January: mindful awareness (aka the mindful pause)

“Wherever you are, be there totally.”

—Eckhart Tolle

I chose this topic as my January post for several reasons. Mindful awareness has been, by far, the single most helpful tool for my own personal development. Additionally, I chose it to be first because mindfulness serves as the undergirding for every subsequent idea or tool I’ll present in the following months. Furthermore, as Resmaa Menakem and others have taught us, mindfulness helps us to be more conscientious and aware of implicit bias. Lastly, I see it as a great way to start out the new year—by taking a mindful moment to turn on the light of conscious awareness and observe our inner atmosphere before embarking on the year ahead.

Before I go too deep into exploring mindful awareness, I want to briefly discuss its natural opposite—dissociation. This is a protective process that operates on a spectrum, from feeling spaced out, distant, or numb all the way to experiencing significant memory gaps due to having separate personalities as in Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder). 

I have a great respect for the human mind’s ability to dissociate, or take us away from the present moment. It is a strategy that helps us survive traumatic experiences. For many of us who have experienced harm or threat of harm, coming into the present moment can be a tall order. If this is true for you, I invite you to consider practicing mindful awareness slowly, gently, and with whatever support feels right for you (e.g., in a safe space with a friend, a therapist, or in a group). 

In Healing Collective Trauma, Thomas Hubl says that when we individually and collectively tend to our emotional and psychological wounds, we generate a heat that warms up the frozen traumas locked inside of us. That warmth is your birthright, and mindfulness is the gateway to it. Dissociation keeps us alive, but presence helps us to heal.

Definitions of mindfulness vary, and I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to define it. Many people believe mindfulness is a value-neutral awareness of the present moment, while others, like Tara Brach and Kristen Neff, argue that awareness must also be imbued with compassion in order to be considered truly mindful. 

One definition of mindfulness that I like is from Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who defined it as being aware of what is happening inside and around us with non-judgment. He believed that mindful awareness is the precursor to creating peace within ourselves and the world.

Eckhart Tolle talks extensively about our awareness as a shining light that illuminates the darkness of unconsciousness (another word for a lack of awareness). While others, like Dick Schwarz, describe mindful awareness as the gateway to accessing the inner guide, also known as the Self.

One way I like to practice mindfulness on a daily basis is in a bite-sized chunk called The Mindful Pause. I have been practicing it for over a decade, but I still remember where I was when I first learned about mindfulness and the fact that I could mindfully pause and observe my thoughts.

It was 2012, and I was in graduate school to become a therapist. I had never meditated before but had been hearing a lot about the benefits of mindfulness in my courses, so I decided to start a meditation group with my friend Edgar. We somehow convinced a lovely Zen Buddhist monk named Ryushin to lead us in meditation each week and to teach us some Buddhist tenets.

As we sat in a circle and began our first of many meditations together, Ryushin instructed us to gently close our eyes or soften our gaze and focus on the sounds in the room. That felt easy enough to me, as I was accustomed to focusing my attention externally. I still remember the bang and hiss of the metal radiator in the corner of the basement room we’d reserved. The voices and shuffling feet of students walking by the ground-level window. The occasional cough or throat clearing of one of the group members.

And then, Ryushin instructed us to turn our attention inward to our minds. 

“Just observe the thoughts passing through your mind and try not to judge them. Just notice,” he said. “Observing your mind is like sitting on the bank of a river, and your thoughts are like boats going by,” he continued. “If you notice that you got carried away down river by one of your thoughts, just get off the boat and come back to your seat on the bank to watch your mind again, without any drama.”

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I could observe my thoughts. Perhaps it was too obvious. Hiding in plain sight, as they say.

It might seem obvious that we can bring our attention inward and watch our minds. But for me, it was a completely novel idea that my awareness could be on anything other than what was happening outside of myself.

In his book Wherever You Go, There You Are, Zen Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat Zinn says the mindful pause opens up a fork in the road, giving us the opportunity to embark on a new pathway that would not be available to us if we didn’t take a beat. For me, when I pause before I respond in a stressful situation, it almost always allows me to look back and feel good about the way I responded. Sometimes, it even helps me notice something I hadn’t seen before (more on that below).

In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer refers to the mindful pause as “taking the inner backward step.” I love this description because it provides a spatial dimension to the mindful pause. This helps the concept feel more real and embodied. When I take a mindful pause, I imagine myself going into my mind and literally taking a step back. This helps me get into what many call the observer mind—the place where I have the ability to see all of my thoughts, reactions, and physical sensations. If I can witness what’s happening inside, then I’m not completely caught up in it. Instead of being overwhelmed or entangled, I am able to be present.

The AA program has their own version of the mindful pause. They say, when you’re faced with a stressful situation: “Do nothing and see what happens.” This is masterful advice. When we feel most compelled to react, we can do the opposite and take a beat. 

No matter what we call it, the idea is the same: unless the house is really on fire (and most of the time it isn’t), we don’t have to indulge the reflex to respond immediately. We have another choice. And we can hardly go wrong by hitting the pause button. 

The mindful pause can be done proactively as a maintenance practice, or responsively in the heat of the moment as a triage practice. I recommend doing both.

When practicing it proactively, I can pause when there’s nothing wrong. I’m washing the dishes or weeding the garden or typing an email, and I just stop and notice details about the world around me (a blue mug with a chip on the rim, a small yellow flower with six petals). Then I bring my attention inward and notice detail there, as well, like the feeling of my heart beating, the sound and feeling of my breathing, and the quality of my thoughts. And then, I go back to the task I was engaged in before I paused. Simple as that.

The mindful pause can also be practiced responsively to change how we react in stressful moments. My partner rolls their eyes at me or says something dismissive. I receive an ominous sounding email. Before I tell my partner off or descend into a fear spiral about that email, I just pause. I stop whatever I’m doing and notice the world around me. I bring my awareness inward, as well, to notice my heart beating (or maybe, pounding, in this case) and the sound and feeling of my breathing. It’s exactly the same process as above; however, now, it’s in the heat of the moment and I am buying a few seconds of time so my frontal cortex can come online and help me figure out the best way to respond.

Here I would like to mention that practicing the mindful pause proactively, when nothing is acutely wrong, is the best way to get better at practicing it in the heat of the moment, when we really need it. Practicing the mindful pause (or any tool, for that matter) when we’re not stressed creates the pathways in the brain that allow us to remember that tool when we are stressed.

The mindful pause can last 5 seconds, 5 minutes, or 5 days, whatever we can manage, and whatever the situation calls for. One of my favorite mindfulness teachers, Pema Chodron, says that mindfulness is like medicine and that dose matters. So, while 10 minutes may be better than 10 seconds, something is always better than nothing at all.

The mindful pause is an important tool for at least two reasons. One is that it is beneficial to our overloaded nervous systems to take mini breaks throughout the day (resting is good for our eyes and other organs, too). The other reason is that it helps us see the world with more openness and curiosity and with less implicit bias. This is important because most of the time, we don’t see what is there, we see what we expect to be there. This is a well-established finding in neuroscience, but I had an experience from my own life that really brought it home for me.

A few years back, I needed pelvic floor physical therapy and received a referral for a physical therapist named Dr. Mayer. I exchanged several emails with her before the initial appointment, filled out the paperwork, and spent a great deal of time reading and re-reading her bio on the clinic website in preparation for our appointment. Our meet and greet went well, and I scheduled another appointment. 

After that initial meeting, I returned to my office and sat at my desk for a brief, 10-minute mindfulness meditation. I then opened my laptop and saw that I had a confirmation email with details about my next appointment. While scanning it, I noticed that Dr. Mayer’s first name was misspelled (Chelesa instead of Chelsea). I should let the clinic know, I thought. 

I went to the website and started clicking around. And then I saw it: Dr. Mayer’s first name was, in fact, spelled Chelesa, not Chelsea; it was consistent throughout every page on the clinic website and on all of the paperwork I had filled out. 

I stared at the screen, blinking my eyes in disbelief. How could I have missed that? 

Since I had never seen the name spelled that way before, my brain had changed it to the spelling I expected to see. Despite having seen her name in print dozens of times before that day, I had not seen what was actually there, but what I expected to be there. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I finally saw what was really there directly after a mindfulness meditation.

This story from my own life is lighthearted and low stakes. But there are stories about a similar shift in perception that have much more gravitas. The support group for ex-IDF military members called Breaking the Silence has documented many testimonies of soldiers experiencing spontaneous moments of mindful awareness—seeing the familiar world around them with new eyes, as if awakening from a dream. They speak of feeling suddenly horrified about the violent acts they had been engaged in without being fully present and aware of what they were doing.

In my therapy practice, people often ask me what they should do after they take a mindful pause. It’s a good question with lots of different answers. 

One thing we can do after mindfully pausing is to bring our awareness downward into the body and focus our compassionate awareness on any areas of tension, like in the shoulders or stomach. Something else we can do is get curious about the inner voice narrating our thoughts: is it critical? Scared? Whose voice is that, anyway? Does it sound like me or someone else? Maybe someone from my childhood? If I can tune into which part of me has the inner microphone at any given moment, I can increase my awareness and help that part of me through whatever it’s struggling with.

But keep in mind that just taking the inner backward step is actually enough. Neuroscientist and therapist Dan Siegel has found that when we pause, notice, and name (I see a green chair, I feel my heart beating), the brain actually begins to release soothing neuropeptides. So, the brain is literally self-soothing when we take a mindful pause. And I don’t know about you, but I could pretty much always go for another dose of soothing neuropeptides.

When we stop and notice the world around us and inside us, we become more present, more fully here. It is from that more fully present place inside that the light of our conscious awareness begins to illuminate the darkness inside and around us. We notice something small we hadn’t seen before, like the spelling of a name, or something much bigger, like the act of violence we believed was somehow justified.

Our ability to be present and aware can grow with practice. It can feel hard at first, but, like any skill, it becomes easier the more we do it. In my most hopeful moments, I believe that when we spend time practicing this skill of presence and mindful awareness, all of our propensities and wounds clear away, just for a moment, allowing our beautiful light to shine.

And we can then move forward with more awareness and care. Just imagine what our world could be like if more of us were doing this.

So, as you move through the year ahead, I hope you’ll consider integrating the mindful pause into your daily life. Whenever you think of it, just stop and notice a few details internally and externally. And then feel the warm light of your present-moment awareness shining all around you.