LIVING IN THE PAUSE

Navigating life’s various stages grants us opportunities to gain experiences and acquire skills that enlighten us on the value of time. When we are young, time can move slow, and the importance of life’s tempo does not seem significant. As we enter life’s final golden age, the emphasis of what time provides seems to become clear and more meaningful. It is the middle years of life where time grabs us, we juggle it, want more of it, and learn how important a minute and an hour can be.

Stressors can vary from high to low in middle age. When time pressure is greatest, one of the first stages that comes to mind is the so-called “sandwich generation.” This is a phase in mid-life when one is caring for a family or children and aging parents simultaneously. This life stage usually abuts the busy time in one’s career too. It is here that the lessons of managing time are heightened.  As one who is now about to step out of the sandwich generation, a big lesson that I have learned is that looking at time through many lenses, external and internal, will help to keep you healthy as you careen through this hectic time of life. This can be done externally by being aware of the world’s incoming needs that trigger you. Internally it is being able to pause.

The intensity of external demands and changes can be the reason why the outside world controls us. Consistently concentrating on the outside pressures can also add a great deal of stress to our nervous system. A bit of stress caused from a crisis here and there is normal but when our lives continually run into urgent and intense situations, our nervous systems can chronically stay in a sympathetic or fight, flight, or freeze state much longer than is healthy.

Biologically, our nervous systems are wired to handle a small crisis and then go back to relaxing. Today’s world doesn’t always work that way. The external stressors of life’s dilemmas, unexpected events, and social media to name a few instigators, keep our nervous systems chronically in full throttle, and it makes it difficult to calm. This response can lead to health issues if our bodies cannot go back to our calm, rest and digest state.

The ability to look at time with an inward focus can alert your attention to when the nervous system is beginning to ramp up. This act of taking a walk inside your body to cue you to any subtle changes that may hint at increased stress can assist in noticing when you may need to pause. The pause can then help to calm the nervous system down. The power of pausing can be life changing, and it’s true effectiveness comes from doing it consistently.

Pausing and the Breath

Breathing is one of the most efficient ways to settle ourselves when we feel stress beginning to increase. Our breath is one of the natural ways to slow down our nervous system. The breath’s biggest advantages are it is with you all the time and it is free. Observing when a nervous feeling begins, we can use our breath to begin to activate relaxation response. By taking a few seconds to pause and deep breathe, we can find a bit of peace in a difficult time.

A simple breathing technique is diaphragmatic breathing. By breathing in through the nose to the lower stomach for a count of two and then exhaling for the count of four, you will automatically begin to relax in both mind and body. There are many other breathing techniques but as you begin to internally notice and pause, diaphragmatic breathing is one of the easiest breaths to use.

Pause - Stacio

My sister attended a retreat and excitedly told me about a practice called Stacio. It is hundreds of years old and has its roots in monastic life. It is the process of taking a five-minute pause in between one activity before you begin the next activity. In our non-stop lives the ability to regroup the body and mind in between life events can be a gift. The goal of Stacio is to reset our sense of direction, to get out of the chaos of the day (our external view), and regroup our focus on what is happening inside us, to prepare for what is coming next (our internal view). I began experimenting with Stacio in my life. It was hard but in the end it was worth it. I was used to multitasking many projects and jumping between each and I enjoyed the feeling of consistently moving forward as I got things done. To stop and internally notice how I was feeling and what was happening around me felt uncomfortable, especially when pausing was taking up precious time. However, as I worked to do this one time each day, I began to enjoy and appreciate the pause. My body and mind were able to catch up with my energy and I became more balanced and, ironically, was able to get more done than when I didn’t pause.

At every stage of life, we will find the power and intricacies of time. We can let the external pressures of needing to do everything in a finite amount of time overwhelm us or we can refocus our view and begin to look internally to pausing time. This pause can be short, but as the succinct pauses become consistent, we can find renewed energy, focus, and presence in a world that is constantly moving rapidly forward.

Photo credit: Image by Anja from Pixabay