I got baptized into the vast potential of the Sacred Pause when my daughter was 16 and I realized (painfully) that a lot of my ways of 'guiding' her were the opposite of helpful. I had just started reading Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart (what a coincidence, huh?). Her bit about pausing--making space to stop whatever it is we're about to do and then doing something, anything, else but what we usually do--seemed like something I should try. So every time I would be about to give Ruth advice or correction I'd pause and do something else.
Mainly I'd do nothing.
Amazing how hard it can be to do nothing. To just be there with that great force of momentum pushing you to do what you usually do.
Over time what gets born in the Nothing is a deep sense of the Possible. Instead of the one great Usual we begin to notice many branching Possibles.
One of the most amazing Possibles is simply listening. At first 'just' listening and not responding can feel like you're doing nothing, but true listening is a huge Something. Usually when we're listening we're planning (plotting) our next move, our next response. But listening, it seems, works a whole lot better when our first intention is to actually make room for and understand what a person is trying to say.
Amazing how powerful this kind of listening can be. Rachel Remen says that when we practice generous listening sometimes people hear a truth IN themselves for the first time.
And 'listening' is just one of the things that is possible when we enter wholeheartedly into a Sacred Pause.
If you aren't familiar with the Sacred Pause perhaps it would be worth your while to give it a shot. Try it in the little ways 'Something' in you suggests. See what happens--in traffic, conversation, grocery stores, desk work, committee meetings, meals, etc., etc.
When the usual becomes the possible and the stale becomes the fresh...the old world where you've been touching it can become astoundingly new.
Go ahead: don't just stand there...Pause ;-)
