The Sacred Pause: Why Stillness Is the Most Active Phase of Your Becoming
So much of our lives are spent holding on. Holding onto people, clutter—both mental and physical, relationships that we keep together with old duct tape and prayers. Stifling emotions like resentment and bitterness that we pretend don’t affect us. Stress, tension, and worry over things that many times, aren’t even our responsibility to carry.
And the world conditions us that control is the answer to all of this. So we try to control, to manage, to push through, to repress, to hold back and restrain what the Divine keeps placing on our path so we can actually trust in ourselves enough to feel safe to surrender instead of tightening our grip. To sit in the stillness of the ashes of the Sacred Pause where the illusions have burned away and we can finally see that thing, that person, that situation for what it is so that we no longer feel the need to control it out of fear.
The ashes
This stillness can feel like a complete loss of everything that we have known. The ashes from the burning of what we are no longer willing to be have settled and we start to question: what’s left?
Is there any piece of me I haven’t let go of?
Who am I now without the stories I’ve told and the roles I have played for so long?
Why couldn’t those I love most continue on this journey with me?
But do not fear because phoenix energy can withstand the fire of letting go.
It may seem like inaction to the outside world and maybe even you, but the Sacred Pause is one of the most active phases of your becoming journey. It’s where pretenses are shed to make room for clarity and truth from which that will guide your pen to rewrite your story.
The Sacred Pause is about allowing yourself to soften, to create space to fully surrender and to trust yourself with the emotions, revelations and truths that rise in its silence.
This cannot be feigned. Only stillnes that is surrendered to, not performed, can achieve this.
And this doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual process that plays out quietly beneath the surface as you let go layer by layer. As you stop letting survival mode drive your decisions and maybe for the first time in your life, let your body lead the way.
THE THREE STAGES of stillness
First your ashes smolder as you sift through pain, rage, grief, and tower moments. You sit with what’s revealed, what has always been asking to be acknowledged by allowing your emotions to speak, pausing so you don’t repeat cycles, becoming okay with the anger and disgust you feel, allowing yourself to mourn the loss of what could have been, reconciling with yourself for when you didn’t know your worth, time to ask yourself the important questions and acutally listen: what will it cost if I stay the same?
Then there is the integration of the truth. The smoke starts to give way to clarity. There is this shift where you go from forcing, controlling, hustling, trying to make it happen to showing up, being present, trusting, and allowing it to all unfold in its divine timing.
Then one day you realize that a person that you once allowed to trigger your defenses or a past event that felt like it could never be forgiven, doesn’t hold the power it once did over you. You have reclaimed it and now, you hold that power to choose to respond differently. To rewrite how they get to show up in your story, if at all. To be bold enough to ask:
- Does this choice, this relationship, this action feel true in my body?
- Does it feel like freedom, like possibility? Or does it feel like tightening and heaviness?
- Am I perceiving what is, what it is showing me and what it makes me feel, not just the potential it has to be?
And then aligning with with resonates and feels true for you.
You only need to be
It is in the Sacred Pause that you no longer feel the need to protect, explain, to manipulate, demand or perform. It’s where healing doesn’t require motion or doing to move forward. One of the definitions of becoming is simply: begin to be. That is really all that is required of us and that is what the Sacred Pause asks of us. To be still. To be the author of our story. To be the alchemist of what once had the power to break us. To be present in the safety of now, instead of the bondage of then. To be the full embodiment of who we were always meant to be.
WHAT I LEARNED
During my own seasons of sitting in the Sacred Pause, there were lessons I finally sat down long enough to learn, realizations and truths that were waiting be spoken and balance I had to seek to end the cycles I was finally ready enough to break.
I had to learn is that stillness isn’t always about silence and complete stillness of the body. Stillness is a state of being and many times I achieved it while being in complete flow during poling, aerial yoga or during a run.
Stillness can feel boring, dangerous, and even chaotic when you are not used to it. The Sacred Pause requires that you trust yourself enough to create a space where you can safely just be in the present moment without distraction.
I had to let go of the guilt I felt so that I could acknowledge and sit with the anger that surfaced on the ashes of all the boundaries I allowed to be crossed. I had to let go of the “should have beens”, “it could have beens”, the potentiality that was never recognized and the grief that I felt over the death of those visions so that I could reconcile with myself for when I didn’t know or believe that there was better.
Finding the right balance between gratitude and expectation became essential so I didn’t repeat cycles of settiling for “at least” and “good enough” nor allow fear of judgment, guilt, history and feelings of obligation to keep me bound things and people who could not pour into me.
After the unbecoming stage, I was so focused on “Look at all I’ve let go, all that I’ve lost. There’s nothing but ashes left. What if I’ve released too much? What if I’m left with nothing?. The Sacred Pause was the vital stage where in the middle of my toddler meltdown because I realized that the Power Wheel that I thought I was driving towards the “excitement” of the busy street (AKA repeating cycles, choosing history over my new story, allowing guilt to keep me bound to what needed to be released) actually had a parent remote that was placed firmly in the hand of the Divine.
And the stillness illuminated the truth of just how divinely protected I was from all that “loss.”
The Invitation
So I pose these questions to you:
Is the fear of sitting in the silence and stillness keeping you from taking the first steps towards becoming?
Does the thought of allowing your emotions to speak scare you about what they may reveal about the relationship your clinging onto? The job that your body has to brace against every time you walk into the building?
Are you ashamed of the anger, resentment, bitterness and jealousy that has been weighing you down will finally surface or is it that when it does surface, you will have to face the truth that walking away is your only choice?
Because the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, right?
The Sacred Pause isn’t asking you to have all the answers upfront. It’s simply inviting you to be still enough to hear them. To remember who you’ve always been beneath the noise, the roles, the conditioning. To trust that in the ashes, something new is already stirring. And when you’re ready—not a moment before—you will rise.
