Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
The Pause
To interrupt the momentum of habitual thought and reactivity by stopping for a few seconds and taking three conscious breaths, opening a gap in which you return to the present.
The pause: Whenever you notice you’ve been swept away — stop. Take three slow, conscious breaths. Let the gap open; feel where you actually are. Then go on. Do it many times a day, tied to natural cues. The gap is where choice comes back.
What it is
The pause (Pema Chödrön’s “pause practice”) is the simplest of her methods and, in her teaching, the master key to all the others. At any moment in ordinary life — mid-task, mid-thought, mid-reaction — you stop, and take three conscious breaths, then go on.
That tiny gap interrupts the “habitualness of our minds and our bodies” and lets the present moment open up. It is not a seated meditation; it is meditation threaded through the day, a way of repeatedly stepping out of the stream of preoccupation and reactivity that otherwise carries you along on autopilot.
It belongs in attention focus because its whole action is a deliberate redirection of attention back to the immediate, breathing present. In Pema’s framework, the pause is what makes it possible to catch yourself getting hooked (see shenpa) before you scratch the itch. It creates the gap in which choice becomes available again.
The Method
- Notice you’ve been carried away. You realize you’re caught — in a story, a reaction, busyness, a craving, a spin of worry. (Over time you also pause proactively, at set moments in the day, before you’re hooked.)
- Stop. Literally interrupt what you’re doing for a few seconds. Pema’s image is “creating a gap.”
- Take three conscious breaths. Feel the in-breath and the out-breath fully — three of them. Don’t try to fix or analyze anything; just breathe and be where you are.
- Notice what’s here. In the gap, the world “has a chance to open up to you.” You feel your body, the room, the present moment, perhaps the very emotion you were fleeing — without acting on it.
- Go on. Return to your life from that slightly more awake place. Repeat many times a day. Pema suggests using natural cues — the phone ringing, walking through a doorway, sitting down, a transition between tasks — as bells to remind you to pause. (Faithfully summarized from Taking the Leap and Pema Chödrön’s pause-practice teaching, not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
Pema Chödrön (b. 1936), American Tibetan Buddhist nun in the Shambhala lineage and student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, presents the pause most fully in Taking the Leap (2009), where it is the practical antidote to shenpa (getting hooked).
It distills a much older contemplative move — the deliberate gap, the “stop” — that appears across traditions (e.g., Gurdjieff’s “stop exercise,” the gap between breaths in yogic practice). → (chodron pema).
Common refinements
Turning it into a project. It’s three breaths, not a meditation session. Keep it light and brief or you won’t actually do it dozens of times a day.
- Only pausing when calm. The payoff is pausing when you’re hooked — angry, anxious, craving. That’s the hard, useful moment.
- Using it to suppress. The pause is to feel and see what’s here, not to stuff it down. Don’t use the breaths to push the emotion away.
- Forgetting it exists. The practice lives or dies on reminders — tie it to recurring daily cues until it becomes a reflex.
- Refinement: pair the pause directly with shenpa work — pause is how you create the gap in which you can refrain from scratching.