Pausing isn’t easy.

In everyday life, you constantly rush to fulfill all your roles, yet there’s one role you may tend to neglect – being me, getting together with myself.

Pausing is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with
yourself and in addition – every process of internal work begins by making the choice to pause, conduct an intimate meeting with yourself and take the opportunity to introspect.

Whether we like it or not, life sometimes forces you to take a pause: the death of a relative, illness, a farewell, economic crisis or a change in the family.

However, you can make a conscious choice too to pause, breathe and ask – how am I doing?

Although it seems like some sort of meditation, the pausing process allows you to peel off your external layers, listen and take a look at yourselves, away from the automatic patterns that compose your daily routine.

Objectives

We highly recommend beginning individual meetings, group gatherings and personal meetings with yourself – with a pausing process. Pausing significantly contributes to efficient and profound work as the meeting progresses.
The process creates focus and concentration and substantially neutralizes background noises that surround you every day.
Beginning the meeting with a pause process also helps you to optimally exhaust the coaching/therapeutic potential.

Furthermore, you don’t have any time for yourself between home and work, children and your personal relationship, television and sleeping, night and a new day. Pausing allows us to take a breath and create some in-between time in your clip-like life on the fast lane.

The process

1. Since the purpose of the process is a physical and mental pause, you should find a spot for yourself in the room and situate yourself in the position you find most comfortable: sitting up straight, leaning on the wall, lying down or whatever you feel is comfortable.

2. In order to limit the time frame for the process, we recommend playing a musical piece of 10 minutes maximum, which is neither too short nor too long and just enough to create a pause in your daily lives.
We choose musical pieces that on the one hand contain calming rhythms and on the other include more vibrant rhythms. This combination helps you connect to the pausing process from a surprising and unobvious place.

3. While playing the musical piece, close your eyes and simply let go.

Take note of the following three questions:
– What do you physically feel during the process? tiredness, restlessness, muscle strain etc.
– How do you feel? Do you feel good? Not too bad, but not great? A varying range of feelings?
– What are you thinking about? What’s bothering or troubling you? What thought remain inside your head and won’t let go? Which thought reoccurs?

Let us call this point the “thoughts’ hunter”, meaning focusing on physical aspects, feelings and thoughts that come up during the process. This is an important tool for creating clarity and focusing on meaningful topics that bother you. Therefore, it is an important starting point for the work to be conducted later along the meeting.

4. After the musical piece ends, slowly and calmly return to your seat.

Ending the process

At the end of the process, it is important to emphasize the qualities included in pausing, since pausing is a tool on its own and cleverly using it, allows you to take a moment away from your daily routines, thereby presenting the option of true change.

Suresh Shah, M.D., Pathfinders Enterprise