Here are two aids to awareness (there are surely many more) :  The gift of Tongues and Bodily awareness.
Tongues (something that I discovered in my Pentecostal days) scrambles cognitive insistence allowing the spirit to freely flow without the "paralysis of analysis". It is not necessary to express tongues outwardly but, as it were, silently. This is not I'm sure to everyone's taste as it perpetuates some form of "noise" but occasionally i have found it helpful.
Bodily awareness is the direct personal link with 'that which is' tangibly. You cannot connect physically with the past or the future but only the present. Hence the body and it's feelings have an immediacy that the mind often fails to have.