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mindfulness is pausing

While mindfulness and meditation can sound great in theory, it often feels impossible to implement them into real-world situations. So in this article, I want to put forth a simple framework that will help with this: mindfulness is pausing. Known as the mindful pause or the sacred pause, this concept will give you a practical way to bring mindfulness into your everyday life.

In an earlier article—What is Meditation—I tried to clear up some misconceptions about meditation, such as why it’s different from mindfulness. You can read that for the full details, but in short, meditation is a method or process while mindfulness is a state of being—a quality of mind.

And how you achieve that quality of mind depends on your specific meditation practice. I personally do a practice known as vipassana, but whatever you do, the point is to achieve non-judgemental awareness of your mind. Known scientifically as meta-awareness, this state of mind removes our identification with thoughts and allows us to have a detached bird’s eye view of the mind.

It sounds simple, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s easy. It takes a lot of practice (aka failure) to build up the stability and concentration needed to sustain mindfulness. And while this is already challenging on the meditation cushion, it’s even harder in the fast-paced hustle of life. This is because much of our life is spent in a zombie-like state—our minds acting on auto-pilot.

But this framework—thinking of mindfulness as pausing —allows us to stop the auto-pilot and create some space. And in that space, we have a much better chance of connecting with our best intentions.

Mindfulness Is Pausing

“In a moment of stopping, we break the spell between past result and automatic reaction. When we pause, we can notice the actual experience, the pain or pleasure, fear or excitement. In the stillness before our habits arise, we become free to act wisely.”

jack kornfıeld, The Sacred Pause

One of the difficulties of starting a mindfulness practice is that we don’t magically get really good at it. At best, we can only notice just how mindless most of our behavior is. And not only do we do and say things out of habit, we then dig ourselves into deeper and deeper holes by defending whatever we did.

I guess we prefer the post hoc rationalization route over admitting that we didn’t really mean something. Even worse, our brains evolved to be so good at lying that we often believe our own lies/rationalizations.

So yes, our minds are a mess. And mindfulness isn’t some simple cure—you have to accept that you will still behave in regretful ways. But building the habit of mindful pausing should slowly increase your success rate.

Respond, Not React

Unless I happen to crack a funny joke with just the right timing, it’s rare that my immediate reaction to something is the ideal one. Such reactions seem to come from a small and ego-centered sense of self—they are often triggered by anger or fear, and they almost always lack the bigger picture.

But there’s a popular concept in meditation to counter this: respond, don’t react.

A reaction is automatic and fast—a stimuli input leads quickly to an output. These can be useful in certain situations, but they also get us into so much trouble. A response, however, implies that we run the input-output calculation many times in the privacy of our own minds before deciding what to do.

And when you’re in a stressful situation, avoiding immediate reactions like this can feel like a superpower. Almost always it is the wiser path. But it only works when you first pause long enough to recognize what is happening. In pausing, you step back and just allow the reaction (like a difficult emotion) to make itself known. You might not fully understand it, but with mindfulness, you won’t be lost in it, allowing you to more wisely contemplate a response.

Our Best Intentions

“In this pause, we can examine our intention. If we have set a long-term intention or dedication for our life, we can remember our vows. Or we can simply check our motivation. Are we caught up, upset, angry, trying to get even, win at any cost?”

jack kornfıeld

Think about how many times you check your smartphone every day. Some of those checks are legitimate, but how many are just a distraction from boredom? (I literally just checked my phone for no reason while writing this paragraph.)

What if every time we felt the urge to check our phones, we paused and had a check-in with our hearts instead?

By this I mean you take a moment—30 seconds to 1 minute—to close your eyes and go home to your body. For one mindful minute, you pause the automatic thinking and instead have a conversation with your deepest intentions. What is my goal for the day? What impression do I most want to leave with people?

This is not so much a conversation in language—it’s not the logical part of our brains or the voice in our heads that loves to blabber on. It’s a felt sense of intention that’s deeper than language. It’s about pausing and listening more than it is about thinking. The phrase “listen to your heart” really just means listen to a deeper and wiser part of yourself.

What are the deepest/best intentions that we have? Ultimately—deep down and underneath our short-term or selfish goals—I think we just want to connect with people. We want to contribute positive energy to the world and help others. We want to love and be loved. Pausing to regularly connect with your heart and remember this is one of the best ways to bring mindful wisdom into your life.

After connecting like this, we can integrate those more noble intentions into our behavior. Even if we still go forward with a confrontation of some kind, it will be a much wiser (and ultimately more effective) response.

Tara Brach’s RAIN

Tara Brach is an amazing meditation teacher, and she has an acronym for bringing mindfulness into difficult situations. It’s known as RAIN, and according to her website, the letters stand for the following:

  • R: Recognize What’s Going On
  • A: Allow the Experience to be There, Just as It Is
  • I: Investigate with Interest and Care
  • N: Nurture with Self-Compassion

It’s a great way to systematically work through a difficult emotion like anger, but it’s worth noting that before you can even start the process you must pause. By definition, you cannot recognize a difficult emotion when you are lost in it. So while adding a P to this acronym would ruin its catchy name, I think all of those letters are ultimately downstream of the mindful pause.

Yes, pausing is often the hardest part. But it’s the only way to even remember that you have an acronym like that in your toolbox.

One can define mindfulness in many ways, but this is why I prefer to remember that mindfulness is pausing. If we are to implement the wisdom of mindfulness into our life, we will always have to pause first.

And you don’t have to wait for a difficult situation—you can create mindful pauses regularly throughout the day. Just a few times, instead of checking your phone, have a mindful minute to pause and check-in with yourself.

On days when I forget to do this—even if I don’t have a conflict—I usually feel scattered and distant from my body. But when I remember to pause, I almost always have a more pleasant, present, and connected experience of the day.

Mindfulness Resources