Samsara & Selfhood: Learning to Pause

Like last week, my post today is the little piece of Pema Chödrön wisdom I serendipitously opened to as a new part of my daily practice. At the beginning of this weekend especially, I very much like the notion of remembering to pause…

# 87 - Thoroughly Processed, Comfortable with Uncertainity, Page 169

Understanding how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others.

Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive – we leave things minute. They don’t keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes through learning to pause for just a moment and not doing the same thing again and again out of impulse. Simply to pause instead of immediately filling up the space transforms us. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as we as fundamental spaciousness.

The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves and others. Anything can come up, anything can walk into our house. We can find a dinosaur sitting on our living room couch, and we don’t freak out. We have been thoroughly processed by coming to know ourselves with honest, gentle mindfulness.

Until next week, when I will leave Pema to my practice and write a post of my own contemplation.