What we are working with in the Peace of Nowness approach is our well-ingrained tendency to avert our attention from uncomfortable experiences. Discomfort has sensory, emotional, and cognitive aspects. If our back hurts, we may distract ourselves from the actual experience, oddly enough, by dwelling on how bad we think it hurts. If we are afraid of being abandoned by loved ones, we may clench our jaw or incessantly play a movie in which we are being left. In every case, we stray from the rawness of the present moment, putting barriers between ourselves and direct experience. As a result, we sleepwalk through a life of unsatisfying reruns.
In this approach, the view is that if we face the sharp edges of experience directly, we will have a life that is vivid and flowing, rather than dull and stuck. How shall we do this? The key, in this approach, is to let sensory experience come fully into our awareness. We do this not by magnifying the sensations, but by relaxing the efforts we have been making to decrease the vividness of the sensations. How we do this varies from individual to individual, and within each of us, from time to time. Common ways to control sensory vividness include breath holding, muscle tension, redistribution of attention away from the discomfort and onto something less demanding, and involvement in thought trains (both in words and images).
The practice involves some variety of noting how you are creating barriers to direct experience, and by dialing back the defensive activity, feel more acutely that which you have been avoiding. It is a huge relief to do this, as we no longer need to be afraid of our own experience. Like cold morning air, it can be invigorating. Like a field from which the land mines have been removed, it can become space in which to dance.