87. mindful pause

I don’t know about you but the past few days have been a bit of a bumpy ride for me. 

Full moon lunar eclipses have a way of revealing and illuminating emotional and energetic patterns that are ready for closure, completion or release. I’ve been out of my daily posting partly due to travel (I just spent a week in the states for school), but also because I am processing some significant necessary endings in my own emotional habit patterns, communication dynamics and relationships. 

The school intensive I attended this past week was an immersion and practicum of sorts for a Spiritual Counseling class. The core of this style of counseling is providing loving witness for a person as they navigate, explore, and encounter layers of spiritual experience and the state of their own soul. 

Obviously, these can be heady topics, and the process of holding space for exploration of soul - spirit - consciousness asks for a much slower, deeper, more spacious pace and way of being than the common habitual patterns of relating and communicating. 

We took a lot of mindful pauses, and I realized that I need a mindful pause in my writing project as well. 

What do I mean by mindful pause? 

I mean, slowing down enough to truly meet the message of the moment. Creating enough emotional and energetic space to feel and sense what is present in the many layers of the human experience. And when necessary, slowing all the way to a pause, to a stop, to a resting point, to truly BE WITH what we are experiencing - particularly when it’s meaningful, challenging, or emotionally significant. 

Part of mindfulness is leaning back or looking inward into our awareness rather than only stretching it into the world, the space around us or the relational field. Mindfulness seeks to gently hold space for both the external experience, the world of sensory input, dialogue, and energetic exchange with environment and other beings, while also tracking and tending the internal landscape; observing the sensations, perceptions, qualities and movements of one’s own body, mind, emotional and energetic state. 

Perhaps the most important ‘aim’ of mindfulness is practicing a soft saying “yes” to what is. 

Saying ‘yes to what is’ doesn’t mean that every part of our experience will be comfortable or pleasant. At times, saying yes to what is might mean saying yes to parts of ourselves that feel defensive, protective, resistant, angry, sad, lonely, scared, or confused. Saying ‘yes’ to these parts doesn’t mean we are enabling or attaching to the experience, but rather saying in a loving way to ourselves, “can this, too, belong?” 

I feel like my life is calling for a mindful pause now. Not in the sense of stopping my outer actions, but in the sense of slowing down enough to see if I can find the soft saying ‘yes’ to what is, even as it is uncomfortable, uncertain, or unclear. 

There is a trust involved in this practice, one that promises that if we make space for all of what is, that the natural self-organizing intelligence of Life will lead us, in that spaciousness, towards some kind of order, towards integration and wholeness.

Even when things feel wildly fragmented, if we can say, “okay, perhaps this, too, belongs…” that we will find an alchemical process in the midst of the discomfort and the softening - one which opens a third way of being, or a third way of moving forward, which was not previously available because it is actually BIRTHED in the process of the mindful pause. 

As I type, I am stopping here. I am making space for the sentiment which just danced onto the page, because it carries for me a resonance of deep truth. 

The third way is birthed in the mindful pause.

Perceived binaries swirl and merge, permeating each other with potential until something new emerges from their intersubjective space. 

In my studies of tri-phasic transformation, the archetypal process of change which is an underlying constant in the natural process of creation and destruction, one of my teachers said something that stuck with me, something like: “The transformation does not just happen in the liminal realm, it emerges from the liminal realm.”

The liminal space refers to a not-here and not-there inner state and / [or] outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is the in-between, where we’ve left one place (the known) but not fully entered the next, and are not yet able to discern just what the next will be. 

The mindful pause is a liminal space, one pregnant with possibility, a womb which will - with adequate time - gradually gestate and materialize ‘the next’ - the next moment of awareness, the next decision, the next way of being, belief, or set of circumstances.

In other words, evolutionary changes do not unfold according to a static or fixed process, but are birthed through the dynamic, responsive, co-creative intermingling of individual consciousness with the vast field of psyche we refer to as the unconscious. When we enter the unknown, when we open in curiosity to the mindful pause, we are also moving into the quantum field where all potentials exist simultaneously. 

When we enter this space with curiosity, openness, and what one might call faith (a quantum expectation that the forces operating are inherently unitive, generative, benevolent, or intelligently loving and have wholeness as their ultimate impulse)... we are participating in a process of conception with consciousness itself. 

What will gestate and be birthed through the process is an unknown, much in the way that the human baby who emerges from the coupling of two beings is a mystery - from the coming together of two, a third arises, and that third will influence, impact, shape, mold, and transform the two involved in creation, even as the third takes on a live of its own, full of meaning, purpose, possibility, and separate, unique expression of being. 

So if the ‘coupling’ beings in the mindful pause are you or me (the person) and psyche / unconscious / unknown (the mystery), what is birthed in our joining is not just the future experience (unfolding circumstances), but also how those unfolding circumstances will transform us and change the weave of creation itself. 

The mindful pause makes space for a more conscious conception, so that what we are conceiving, gestating, and birthing into our own lives, our own transformative processes, and the whole of creation itself, can be infused with more intention, care, skill, and ultimately, love. 

I promised myself that I would write for 365 days, and I will honor that promise. However, I’ve determined (in the mindful pause) that the days may be punctuated by moments of slowing down, of resting in the space of conception, of unknown, for a day or two, until the emergent creativity births itself from the liminal realm. 

Because what I’ve found lately is that the self-created and self-imposed pressure to produce and perform every day in my writing is, at times, taking me out of the mindful pause before the spark of conception, before the emergence, before the truest ‘yes to what is’ can land. 

Remaining in the mindful pause can feel uncomfortable; it often flies in the face of our conditioning to be the doer, to take action, to hurry up and get on with life. Simply being with the fullness of what we are experiencing (provided it is safe enough to do so) without rushing to the next doing step, can even feel threatening, like we are going to miss an opportunity or be left behind. 

But what if - what if - we wait until we feel the inevitable organic pulsations of labor begin? What if we wait until we sense the heartbeat, strong and rhythmic, of what is ready to be born next? What if we stay with the discomfort of the unknown until our bodies align with the self-organizing intelligence of nature, of Life, of All That Is, and spontaneous rebirth begins? 

What if we trust that everything that lives and moves and breathes operates according to the laws of nature, including ourselves, and in that trust...

We can orient ourselves to the mindful pause as a tributary of the mother river, the flow of Life. If we immerse in its headwaters, and yield our body-minds to the current, the unyielding flow will unfailingly lead us to the ocean of our destiny.