For another domain where "coming back" can be applied see
this video by Kim Katami (at the 37:20 mark), crossposted from DhO from today. Katami talks about the trinity of intention (TMI: attention), attention (TMI: awareness) and awareness, the latter being Dzogchen's
natural state. A couple of minutes before he mentions his definition of mindfulness: a balance between effort and relaxation, which is not so far from TMI's definition of balance between attention (Katami: intention) and awareness (Katami: attention).
For Katami, "mindfulness practice" is unsurprisingly the sutric "efforting" connected to the first two of the trinity. "Coming back" in this sense means excertion of effort in order to exclude distractions. On the other hand, atiyoga practice does not use effort at all. So how to stay in the natural state when one is not yet familiar enough with it? For this case another "coming back" pattern applies:
If you get distracted you get back to that knowing [the natural state] because it's there also at the basis of being distracted, like if you imagine that in your mind you would be associating ... from one thought to another, kind of ... drifting. ... [T]hen at the basis there is knowing, so just latching to that knowing, coming back to that knowing, again, and from there bringing that cause of being distracted, thoughts, emotions, sleepiness, restlessness, letting all of that be included in this knowing.
That's an interesting take, I think. I suspect that for Dzogchen newbies it would probably be less the natural state at this point but rather something like né-pa as a result from ngöndro shi-nè. But that's even more helpful. Kim explicitely introduces a self-enforcing mechanism in shi-nè ("just sitting") which over time will result in a clear state without thoughts ("né-pa"), which in turn is the basis for vipassana practice (at least in the Aro'gTer framework). That's complementary to how Aro practitioner Rin'dzin Pamo explained it in a recent
Deconstructing Yourself interview:
And in shi-ne the starting point is that you would expand out in all directions from the arising thought, so your relationship with that thought changes, the mental experience is different but there is no ignoring. You wouldn’t ignore anything in that practice.
So I understand "coming back" in Dzogchen as the movement of waking up from the trance of thinking, then coming back to the knowing and including the thoughts by expanding the knowing through them.