Often we begin our mindfulness practice by bringing our awareness to something very ordinary like the sensations of the breath moving in the body. This type of practice is a wonderful means for settling the mind down from its normal activities. However, when we do reach a place of relative stillness, something else may arise: a sense of a deeper unrest, a more undefined pain, what we may call an existential angst. We have all touched this deeper sense of unease in our lives. Our deeply conditioned habit is to avoid this vulnerable feeling at all costs. This habit of denial and distraction may get us through the day, but if we seek a more unshakeable ease and wellbeing, we all must eventually turn towards it. This deeper work comes to the core of Buddhist mindfulness practice: to understand suffering and the end of suffering. Our work is to cultivate this understanding not in a conceptual way, but directly as it relates to our immediate experience, in real time, moment by moment.