Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.
Christine Feldman
It takes a great person to creatively inhabit her own mind and not turn her mind into a destructive force that can ransack her life. [Even some] lovely people feel that their real identity is working on themselves, and some work on themselves with such harshness. Like a demented gardener who won’t let the soil settle for anything to grow, they keep raking, tearing away the nurturing clay from their own heart, then they’re surprised that they feel so empty and vacant. Self-compassion is paramount. When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than you do.
Work can be fast and relentless: pressing deadlines, looming goals, endless meetings; email, phone calls, “to do” lists. At times we can feel out of control, as if driving a car with no breaks, rushing through our jobs holding onto difficult turns, cutting corners, racing through an occasional red light. We might even say to ourselves at the end of the day: “Hey, what just happened – I just spent my whole day at a job without noticing any of it!”….When we are mindful of our job’s speed and hecticness, we take a subtle step: we actually slow down in order to notice how fast we are going. By simply observing the speed mindfully, we have tapped the breaks, so to speak, and slowed down just a bit. 
Awareness of sensations is considered the first foundation of mindfulness because whatever we experience — feelings, emotions, thoughts and sensory perceptions — also arise as sensations in our body. When mindful of our body, we open to the changing stream of sensations without grasping or resistance. The experience might be fear or joy, it might be the intensity of aliveness, or it might be numbness. ….This mindfulness is not a distanced kind of witnessing. […] we should “observe sensations within sensations.” This means not imagining our hand, for instance, but actually directly feeling from the inside the energy that is our hand, as it is in any given and changing moment. We are training to experience the body from the inside out.
Mindfulbalance 