Light in the Dark

The thing about the pause is that it’s often the last thing we want to do. We think we’ll pause later when we get through “the busy time.” Pausing can even feel scary, like a subtraction from our agenda. Or extremely unpleasant because it puts us face to face with all of our unprocessed feelings.

And yet when we learn to genuinely go for it, we begin to see the investment in life that it is. I am reminded of the question Thich Nhat Hanh once asked: “How will you get there if you are not here?” 

Reconnecting to here-ness and now-ness gives us agency. Rather than life tumbling forward because of a set of conditioned forces, we choose what the forward is. 

Maybe the pause is a single moment standing alone in the kitchen, spatula in hand. Maybe it happens right as a conversation with a loved one starts gets activated. Or maybe you're meditating for twenty minutes.

Wherever it is, the pause gathers our scattered, dispersed life-force energy and reorganizes it into something that is collected, useful, and enjoyable. 

The Buddha taught that the highest happiness—peace—arises when conditioned patterns end. The pause creates the visibility of our patterns in the light of our awareness—and empowers us to create a new path forward.

When we are entangled in thinking, we are our thoughts. We are identified with our thoughts and glued to our self-referential stories. Our thoughts and stories usually do not cause happiness. They often cause suffering or stress. When we are stressed, our anxiety or frustration takes up all the real estate that we are. 

When we pause, we recognize our delusion. We recognize, as Tara Brach teaches, that our thoughts are infinitely smaller than the vast space of the heart-mind, like clouds in a sky. We recognize the profound difference between having thoughts and being swept up in the thought process.

We recognize that the cause of happiness is not something happening or not happening outside of us but an end to the belief in our thoughts. 

We recognize that even our most difficult emotions arise within an expansive field of awareness that is not threatened by them—and can hold them all. 

Yet we cannot “do” any of this, this gathering of our life energy, this unearthing of wisdom, with our intellect. We cannot think coherence into existence or implement it through striving. We cannot summon our essence with a mind that is disconnected from it.

Yet we can pause and make room for the intelligence of non-doing to work on us. 

Pausing is more than taking a few deep breaths and trying to feel calm. It asks us to look at the avenues of attention, the deeply rooted strategies and mechanisms that determine its movement. It asks us to look at our felt sense experience and our relationship to it. 

It asks us to recognize the momentum generated by our historical selves. It illuminates a path that is uninfluenced by our historical selves. .  

Pausing teaches us how to be who we are now and shows us with great clarity how to move forward in a way that feels good. It is a seed of liberation.

~

Presence, at this time of year, can reorganize attention and bring forth our light in the dark, like a candle that is simply there, burning; it is not doing anything other than being itself. It glows simply because it is, and this is sufficient.

The candle need not be moved around to share its warmth or brighten the room. Its existence produces its essence, which is good, purposeful, and beautiful. And its essence relies on protection and stillness.   

It’s so human for us to grasp at past, future, definition, knowing, and control. It’s so human for us to not pause, to keep pushing through the moments that define life. 

We struggle to trust stillness, to relax into darkness and not-knowing. We struggle to trust these experiences as necessary for the emergence of growth and direction.  

When we pause, we soften into uncertainty, we allow a wider realm of support to govern our lives. We allow for a much more vast, aware, and radiant presence to arise in the foreground of life experience.

We hold a deeper respect for the unmanifested, the dark, the not-knowing, as a portal to potential and creation. We surrender to the deeply productive energy of non-doing and make room for the emergence of light.

We find stillness and light a candle.