Virtual Pause

Come as you are…. This is very difficult to do. To accept where we are at the moment – with all of our limitations and unmet expectations. Yet if we accept where we are right now, that is when movement and transformation can take place. When we resist where we are by pushing through, pulling up our boot straps, trying to grasp at whatever it is we think we should achieve, that is when we create ch...

We grow up in a trench – a place of high walls with particular beliefs, opinions, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking. These walls are crucial as we grow up to help us form a sense of identity, but as we grow older, we may begin to feel suffocated by these walls, questioning what they represent, wondering if there is a bigger, vaster world out there. After we settle our bodies and quiet our minds...

Holding space for someone else to share their burdens, concerns, hopes, stories, and trauma is a beautiful gift. Yet when we internalize what they share – in our bodies, our minds, our hearts, or our spirits – we can become off kilter, restless, and depleted. In this episode we will bring to memory a situation where we listened to another’s story and then we will release any piece of it that we ma...

To loft a ball high in the air, it has to be let go. We can’t rise up if we are tethered to something. In our lives we are bombarded by messages, indirectly or directly, verbally or not, that tell us who we are. We hear “You are” messages that are positive and negative. The problem is, both can be dangerous if we over-identify with them, absorbing them into our very being, shaping our interactions...

Why do we tend to resist great love, joy or sorrow? When the emotions begin to well up in us, we walk away, we make ourselves busy, we numb, we scroll, we indulge. We find a way to escape the moment because it just too intense. Maybe we are afraid the emotion will take us over. Maybe we think it won’t last, and it easier to end it before it ends on its own. Maybe we don’t think we can handle the i...

Episode 23: Self-Emptying Kenosis is the practice of self-emptying – releasing our attachments to what we possess, both intangible and tangible – so that what we possess can be used for the movement of God – love, healing, wholeness of the world. In today’s episode, we will reflect on something we possess, how we react when it is threatened, what attachments of control, approval or security are te...

Meeting Chaos with Chaos Often we can find ourselves interacting with other people’s chaos - or their sense of striving to control, to be accepted, or to be secure – through our own sense of chaos. We meet other’s chaos with our own. When we feel depleted physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, we can absorb other people’s chaos and allow it to dictate our emotions and decisions and sp...

Attachments from Scarcity (previously recorded July 5th in front of virtual audience) It is so easy to allow people and circumstances to take up a tremendous amount of mental and emotional space. These people and circumstances can cloud our view of our present moments and our view of our path. They become inordinate attachments, take such a priority in our space that everything else is pushed out....

What we do or what roles we play are often essential and life-giving to us and to others. But often we over-identify with these things we are doing it in order to cover up some sense of unworthiness, wounds of our past, or shame. These layers are layers of false self, and block our ability to see and live out of our true selves.  In this episode, we will notice something in our lives that we have...

We can become imbalanced - physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually - when we are striving to perform and to be productive. This striving is usually undergirded with a desire to be perfect, to be significant, to be needed, or whatever our inner motivation is to fulfill our self-worth.  In this episode we will identify something that we are putting much of our time, energy, mental capacity, a...

We can’t always analyze why we are experiencing anxiety, melancholy, sadness, or other emotions. Memories and experiences can be trapped within our bodies and our subconscious, and sometimes it is difficult to name them. But we can still tend to our whole beings and help ourselves get back to a state of stability and balance in our inner selves. In this episode we will walk through the be STILL pa...

I define resilience as “shortening the space between chaos and stability”, or the space between living from our false selves and our true selves. We can’t get away from experiencing moments in our lives when we think or behave in ways that aren’t aligned with who we were really created to be. But in cultivating resilience, we can recognize more quickly when we are in that chaotic state and move to...

Take a walk! If you can. Take a moment or 20 minutes to take a walk during this pause. If not, just sit back and follow along. I am excited to read a poem by Jonathon Stalls, and then guide us through the be STILL process, becoming aware of the sounds and sights around us, and identifying a particular burden or problem we are carrying around, and then letting go of the grip it has on us. I recorde...

There comes a time in our lives when what our bones need is deep rest. What our hearts need is an open field to play and roam and be. Yet our minds keep us grinding at the wheel of productivity and cage in our hearts, so that we look acceptable to the world and to ourselves. We must do , we can’t just be . But if we don’t stop and be, we are going to break. It is difficult to stop and rest because...

In this episode we will look at our lives like an impressionist painting - a beautiful landscape or scene that has a million different dots of color, or moments. Sometimes we can forget to back up and look at the big picture, and instead we focus on the struggle of the moment, not realizing it is part of the tapestry of our lives. We will spend some time identifying a moment over our entire life t...

In this special episode I describe why I started the Pause, the structure of it, why it has the elements that it does, and what it is intended to do. This is a good episode if you have never gone through a pause before and want to understand a bit of its history and foundation. None of this is unique to me, it is simply what I have gathered and put into a process because of a desire to cultivate m...

Our pace of play, or the pace we are living, is often fast and frenzied. We are told we need to "rest", but rest is a luxury and self-indulgent. Yet by not resting, we become fragmented, disconnected and chaotic, running into others around us and eventually burning out from exhaustion. This episode helps us take a rest in the midst of our chaos, a brief pause that doesn't require a couch, so we ca...

We each have a center of our being that Thomas Merton describes as “nothingness”. It is nothingness simply because it is not attached to anything and has no agenda. It is the place where we are the most free, full of love and life, our true self. We often find ourselves in situations where this place of “being” doesn’t transcend into our “doing”, or our movement out into the world. Our true self m...

In the noise and busyness of everyday life, we can find it hard to be fully present in the moment. In this episode we will imagine ourselves in a situation where we desire to be present - maybe a conversation with someone, in a meeting, cooking dinner, or even taking a walk - and we will identify and let go of that which keeps us from having fidelity to our whole being in the moment. Listen: There...

Have you ever spent some time alone in quiet, centering yourself, and found some peace, only for it to be gone as soon as ordinary life comes knocking on your door? We can be in a vicious cycle in our lives where we center ourselves and gain a sense of peace and clarity, and then something triggers us and we erupt – however that might look like for us. Carl Jung says that 10% of our thoughts and a...

When we have agendas, plans, and expectations, and something comes in our lives to interrupt them, we can sometimes refuse to let go, creating a sense of disintegrated chaos for us and those around us. Yet when we take a pause and let go of our agenda, plans and expectations, we can experience stability in motion, and then we can rise up and make a positive impact on those around us.  "I have...

In this episode we will explore why we need silence and solitude and what to let go of internally and externally to protect it. "Silence is the outer wall that we must build to protect an interior edifice." "I am certain that silence is a divine liberation that unifies man and places him at the center of himself, in the depths of God’s mysteries. In silence, man is absorbed by the divine and the w...

In this episode, we recognize that it has been one year since the COVID lockdown. As the world slowly begins to open up, we are faced with transitioning again. And although some things may look the same, we know there are many changes that face us. With the help of a passage from Frederick Buechner's A Room Called Remember , we will examine what is old in us that we need to let go of in order for...

We often measure our interactions, our relationships, projects and work by how society tells us we should. Did we win? Did it give us accolades? And although this way of measuring seems fine, if we are honest with ourselves, there is an underlying motivation to our actions. We measure our success by having more control or power, approval, security or safety. Yet what if we measure our “success” in...

This Virtual Pause Podcast episode is specifically designed for kids and teens when they are feeling anxiety, stress, or dealing with a heavy worry or burden. It is a brief way to settle your body, tune in to what's going on, inhale and exhale to quiet your mind, let go of the burden, and listen to what your next step can be to help the burden become lighter. Support this podcast https://anchor.fm...