Since mindfulness is about the cultivation of moment-to-moment awareness through careful, systematic, and disciplined attending, it can seem at first as if what we are paying attention to — that is, the various possible objects of attention — is what is most important.
These objects of attention can be anything within the realm of our experience: what we are seeing, or hearing, or smelling, or tasting, or touching, or feeling, or knowing in any given moment. That is in part because, from the very beginning of a meditation practice, we do have to focus on something to pay attention to, whether it is the feeling of the breath moving in and out of our body, or sounds coming to our ears, or anything else we can perceive or apprehend in the present moment. Later on, we may come to realize that we can focus on awareness itself and become aware of awareness, without choosing any particular object to focus on. We will explore this in the last guided practice, Mindfulness as Pure Awareness.
But it is essential that you know right from the beginning that it is not the breath sensations, or sounds, or even our thoughts when we are paying attention to thoughts, that are most important.
What is most important but most easily missed, taken for granted, and not experienced is the awareness that feels and knows directly, without thinking, that breathing is going on in this moment, that hearing is going on in this moment, that thoughts are moving through the sky-like space of the mind at this moment. As we have seen, it is the awareness that is of primary importance, no matter what the objects are that we are paying attention to.
And that awareness is already ours. It is already available, already complete, already capable of holding and knowing (non-conceptually) anything and everything in our experience inwardly and outwardly, no matter how big, how trivial, or how momentous. That is simply the property of awareness. And you already have it! Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, you already are it.