The Efficiency of Pausing
Here is an ironic truth: the person who doesn’t have time to meditate, needs meditation the most.
Often when I am running late, I start rushing, while sending death stares at my husband for his intentionally slow movement. I work myself into a tizzy, hurrying, forgetting things, running into things, the works. There is often a tornado in my wake when I rush to be on time.
My husband doesn’t rush. Ever. When I speed up, he slows down. Last weekend I spent 2.5 hours trying to reformat a PDF into a word document. I was frustrated and annoyed that I hadn’t been able to figure this out. When my husband got home, it took him 2.5 minutes to finish the task. I often get so tempted to try and immediately solve something or fix it, when the best answer is to rest for a while and slow down.
So often I hear people say, once all the work is done, then I can rest. But the truth is, the workflow of being alive is never going to stop. If I wait to rest until I have answered every email in my inbox, it won’t happen. Another email inevitable pops up, and same with housework. Dishes pile up, laundry keeps coming. Waiting for the workflow to stop before resting, ends up handing our power over to work. Just like we have to continue to eat, and poop, and sleep. The emails and the assignments and the dirty dishes will continue to come and go. Finding our power looks like intentionally cultivating times to pull aside and focus on generating rest. It gives us more energy when it’s time to jump back into the swing of things.
Our body is an incredible, highly efficient machine. We can build trust in our body when we honor our basic human needs: eat when hungry, sleep when tired, go to the bathroom when needed, drink when thirsty. It’s so simple and yet how often do we hold it in just to get through one more task or to accommodate others or a work meeting. And the irony of it all, is pausing and resting often makes us more efficient and more productive in the long run.
We are constantly moving through the world impacting others with our presence. A pebble makes a ripple in the pond whether you throw it softly or slam it into the water. Whether we are exhausting ourselves working tirelessly, or simply being and resting, we are rippling out to others around us. What sort of ripple do we want to create? Actively cultivating a practice of peace and calm, deepens my capacity to truly be with people in the depths of their suffering, and in the height of their joy. My practice has grown exponentially not through seeking opportunities, but rather through being.
The past several years I have made it a point to retreat twice a year, if not quarterly. I think of retreating like pulling away from the flow of everyday life and settling into an eddy for a while to regroup. When I reenter the flow, rejuvenated and refreshed, it becomes easier to ride the waves of the ups and downs. My past two retreats have been cancelled last minute due to unforeseen circumstances. In previous years when a retreat would be cancelled or changed, I would open my emails, start scheduling meetings, and find a way to keep myself busy. Now my practice has evolved such that it is possible to keep the boundaries of my peace and time quiet, even at home. I turn off my phone, turn off my email, and unplug. However, without having blocked off the time to actually go on retreat, I might not have been as willing to hold the boundary of my time aside.
Time seems to be slipping through my fingertips every day. Weeks are flying by, and the past year in quarantine feels like a daze. And yet when I sit with a timer for 15-20 min of a silent meditation in the mornings, the time seems to infinitely slow down. I often hear people express a desire for life to just stop or pause for a moment. In truth there is no pause; the flow of life is always going. However, we hold the power to set a boundary with that flow, and to invite and actively cultivate a change of pacing. When we choose a different pace, one that is sustainable, and organic, it can seem as if the world is slowing down around us.
One of my favorite ways to experience this slowdown is an Epsom salts soak. I put the water low enough that my entire back can rest in the tub, nose just above the water. The Epsom salts help to settle the micro muscles of the neck, key for feeling safe and unwinding neck tension. More than that though, the sound of my heartbeat is all I can hear in the water. It fills my ears with life force resonance, reminding me of the fetal heart rate monitor from when I was a doula. That sound of a little life’s heartbeat fills the space and has enormous value. We all started in water, cocooned in a womb space, hearing the sound of our own heartbeat. A baby doesn’t “do” its way into existence. Rather, it nestles in for the nine-ish months of becoming, blossoming, growing. Sometimes the most efficient thing we can do is trust our body and rest.
Self-care is a yielding to the broader force of growth. Just like a flower doesn’t rush to blossom open, it yields over and over to expansion, until is it full and fragrant. Being still, being quiet, allows the larger forces of growth to innervate us, improving our efficiency.
