How to create awareness of the present moment

I can only share some insights as a fellow practitioner, please let me know if I have gotten anything wrong. I think you are letting your desire to be on top of things, events and relationships in your life gets to you. Through meditation, we can get insights into what happened in our life and see the mistakes that occurred due to our habitual ways of viewing, perceiving, thinking, feeling, speaking and acting. This results in a realization that we could have avoided these mistakes if only we could be more aware, alert, focus and so on.

Whether this is a desire to avoid sufferings, to be a better person or to achieve more success is beside the point. The important thing is we can either make use of this desire to goad us into doubling our effort or allow it to bash us up. We use it in the former by understanding that these feelings, emotions and thoughts too will eventually change but right now we can harness them for further progress (right view). Ultimately, our aim is to be kind and compassionate to ourselves and achieve long lasting happiness and well-being (right intention).

What pulls us away from awareness of the present moment is usually greed, aversion and ignoring. The ignoring part is when there are cues, hints and information in the environment (internal or external) that goes against our desires or we averse to. So, we push this information out of our consciousness by dimming our awareness and losing the present moment. This is usually habitual and requires constant watching and observations of our feelings, perceptions, mental formations (thoughts/emotions) and consciousness in order to overcome i.e. right mindfulnesss. We must be willing to let go of these unskillful habits and prevent new unskillful ones from arising. Similarly, there are skillful habitual ways of feeling, perceiving, thinking and cognizing that helps support our present awareness such as a constant reflection of our state of mind e.g. level of consciousness, current emotions and feelings and so on. If these skillful habits are not present, we try to cultivate them, in short, this is right effort.

I think you get my drift by now. The genius of the Buddha is that he understood that for true progress in our mental and spiritual practice, we need to work on all the 8 factors of the Noble Eightfold path. Otherwise, our progress will begin to slow down and perhaps come to a standstill. It is tough grappling with all the 8 factors simultaneously. I think we can start with one of the factors we are most comfortable with as an entry point. Ajahn Chah, the famous forest monk, worked on right view and he said the rest of the factors just followed.

In our practice we must have ''right view'' (sammā-ditthi). If our view is right then everything else is right: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right recollection, right concentration - the Eightfold Path.

With Metta.

Additional notes:

During meditation, when you catch hold of yourself being pulled away by thoughts instead of just going back to your breath, pause for a moment. Try to take note of the desire or intent that prompted those thoughts. If you failed to identify it, never mind, just go back to your breath. If you do manage to identify the desire, try to see the allure or attraction behind it. Once, you see the attraction, the desire will usually weaken or fade away. If you failed to identify, it is OK as it will tend to stay at the back of your mind and attempt to pull or push you away from your breath with more thoughts. Just repeat the steps again when that happens. Sometimes, we fail to identify the true desire. You will know this because the same pattern or type of thoughts will appear again, just repeat the above steps.

The mind as @Andriy Volkov pointed out, is constantly hiding its intentions and desires in order to trick us. By doing the Vipassana technique above we are training our mind to be sensitive to the mental and emotional activities that is happening within. When we are not meditating or concentrating, these activities push and pull us away from the present moment without we realizing it. By training our mind to be sensitive to these activities, be quick to identify the intent/desire behind them and see the allure in the desire, we will grow dispassionate and the mind will quickly quieten down and settle back to the present moment.

To be honest, breath meditation is traditionally a Vipassana technique from my understanding. So, I am not sure what is happening. If you are comfortable with your practice, just ignore me. If not, perhaps you can ask another question with more details about your meditation technique in the forum. I believe there are experienced practitioners in the forum who will be willing to help spot any issue or give advice, if necessary. With Metta.