The big pause

I bought these sweet, silly slippers last spring when I was headed to a 5-day silent meditation retreat. I needed some “house shoes” for walking around indoors at the retreat center so I thought these two cuties would help put a smile on my face and keep me company during my stay. 

Ever since I was a little girl, I had wanted to experience an extended period of silence. Unplugging and leaving my family for 5 days with no phone calls (except for emergencies) felt scary and a little indulgent. 

But this retreat was not just a life-long dream, it was also a requirement for a mindfulness teaching certification I was planning to complete later in the spring. So, despite a little fear and mommy guilt, I was going. What would it be like to stop all the talking, stop all of the activity and just be? These questions I had had since childhood were finally going to be answered!

And then NYC locked down due to Covid-19 and I had to cancel my registration. I put the retreat, my teaching certification and many things in my life on hold. You probably have a similar story about things you put on hold last spring…

That period was the start of “the big pause” as I like to call it. Besides cancelling a bunch of teaching engagements due to Covid, I made the tough decision to take a break from teaching all together. Becoming a Zoom + video + internet content expert AND a home-schooling mom all in the same season in the middle of a pandemic was a mountain I felt I could not climb. Instead, I hunkered down at home and became a full-time mom and housewife.

It was really scary to pause it all. Maybe you felt the same? I didn’t know whether the pause would be temporary or permanent. I spent most of last spring and summer mourning my former life. It felt like someone or something had died. It wasn’t until mid-October that I hosted my first mindfulness gathering on Zoom.

As I look back now, almost a year since the NYC lockdown, a lot of life lessons came out of the big pause. You probably have your own list of life lessons. In that long spring and summer, the most important lesson I learned was just how little control I have over life in general, if I have any at all. The ground that I thought I was standing on had come out from under me and I had to let go of everything I thought was solid and fixed. Who I was. My work. My plans. I remember there was this voice inside my head that kept prodding: I should be doing this….  I should be doing that….  I should…  I should…  I should…  It felt like I was putting my foot on the gas pedal while I was stuck in park. Revved up but unable to move forward. It was all those years of mindfulness practice that allowed me to hear that voice, to pause and lean into it, instead of pushing through it, or ignoring it, or numbing it with activity, or doing, or with substances. Difficult as it was, I stayed with the pause. Inside the pause. With all of the groundlessness and the ups and downs that it was.

Today I’m hitting the play button on part of my big pause - I’m participating in a 5-day silent retreat from the comfort of my home starting tonight! It won’t be the same as going to a retreat center and as such there’s not quite as much fear or mommy guilt. Nonetheless I’m super excited for the challenges and discoveries that await me. Will I finally have the answers to the questions I’ve had since I was a child? Or will I find a new groundlessness to abide in? Probably a little bit of both and none of either.

I’ll be putting all the tech down for the next five days and will see you on the other side. These sweet, silly slippers are coming along for the ride, of course. Wish us luck!

​xo