Returning to your nature does not require forced effort
With general mindfulness or with vipassana (insight) meditation techniques, sometimes we try too hard to notice every little thing. Every itch, twitch and scratch, every fleeting thought and emotion, every ache and every complaint. We strain ourselves trying to become aware of everything that happens; we strain to become aware of the complete picture. But actually all this straining is just shutting us off instead, so every new sensation or form that arises in our field of awareness become honed in on, to the detriment of everything else. Our focus becomes a spotlight instead of a lamp.
Exchange your attempts at being perceptive for being receptive, however, and a rather different thing happens. Being perceptive takes effort, it’s active. Being receptive, allowing things to come in and out of your field of awareness naturally of their own accord, is passive and peaceful. This is the work of your pure awareness, your Mirror Mind. It is the sensory and conceptualising-consciousness that we push and strain with to perceive things, but the Mirror Mind of undefiled awareness needs no pushing or pulling - it simply witnesses all things equally.
If you can enter into a state of relaxed but alert perception, both on and off the meditation cushion, all sensations and phenomena will appear to you together quite naturally as a complete experience of being, moment by moment. And here you shall find what you truly are.
