When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

The habit patterns of the human mind are very strong and make it seem that the hard way is easy and the easy way is hard.

Some people when I speak of awareness of the "inner body" call it a technique. I would not call it a technique because it is too simple for that. When the oak tree feels its roots in the earth, its connectedness with the earth, it is not practicing a technique.

We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.