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by OneDanceTribe

Pause by Adam Barley

I’m being more still the last two days than I’ve been for a while. So easy to miss the need for that. Easy to forget Gabrielle’s wisdom that the power of healing lies within the rhythm of Stillness, getting busy instead with eating the right food, doing the right practice, seeing the right people, getting the right exercise, etc, for my wellbeing.

What a profound blessing to just lie still instead, and very gently fall in and out of myself, occasionally drifting into sleep, soft waves rolling through colours of my awareness, the sheer bliss of doing nothing permeating me like a mist.

Then in a moment of difficulty staying there, I lean into the restless tides of my longings, and familiar grief comes as I feel the depth of fear that laid down tracks so long ago and still has me jumping guns. How deep the urgency to move is. What a subtle art it is, learning to stay quiet with that my selves which are busy.

They finally get the better of me as I get inspired to write this, but I swear I’ll go back to lying still once I’ve posted. Lol.

I reflect on how uncomfortable we have become with being still, whipping out our phones the moment there’s a pause. Rush rush rush to the train: a moment on the platform and out they come. Talk talk talk at the restaurant: a moment’s pause and out they come. All that e-communication is exacerbating our discomfort with stillness, because the thing about email and messaging services is that any moment of pause and we switch to another task, another app, another conversation. How often do we sit with a pause while we’re in a messaging dialogue, and just feel into the moment?

The moment stillness comes, intimacy deepens. We immediately start to feel stuff that was obscured in the busy business of doing, and that’s confronting if we’ve had any investment in not feeling it.

Instead, most of us are practicing a style of communication all through the day in which we don’t stay with the pauses.

Oops. Big mistake.

The pauses are vital to our wellbeing.

We’re habituating an avoidance of intimacy, with each other and with ourselves. No wonder the stats on loneliness are rocketing.

To practice: Stillness is inside all the rhythms, if we pay attention accurately. No matter what our movement style, it’s there in the silence that is always and everywhere.

To practice: when a moment happens… simply pause, breathe, and feel.

OneDanceTribe
About OneDanceTribe
OneDanceTribe is an international community of people practicing conscious movement as a pathway for personal and global transformation. It is a portal to a unified field where teachers and dancers of different modalities and walks of life come together to celebrate the power of Moving as One.
Adam Barley Pause