One of my teachers used to tell us:

"Change the prescription of your glasses"

Initially I thought it was just a matter of having positive thoughts. This sent me on a positive thinking journey which left me feeling I was missing something. At some point, I stumbled into this question "why do I think the way I do?" This question changed the direction of the journey—it turned awareness back toward its source.

Many times during meditation, we can experience a calmness that is not devoid of thoughts. The times that I have experienced this, it seems like being at the bottom of a lake and only perceiving the faintest view of the surface. In other words, even though there are thoughts, they barely make an imprint in the mind. I remain mostly in a very pristine sense of awareness. 

Awareness is the most basic thing we do. It is so second nature to us that we don't think twice about directing it. We simply let it move about as it will, from one experience to the next, and we seldom notice it. 

A while ago, I was taking a yoga workshop, one of the teachings that stood out to me was that through yoga we learn to direct awareness. This is an ongoing lesson for me. At some point, we all discover how our awareness fluctuates as we practice. Personally, when I practice, I can catch myself most of the time when my mind starts to wander. As soon as I recognize that this has happened, I gently bringing it back to the task at hand. 

As we practice yoga, we feel a great deal. At the beginning, everything may register as undifferentiated sensation. Overtime, we learn to discern what is strengthening and what is stretching. We also learn to gauge how much effort or ease to apply in each pose. We can even learn how to respond once we realize we have pushed too far. All of these abilities are developed through thorough and consistent observation of ourselves during practice.

When I started meditating and practicing yoga, I did it as a way find answers, and I had so many questions (I still do). After many years of witnessing the contents of my mind,  I feel more able to self–regulate. This offers a certain distance from the world, which initially can be helpful, but not in the long run. During challenging times, this experience has created a feeling of being calm as the ship goes down—like standing on deck with full awareness, waiting for a map that does not exist.