JonW wrote:I think we should be a little careful about assuming that mindfulness as a practice has been "perfected" by anybody, including Siddhartha. "Know for yourself," he famously said. Perfection would be the ultimate goal and this is not, let us remind ourselves, about seeking goals.
Indeed. And we also have to be careful lest "not seeking goals" becomes our goal
. There is always something to be said for paying attention to the detail, however, and the devil is always in the details, is it not! 
LucidMind wrote:Wow...Thich Nhat Hanh never ceases to amaze me his powerful and inspiring quotes and metaphors. I really like that one, and i'll definitely keep it in my mind if I start worrying whether or not I am feeling my breath correctly. Thanks for sharing!
Effortless to share
.Here are some direct quotes - since he didn't say explicitly what I said... I'll let you decide...
ShambhalaSun.com: Thich Nhat Hanh on The Practice of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is when you are truly there, mind and body together. You breathe in and out mindfully, you bring your mind back to your body, and you are there. When your mind is there with your body, you are established in the present moment. Then you can recognize the many conditions of happiness that are in you and around you, and happiness just comes naturally.
Mindfulness practice should be enjoyable, not work or effort. Do you have to make an effort to breath in? You don’t need to make an effort. To breathe in, you just breathe in. Suppose you are with a group of people contemplating a beautiful sunset. Do you have to make an effort to enjoy the beautiful sunset? No, you don’t have to make any effort. You just enjoy it.
The same thing is true with your breath. Allow your breath to take place. Become aware of it and enjoy it. Effortlessness. Enjoyment.
[...]
First Mindfulness Exercise: Mindful Breathing
The first exercise is very simple, but the power, the result, can be very great. The exercise is simply to identify the in-breath as in-breath and the out-breath as the out-breath. When you breathe in, you know that this is your in-breath. When you breathe out, you are mindful that this is your out-breath.
Just recognize: this is an in-breath, this is an out-breath. Very simple, very easy. In order to recognize your in-breath as in-breath, you have to bring your mind home to yourself. What is recognizing your in-breath is your mind, and the object of your mind—the object of your mindfulness—is the in-breath. Mindfulness is always mindful of something. When you drink your tea mindfully, it’s called mindfulness of drinking. When you walk mindfully, it’s called mindfulness of walking. And when you breathe mindfully, that is mindfulness of breathing.
So the object of your mindfulness is your breath, and you just focus your attention on it. Breathing in, this is my in-breath. Breathing out, this is my out-breath.
Notice he doesn't give any detail as to the locality of the breath - just noticing it at all is apparently enough. He is an old master at teaching and practicing mindfulness, so he would have given more detail about the nose or the belly if it was important. In fact, I don't recall ever having heard such detailed instructions from him about where exactly to sense the breath.
The following is posted on Thich Nhat Hanh's ThichNhatHanhSanghas.org as part of the article titled Seven Steps to Artful Living:
1 IN AND OUT BREATH Without attempting to control or manipulate the breath, just let it come in and go out through the nose. As the breath comes in mentally say “in”. As the breath goes out mentally say “out”. If you begin to think of other things, bring your attention gently back to the breath as soon as you notice the break in your concentration.
2 EXPERIENCING THE BREATH In this step we focus on the qualities of the breath. Qualities include: sensation; pressure; length; fast or slow; deep or shallow; coarse or fine. You can focus on the breath at the tip of the nose, the chest area, or the stomach area. You can also follow the path of the breath as it comes in and out of the body.
It's not directly linked to Thich Nhat Hanh, but someone practicing within his broader Sangha.
Gareth wrote:Mindfulness is most often taught as an awareness of breath, and while I do sometimes meditate to my breath, most of my meditations are sound-based. Either some gentle ambient music, or just the sounds around me. Today I meditated with my bedroom window open, listening to the sounds of spring outside. This type of meditation always feels more natural to me, although I do like to experiment to this day.
There are many ways to practise mindfulness.
Yes, and a big emphasis on maintaining the mind-body connection is always useful here, lest one drifts off into indulgence in the sounds and the thoughts they generate for us. Here is JKZ in Coming to Our Senses, Chapter: Soundscape, p206-207:
... the co-arising with sound of the knowing of sound as sound, as just what it is, before it gets dressed up by the thinking mind and avaluated by our naming, by our liking and disliking of things, by our judging mind. It is something like a mirror for sound, this knowing, simply reflecting what comes before it, without opinion or attitude, open, empty, and therefore capable of containing anything that presents itself.
This is a great soundscape guided meditation from JKZ available on youtube: Jon Kabat Zinn Soundscape Guided Meditation. At 09:22 he highlights how the practice is keeping one's attention on the continuity of sounds arriving at one's ears, and if that attention is broken, then to meet with awareness whatever it is which carried one away from one's anchor within the 'soundscape', and then gently noting what drew one away and then bringing the attention back just like one does with the breath.
Again, in Coming to Our Senses, JKZ writes in the Chapter: Just Hearing, p281:
The sounds are already arriving. Can we hear them? Can we be with them moment by moment, sound and the spaces between sounds met with awareness, just as we have been doing with thoughts and the spaces between them, without liking or disliking, preferring or rejecting, without judging or evaluating, cataloguing or savoring? Of course you can intentionally do this with music, which is itself a rich and wonderful practice...
Keeping one's awareness of the tension within one's mind and body in all these activities is one of the essential ingredients - noticing when it changes, and providing the conditions for it to dissolve so that we can remain joyfully immersed in our activity.
I like JKZ's use of 'scapes' - this points to this idea of 'neighbourhoods' of awareness. Here is another youtube guided meditation by JKZ using the breathscape: Jon Kabat Zinn Breathscape And Bodyscape guided meditation. At 11:15 he invites one to expand the awareness of the breath to the body as a whole - a combining of the 'breathscape' and the 'bodyscape' - the whole body sitting and breathing.