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

Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.

More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.

In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.

Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive