What you essentially are, prior to the arising of any experience, is not empty. The mind may call it so, but only by comparison with the content of experience. In its own experience of itself it is full of itself alone, lacking nothing and at peace.
Rest as the aware openness within which all experience arises. Even the suggestion to rest as open awareness is a compassionate concession to the one that seems to be other than that. Awareness does not need to be told to rest as itself; it is always at rest as itself. Its nature is rest or peace: resting is what it is, not what it does.
The qualities that are the nature of this aware openness, this luminous fullness, may be felt and tasted directly. The aware openness that you essentially are seeks nothing, holds on to nothing, resists nothing. Concealed in the great search for happiness or enlightenment is a self, an entity which, when sought, is never found. When you look for the self that you seem to be, you find only the self that you truly are.