The Power of Pause
The Power of Pause (and the unpopular notion that not working is unproductive)
The cause of your need to pause may be the lingering call to return to your Original Dream, that which you were born to pursue, that which you were destined to fulfill. You cannot run forever, even with all the external high fives and attention you get for succeeding in various other dreams. Your dream will return as itself with a thousand faces until you reach for it and hold it close to your thankfully-beating heart.
For the past 19 years, I have had the undeniable job of a mammoth. It started with my son needing a lifesaving operation at 4 weeks old, and me, not having any funds, insurance or a person to help foot the bill or with the emotional fire that made me who I am today. This spurred me to “never need anything” from “anyone” and to start the bullish journey of building a tea company that was worth $12M when I left it.
I leapt from that into NYC publishing and spent 4 ½ years acquiring, editing, publishing and marketing almost 40 books in an industry where I knew very few people and left knowing the most amazing people. I didn’t just do this though, I continued to teach 4-6 workshops a year, consulting with large CPG companies, and I wrote a book called Love in Detail.
The pace was incredible and I loved every crazed minute of it.
My agent sent Love in Detail to 10 or so publishers and it was rejected by all of them. That sent me into a tailspin I cannot easily explain, but knew there was a solid reason for it. I had this lingering shame and a fear of embarrassment that literally paralyzed me often.
You might have a variation on this, but for me, it made me work twice as hard and make impulsive decisions my whole life. If I was moving fast enough, the shame and embarrassment wouldn’t be able to catch up with me. When we pause, we can experience what wants to be healed; we may not even know what wants to be healed.
I wasn’t embarrassed by the rejections, to be honest. From a publisher’s standpoint, I didn’t have a spirituality book platform, but a business woman’s platform. So it wasn’t in my “range” to support a spirituality-based book. Yeah, I got it. The responses were warm and cordial, the encouragement was all there, but I then went into a space of thinking everything I wrote was simply wrong. I now know I was channeling my “She who buries her tracks” persona…
For like two years.
As I wrapped up my contract at Simon & Schuster, I jumped into consulting with more companies, teaching more workshops, and keeping my pace pretty high, but then I got the tumor in my throat and my mentor Gay Hendricks said to me, “What this might be telling you is that you are speaking from a place that is not your essence.”
Essence? Tumor?
I needed time to reflect on this, I needed time to pause, but when does the world stop for us to take a real, deep pause?
It took a whole year to give myself (and my 9-year-old) daughter that time, and I had to fight for it! I had to book myself a 6-week trip across the world to get this time for myself, in the midst of my son needing another operation and in the midst of starting a new company.
I spent a week at the beginning of the journey at a detox center on the island of Phuket, where I was on a strict protocol of raw juice, psyllium smoothies, daily spiritual counseling, massage, nervous system healing, astrology/destiny readings, and twice-daily colonics (which is like giving birth twice a day). What I discovered there was not what I had hoped for—it was about a cellular memory of abuse (not by my parents) and attached to it was shame so deep I had no consciousness of it.
Once I discovered it, all the pieces of my soul and being started to sync into place—from a placeless place. I held myself, cherishing myself for the first time, and then went and held my little girl. I pulled up Love in Detail and began re-reading all of the various drafts and each one felt so lovely, so pure and so right. I searched for the shame of not getting it published and the shame was simply gone.
I could no longer locate shame in my being. It had been trapped in my first chakra, wreaking havoc on my sense of safety my entire life. I remember exactly what happened, and who it was, but that didn’t strike me as something that even mattered. There was no anger, just curiosity and a commitment to heal.
What proceeded to occur over the course of the next five weeks was an unraveling of the knots of embarrassment. I wore a bathing suit in front of people for the first time in years and wrote, swam, played with Mia and was fully in my body as if for the first time in my life. And in my body was pleasure, wonder, sensory delight and power.
I felt a deeper joy than I have ever felt in this lifetime. It wasn’t that joy wasn’t there before, but it was locked deep in a box of shame that had been silently holding me—and my writing—hostage.
Now, I am preparing Love in Detail to publish under my very own imprint, the way Louise Hay published her book You Can Heal Your Life at 60, this was the book that started Hay House.
Why do I feel I can do all of this now? I’ve been talking about it…wanting it, dreaming of it…
Because the shame was removed from my body and my nervous system. I reintegrated my child self after the experience of remembering something that happened when I was a very little girl. And whether or not it happened doesn’t even matter to me, because the result is I have a freedom that was never there for me before now. I have my essence and the truth it brings centered in my heart and mind.
This is the power of the pause.
I was telling my friends the other day that I had never stopped and done “nothing” long enough to know what was running my show. I knew I wasn’t whole but couldn’t find the missing piece between conference calls or product launches.
What are we missing by not pausing long enough to re-member
our psyches and souls and re-integrate them into our lives now?
What has occurred for me can occur in each one of us, so long we are committed
to our own healing, however long that healing takes. For me it’s been years and
years of therapy and personal growth retreats, certifications, you name it. But
now a light seems to be shining from the infinite being I am inside—I had no
idea it was blocked by something I couldn’t remember—until I took a pause and a
deep self-care journey into the eye of my inner storm.
And that is what it is isn’t it—we all have an inner storm that isn’t allowing us to pursue the calling of our deepest longings. We are all doing this in some way—with lovers or books that want to be completed, there is something deeply held in our belief system that doesn’t allow us to experience the depths of our being in human form.
We are made to live—why else would we have a soul and eyes, a heart and voice? We are made to express, why else would we desire it so?
What we aren’t made for is to hold a shame or a subconscious block deeply in our cells for the entirety of our lifetimes—we are meant at some point to discover and release them so we may know what it was to not have what we wanted, to know what it was to be separated from the dream we desired more than anything in the world.
I have stopped running. I didn’t know what I was running from, but now I know that I can sit on the couch and sip my tea and write and publish and dream and do from the very deepest core of my soul’s seed formed from the sparkle in God’s eye. Shame was my block, and it took a pause to uncover it and physically release it.
As the memories of those in my youth saying, “Shame on you!” I am now free. I can say and speak and sing and cry out my truth, there is no shame in that.
There is no shame in taking your very own pause. As long as that pause wants to be taken, take it my loves.
With Love,
Zhena
