Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Contemplative practice is an odd activity – it is so easy to fall into what we have learned to call distraction, and yet it is even easier to judge ourselves for becoming distracted. “Call yourself a meditator?” we sneer to ourselves, “you couldn’t concentrate if your life depended on it!” And yet, as Rosenberg says, really there is no such thing as distraction. There are only thoughts, that come and go, because that’s what minds do: they think. We have only to observe – and if we find ourselves tempted to follow trains of thought, to observe the temptation. Soon enough, the mind distracts itself from its distractions – and if not, the faithful breath is waiting for us to come back.

As long as we are alive, the dear breath is with us. There is such comfort in knowing this, if only we can remember. There is nothing, save gentle death itself, that can take the breath away from us: not illness, not sorrow, nor even happiness or anticipation. Always the breath is waiting, infinitely patient and kind. It is the soft weight of life itself, our companion from the minute we are born. All we need to do is trust it, like the steady tide on the wide shore of being.