As you begin befriending your breath, you see immediately that unawareness is everywhere.

TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, "Am I awake?," "Where is my mind right now?

Even the tiniest manifestation of mindfulness in any moment might give rise to an intuition or insight that could be hugely transforming.

Meditation is more rightly thought of as a "Way" than as a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are.

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Ultimately, I see mindfulness as a love affair — with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world.

There is really only one way to do this. It takes a ruthless and, at the same time, kind and self-compassionate commitment to seeing your own impulses to go for the familiar, to fall into habitual patterns and confining mind-sets, and a willingness to let go of them in the very moments when they arise.

Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.

This is the case because, as we noted earlier, it is not the breath that is most important here, but the awareness itself. And the awareness can be of any aspect of your experience, not just your breathing—because it is always the same awareness, whatever the chosen object or objects of attention.

This has everything to do with holding the present moment in its fullness without imposing anything extra on it, perceiving its purity and the freshness of its potential to give rise to the next moment.

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." For instance, if you have the thought that you have to get a certain number of things done today and you don't recognize it as a thought but act as if it's "the truth," then you have created a reality in that moment in which you really believe that those things must all be done today.

We see that thoughts, when brought into and held in awareness in this way, readily lose their power to dominate and dictate our responses to life, no matter what their content and emotional charge. They then become workable rather than imprisoning. And thus, we become a bit freer in the knowing and the recognizing of them as events in the field of awareness.