with just one shot. (P. 132)

• The secret to meditation is simple: we become what we meditate on.  When you use the Prayer of St. Francis every day in meditation, you are driving the words deep into your consciousness.  Eventually they become an integral part of your personality, which means they will find constant expression in what you do, what you say, and what you think. (P. 223)

Wellsprings A Book of Spiritual Exercises by Anthony de Mello.  NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1985.

• Meditation can lead from mind to sense, from thought to fantasy and feeling – then, through feeling, fantasy, and sense to silence.  So use it like a staircase to get up to the terrace. (p. 12)

• The peace and joy that comes from meditation may not be what you are accustomed to – something that at the beginning is so subtle that it hardly seems like a feeling or an emotion at all.  If you are not aware of this, you might become discouraged too easily. (P. 56)

• The enjoyment of this peace and joy is an acquired taste.  When a child is told that beer is enjoyable, he is likely to approach his glass of beer with his own experience of what enjoyable means and is then surprised and disappointed that the beer contains none of the sweetness that he gets from his soft drinks.  He was told that beer is enjoyable – his concept of enjoyable is limited to sweet.  Do not approach the exercise of contemplation with any preconceived notions at all.  Approach it with a readiness to discover new experiences (that initially may not even seem like “experiences” at all) and to acquire brand new tastes. (P. 56)

Thirty Days of Inspiration Survival Guide for the Soul – Day 1 Just Breathe

• Meditation is the conscious direction of one’s attention to the inner self. It allows you to get in touch with that wisdom deep within you that can always be relied upon to let you know what to do. Because it is the quickest and surest way to increase your awareness, regular meditation should be an important part of your daily activity.