Virtual Pause

5/16/22 So much pain, expectations, responsibilities, other’s opinions, etc. get layered upon our true self and cover up who we are designed to be.  These things constrict our capacity to love. In this episode we will be exhaling negativity so that our tent, or the place where our true self dwells, can expand. We will sit in silence using a meditation method called Centering Prayer, and then...

5/2/22 Our beliefs are important to us and can fuel our passion and action. But when we do all we can to fortify those beliefs, holding armor in our hands ready to fight or flee when our wall of belief gets rubbed up against, we expend a ton of energy -  usually leading to our own unhealth. In this episode, we will think of a belief we have and a person or situation that rubs up against that...

More than likely, you have felt a stirring, passion or desire to be or do something throughout your life. For me, I used to write poetry and music for an audience of one. But we end up giving that passion up because the world tells us these passions are unproductive, or we aren’t good enough, or we need to be practical and focus on building a life that the world says we should live. That passion i...

Episode 50: Sight in the Darkness 4/11/2022 These Pause practices are not simply ways of self-care. If that were the case, then when we feel unworthy in our beings, or when we feel a sense of darkness or chaos in our lives, we most often will push self-care practices out of the way. Yet if we practice these pauses as ways of seeing, seeing the light in the darkness, gaining clarity of sight for ou...

4/4/2022 I just launched a book last week, and it feels like I gave birth to a baby. The problem is I have been so buried in the details of editing and getting it to done, that I didn’t have the time to determine what happens to it when it actually is published. So in a flurry of activity last week, I barely had a moment to celebrate because I was deep in the mire of “ok, now what do I do with it?...

Sometimes we don’t know what we need. We are too exhausted, busy, confused, depleted, to even determine what it is we need in that moment to feel a sense of equanimity and wholeness. Our false self, or ego, stands at the top of our castle, in charge, keeping our body from settling, our mind from quieting, our heart from opening. Our true self is hidden in a locked treasure chest, behind a fortifie...

3/21/2022 There are times when we can be totally consumed and self-absorbed by something. It can be a good thing – a project or task or relationship – but it can consume all of us and effect us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We can’t always let go of the thing, but we can take a pause and release the grip we have on it and it has on us. In this episode we will try to counterac...

We have a center – our true self that is authentic. When we engage in relationships, projects, goals, etc. that aren’t aligned with that center, we experience chaos, confusion, and depletion. In today’s episode we will imagine our center and the areas in our life that are weakly connected to our true self. We will see if we can make the connection to our center stronger, or if we need to let them...

When we are depleted – physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually – we can feel imbalanced, confused, indecisive, grumpy, and all kinds of things that don’t feel productive. When we can’t take a day off or put aside the tasks at hand, we still can slow down and pause. But regaining energy is not a cognitive exercise – we have to integrate our entire self. In this episode, we will pause, as...

One of the basic needs of being human is to have safety and security. We all deserve that and should have it for ourselves and help others have it – physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. But sometimes our identity is tied up into what we believe will give us safety and security, and make us whole, when really these are just false programs of happiness at play. When we are gripping on...

The heart is our organ of perception. As human beings, we naturally look to something or someone for our identity and sense of self-worth. And when we look to others for who we are, we create chaos, as we move towards that which brings us praise and away from that which we are told we are not good at or shouldn’t be. The perception of others dictates our way in the world. These things are deep wit...

Letting Go: Part 1 – Control and Power When we create chaos either internally or externally, it is usually caused by our need to fulfill one or all of the three programs of happiness. In this episode, we will dig into one of those programs – our need for control and power. We will go through the be STILL Pause process by bringing to mind a personal chaotic story that is driven by our need for cont...

The Pause, or any contemplative practices that integrate body, mind, heart, and spirit, can transcend circumstances over time. In other words, the peace that you feel during a Pause can actually occur in other circumstances of chaos. Today we will visualize ourselves at the top of the summit, with unobstructed views of miles of beauty. We will let go of our need for control and surrender, our need...

We have a choice – to show up with our false self or our true self, every moment of the day. Yet without even realizing it, we easily slip into our false self masks, and our true self gets covered up. In today’s episode we will notice our tendencies – notice how our false self is showing up and how it behaves. It may be striving, grasping, running, numbing, hiding – just to name a few. But it is a...

We make our new years resolutions and if you are like me, you mess up by January 3rd – missing the mark, not doing what we intended to do or being who we intended to be. When we experience pain or frustration because of our own mistakes or someone else’s, it is easy to run into isolation and hide in the dark. Instead, we can go into solitude and connect with our creator, receiving love for our dar...

When we experience stress or even what seems to be small moments of trauma, our bodies take it in. Our stress hormone increases, and we can find ourselves not sleeping, feeling jumpy at the slightest thing, mentally foggy, over-emotional or checked out, and just not present. We believe our faith should be enough to overcome these things. Yet when our faith is not embodied by our entire beings, the...

Episode 37: The Great Gap In this season as we prepare for Christmas, I often feel a sense of melancholy. Yes, there are so many things to do and fun to be had, but I get a very melancholy feeling inside when I stop the busyness, even for a moment. I realized that what Christmas represents - from the Christian faith and also even from a secular perspective- is joy, peace, and love. Yet often the w...

Episode 36: Confidence Confidence in our abilities often comes from the way the world perceives us and gives us feedback. That confidence is coming from our false self. Confidence from our true selves is when we are unfettered, unhindered by the world’s voices, and move throughout life as love. We love our neighbor as ourselves, or love our neighbor from a place of our true self, or God indwelling...

Our first two episodes in this series of Mining Our Diamond Light addressed the walls we build or allow to be built around our true selves, which covers up our diamond light. The first part focused on not building any more walls, the second focused on knocking those walls down. In this episode, we will look at the walls we either create or fortify to block someone else’s experience of living out o...

There are walls that have been put up in our lives that block our true self, our diamond light inside of us, from shining. These walls shape our way of being in the world, even if we don’t realize it. In this episode we will identify a wall that has shaped our thoughts and actions, and either made us hide with shame or try to prove that these walls are wrong by striving. We will attempt to let the...

Episode 33: Mining our Diamond Light: Part One We have a center of nothingness which is a place untouched by the world. It is our true self, our real nature, and we were born with it and are intended to live from it. We need to mine this diamond inside of us, not by striving to be someone else, but by knocking down the walls and relaxing into who we really are. In this episode, we will “mine” for...

Crossing the Lines of Our Lane We can get caught up in the chaos of our own making when we think of what could be or could have been. We may find our emotions are strong and our desire for the outcome to be different than it really is. But if we allow ourselves this “egoic tantrum” for a moment, and we don’t shove it down, and then take a moment to be calm, we can see the inner motivations behind...

Episode 31: Needing to be Everything We can be so invested in relationships, our work, or a specific event that we try to be everything in it and even try to control the outcome. We are simply one data point in a much larger picture of someone’s life or a situation. In this episode we will identify a circumstance or relationship in our lives where we want to be all. We will determine if there is a...

We can’t will ourselves to be peaceful. Yet we have a true self inside of us that is peaceful. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and activist, says that once we learn to touch the peace within us we can be healed and transformed. In today’s episode we will practice tapping into this peace inside of us through mindfulness exercises. We will then identify what it is that keeps us resisting that pea...

Sometimes I am so in my head that I walk around oblivious to my surroundings - kind of like a zombie. I am so fixated on whatever problem it is I am trying to solve that I disconnect myself from the earth, other people, and God, and I even disconnect myself from myself. In this episode we will identity what happens in our bodies when we are in our heads, what drives the need for us to be in our he...