To pause is to stop some activity temporarily, to let it go.
The body-mind is astonishingly sensitive. Its habit is to grasp at whatever touches it: sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, and thoughts. It grasps to understand: What is this? It grasps to hold onto pleasures, to wrestle with pain, and to obsess about fears. Seeing another person, it grasps to hold her or to push her away, to know him or to be known by him, to touch, to fix, or to adjust.
When we Pause we move from grasping to non-grasping, from clinging to non-clinging. This movement is the pivot point to freedom.
Waking up from habit mind is the first step on any path. The first instruction in Insight Dialogue is Pause. Step off the train. Dwell a moment with immediate experience before speaking, or while listening. The pause is mindfulness. It is an interruption of a lifetime of habitual forward pressure. It opens the door to the present moment.
It takes energy to change the momentum of a heavy moving object; it also takes energy to interrupt the habitual push of the reactive mind. The energy needed is called right effort: the intention to calm down and wake up. Just one moment of clarity can open the door to new possibilities.
Strong intention is essential to cultivating greater awareness—but even strong intention needs some way of working with in the habits of the heart-mind. Without the support of a practice, it is difficult to do anything other than what we have always done: live in the trance of conditioned emotions and thoughts.
So we practice. Attending to the breath or to the body pauses the torrent of habit. How is the body, right now? When we get lost in the fabrications of the mind, carried away by emotions, we can pause and become mindful. The body can ground us in mindfulness. Practice and gentle guidance are necessary.
We can observe the pleasant and unpleasant qualities of experience, observe the rising and passing of thoughts and moods—just passing phenomena. We may suddenly notice that we are not, in fact, these phenomena that come and go. Mental phenomena move more quickly than bodily sensations, however; to be aware of them without falling into identification takes agility and practice.
We can Pause before we speak, while we are speaking, or after we are done speaking. The Pause can be long or short according to circumstances. It is not about time; it is about mindfulness. Generally speaking, when the emotion is strong, the pause is long. This is not a rule, however, only starting point. When mindfulness is well established, the pause takes almost no time.
