pause
For much of my life, I have not been a “stop and smell the roses” type woman. I move swiftly, from one task to the next. When I ran the yoga studio, even when I put 10 minutes in between meetings, I would skid from one event to another. Rarely giving myself time to pee.
I called this productive. Now I recognize it as a form of anxiety. Or rather, anxiety-fueled productivity.
I didn’t see it as a problem. I was meditating in the morning. Sometimes at night. What I didn’t realize is that I was not creating any space in the fabric of my day for presence.
It’s been over five years since the studio business closed. I’m different now. I look back on that woman who ran herself into the ground and smiled through it all with a lot of love. She didn’t feel safe, or worthy or lovable unless she was productive.
Why would she? When I lay on the couch as a child staring at the ceiling my father would ask me, “What are you doing that is productive, Alyssa?”
Conditioning is so obvious sometimes, it’s like the nose on our faces.
But we can only see it with a mirror.
My mom was my mirror. How she lived and ultimately, how she died. She was maintaining a 3000 square foot home, gardening, taking care of her husband with Alzheimer’s and managing a pool that brought me to my knees all while quietly dying of cancer.
She was productive until her body just stopped.
And I finally saw the nose on my face.
—
We all have this conditioning to a certain extent. We all do more than one thing at a time, a good deal of the time.
Walking and listening to a book.
Cooking and listening to a podcast.
Standing on line and scrolling on your phone.
Watching a show and playing Blockblast or some other game on your phone.
Working on your computer and shopping on amazon.
Weight training while watching old episodes of Fringe (this is weirdly specific because it’s what I do).
I’ve recently been tasked to engage in mono tasking. Doing one thing at a time. It’s hard. Even though I move much slower than I used to and have much more space in my day, reducing the amount of input in my field is hard.
Yet, my nervous system is asking for it. My body is asking for more space, more silence, more pausing woven throughout the fabric of my day.
This is the path to becoming more quiet within myself. This is the path to experiencing myself as fully embodied consciousness.
When I am fully embodied consciousness, I know what I need in any moment because my body tells me. My body holds the truth of me and when I listen, I am fully sovereign in all aspects of my life.
My only job then, is to listen.
—
The teaching I share today was inspired by my work on Insight Timer. What a gorgeous group of humans who show up for live classes. We talk a lot about pausing. Pausing to check in with ourselves. Pausing to watch our breath. Pausing to feel our feet on the ground.
Pausing as a way of re-connecting to our present moment.
This transmission was for my Insight Timer students and for me. I’m always learning right along side of those I am lucky enough to teach.
Pause
Trust yourself. Trust your heart. And the impulses and desires that lay deep within you.
Not the surface pulls. Or the surface wants. Or the surface grasping for control to soothe your restless body.
Seek to quiet that layer of noise.
Pause.
Pause in your day as frequently as possible.
When you notice yourself encumbered with noise - thoughts, opinions, judgments, memories, plans, goals.
Pause.
When you notice yourself swirling with emotions - urgency, frustration, excitement, disappointment, longing.
Pause.
Notice all that moves within you. Feel all that moves within you. Without doing anything about it.
No actions other than feeling.
(This is hard. Otherwise more people would do it more frequently.)
We don’t learn to do this as children. Children don’t see their parents pausing and placing their hands on their hearts and asking themselves:
“What am I feeling right now?” And then giving themselves time to feel it.
Most of us didn’t learn this.
So we learn it now. We begin where we are.
Right here. Right now.
Feel yourself in space.
Feel your breath.
Feel your body breathe.
As many times as you can in a day, pause and stop and feel yourself in space.
Place your hand on your body, on your belly, on your chest and feel yourself.
Give yourself permission to feel whatever it is you’re feeling and feel it fully.
No story. No narrative. No reason for the feeling.
Let all that go.
And just feel this moment now.
How frequently can you do this over the course of your day?
Without interruption. Without sound in the background.
Silence and quiet around you will help silence and quiet take root within you.
Pause.
Stop the constant gerbil wheel of doing.
Stop performing, improving and producing.
Whatever it is.
Stop.
Let yourself simply float.
An anxious, scared body will sink under the water.
A relaxed, trusting body will float.
Pause.
Over and over and over.
Slow down.
Take time to smell the roses.
Literally.
Take time to go for a walk. A slow walk.
Lean against a tree and feel the support on your back.
Put the phone down.
Turn the podcast off.
Listen to the sound of silence.
It’s okay if the noise within you amplifies briefly.
Let it.
Breathe.
Let the noise within you have its say so it can quiet down.
That which we resist just persists.
Allow everything.
And watch the noise dissolve.
As this noise on the surface dissolves, and as you experience a quieter sense of being, you know yourself.
You see yourself.
You feel yourself.
You trust yourself.
You love yourself.
This is everything.
All because you learned to pause.
Over the last year I've been creating practices that help us do exactly what I’m writing about today. Not think about pausing - but actually practicing it. Next week, I'll be opening The Practice Room, a library of guided practices organized around the nervous system states I teach most often.
Tune in next week for more info and even a video tour!
Meanwhile - have you listened to Awakening The Multidimensional Self yet? Give yourself some time to just lay on the couch, put me in your ears and listen. (also, it’s not 10 days, it's 10 episodes ranging from 11 minutes to 17 minutes long.)
That line about only being able to pause because Milo is literally anchoring you in your lap hits that place where a woman’s body finally slows, but only when something she loves is physically holding her in place.
It feels like you’re teaching yourself, in real time, that these tiny pauses where you feel your weight, your breath, a baby’s warmth against your chest are not a break from your life, they’re the doorway back into actually living inside it.
So much easier said than done, but trying! ❤️