My teacher said something to me recently that has stayed with me.

"To have all my mistakes."

Meaning, without his mistakes he would not be where he is now.

This idea is based on a Buddhist prayer of surrender, welcoming all the challenges that will lead them to their awakening.

And here's what makes that prayer so honest — most of our challenges are ones we created ourselves. 

Through the mistakes we keep making without realising it.

So it’s in the moment of realising you made a mistake that you can see what in you led you there.

The mistake reveals your shadow.

Recognizing that allows you to inch through another layer of what keeps you stuck. 

A lot of what I teach comes back to one thing — learning to be present. 

To step out of the endless loop of thoughts and fears and come back to what's actually here, right now.

I coach people who are looking for exactly that. 

A way to quiet the noise.

And there are practices for it. 

Ways of arriving. 

Of coming back to the body, the breath, the moment.

I've been practicing them for years.

What I didn't realise — until a pivotal day — is that I'd been making a fundamental mistake in my own practice. 

So in the spirit of celebrating my mistakes — here's one I was making without even knowing it.

One day I was feeling overwhelmed. 

That kind where your heart rate is up and you're having trouble focusing. 

I went for a walk to shake things up.

I thought about the teachings — become present, thoughts don't exist in the present moment. Blah blah blah.

You're taught to look around. Check if you're safe. If you are, you know it's just your nervous system running an old program. Right.

So I did this, I looked around. I tuned into my senses. I tried to arrive.

But something wasn't quite landing.

And I didn't know why — because I didn't know yet that what I was doing — and what I thought I was doing — were two completely different things.

What I was actually doing was being vigilant. 

And there is a very big distinction between being vigilant and being in a state of awareness.

And realising this made me see how much of my time I'd spent being vigilant rather than actually witnessing.

You see the mind is a master manipulator.

Not out of malice.

But because it knows all your fears and doubts — because, well, that's the only place they actually exist.

Inside your mind.

Not the fear of an oncoming car. The fear that you're not enough. That you'll be left. That it will all fall apart.

So it believes it needs to stay on guard, to defend against all these things it's been escaping from. 

And it will do whatever it takes to keep your attention.

Because 

It's only your attention that keeps the mind there.

And dropping into awareness can only happen without the mind.

Which is the predicament.

Because the mind doesn't want to be left out. So it does the next best thing.

It pretends.

This time I caught it — right in the middle of its performance.

Doing all the right things. Looking around. Being “present”. “Arriving.” Or so it seemed.

Vigilance can feel like awareness from the inside.

When the observer part of you is caught in vigilance it is: scanning, evaluating, trying to stay safe, frozen, staring, fixated, holding on.

The observer in awareness is spacious, curious, has no agenda.

The mechanics are almost identical until you notice one difference.

One is work.

The other is resting.

Real awareness isn't something you do.

It's something you stop doing.

There's nothing to figure out. Nothing to manage, nothing to navigate. 

The knowing arrives on its own.

You know how to interact, what you need to do, where you need to be — without having to calculate any of it.

There's a deep ease in it.

No agenda.

Nothing to fix.

Just here.

I'm not the first to notice this.

Every serious contemplative tradition has mapped this trap — the mind co-opting the very practice meant to quiet it.

In Zen they have a term, makyo, for the illusions and distractions that arise during meditation.

Visions, sensations, experiences that feel significant but are just the mind generating noise.

But what I stumbled onto is subtler than that.

Not an illusion during practice.

But the mind pretending to be the practice itself.

Dressed in the right clothes. Doing all the right things. Looking around, checking, arriving. 

Scanning with such discipline it had convinced me — and itself — that it was awareness.

It wasn't.

And what struck me most, sitting with that realization, was not the mistake itself.

It was how long I'd been making it.

How much of my life I'd spent in vigilance — that watchful, working, never-quite-resting state — believing I was present. 

Believing I was aware. 

Even believing I was meditating.

The mind is that good.

And that is exactly why our teacher doesn't just tell you what awareness feels like.

They point at it, again and again, from different angles, until one day you stop in the middle of your own performance and catch it.

The way I did on that walk.

The harder you try to be aware, the more vigilant you become.

Trying is the vigilance.

Next time you feel anxious or unsettled and you try to come present — pause.

Check who is doing the looking. 

Is it resting or working?

Spacious or scanning.

That's the difference.

And how do you know which one you're in?

You probably won't. 

Not at first.

My teacher was right — you have to have all your mistakes.

The mistakes are the practice.

So don't try to get it right.

Just notice.

And when you do find the resting place — stay there.

Not by effort.

Just by not leaving.

Paul