Awareness

Breath awareness is the door to self awareness. When attention has aligned with incident events, emotions, thoughts (~deviated from self), one loses sight of ownself. Joyful breath awareness facilitates gentle return of aloof attention to the self amidst evolving circumstances. Consistent breath awareness facilitates it's firm grounding. One no longer gets carried away.

Emotional awareness is being aware of emotions that emerge out of involvement in external and internal narratives. For example: most of us get carried away with emotional narratives in a movie. We experience a wide range of emotions ourselves - agitated, provoked, angered, pained, frustrated etc. All these have nothing to do with our lives. Yet we experience oneness with these emotions and get carried away. Emotional self awareness involves gentle and self reinforcing breath awareness while aloofly watching on screen emotions and all the time remaining detached within. 

Mindfulness is being aloofly aware of thoughts associated with unfolding narratives while maintaining self awareness. For example: inability to impartially perceive see an event/incident as it is, results in mental intervention to process the event. The outcome is either a favorable or unfavorable perception. One then subtly aligns with any one perception based on prevailing perspective and associated train of thoughts. Mindfulness is gently bringing back attention to self by relying on a combination of breath awareness, emotional awareness and thought awareness.