The Sacred Pause
- mei chong
- May 2, 2022
- 2 min read
My good friend and yogi Betsy sent me this today
HOW AM I?
Working on your job while working on your mental health while working on your relationships while working on physical health while working on your family while working on sleep habits while working on self-care while working on exercise while working on personal goals while working…
(see photo image below).
It gives an idea how modern life is like. We ’know’ what is ideal.. and we try to emulate it, being good human beings. we juggle all the balls in the air, doing the best we can, hoping none of the balls drop.
What about the sacred pause?
In our practice, we can practise pause between asanas. We begin the process of turning on the parasympathetic nervous system instead.
In his book The Tree of Yoga, BKS Iyengar makes the following statements:
“There are three transformations which take place in meditation. At the very beginning of his Yoga Sutras, Patanjali says that stillness of the mind is yoga. Later, he says that when a person is trying to still the mind, there is an opposition which occurs as new thoughts or new ideas arise in the mind. There is a tug-of-war between restraint and the rising thoughts as they come together. When there is restraint of thought, after a little while some new thoughts are born in the gap. How many of us have caught that gap between the restrained thought and the rising thought? The space between the restrained thought and the rising thought is a moment of passivity. In that moment there is a state of tranquillity, and a person who can increase that pause, that space between the restrained thought and the rising thought, is transformed towards the state of experience known as samadhi.”
When we are off the mat, especially, practise the pause. Be.
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