Teaching Moments: The Pause
The pause between the breath gives us an anchor of stillness amidst the constant fluctuations of mind and karma. Because the breath is as ceaseless as manifestation is infinite— and flowing with our breath, like flowing with our karma, takes practice and surrender. This is why the pause between the breath is such a resource helping us find and unite with this flow. (Text continues below).
The pause between the breath isn’t separate from the breath, but it is what unites the inhale and exhale into a fluid experience. The Shiva Sutras describe this as a type of “Triple Awareness”, awareness that goes beyond just the inhale and exhale, beyond duality, and encompasses the in-between space. “When you fix your awareness not only in two, but in three, you are carried to God consciousness and you become one with Svacchanda.32 (Svacchanda Tantra) What is the meaning of “triple awareness”? The verse tells us there must be triple awareness, not just awareness of two. Awareness of two is the awareness of two actions, such as inhaling and exhaling. Triple awareness includes the junction, the gap, between any two actions, between inhaling and exhaling and between exhaling and inhaling. It is the junction between one step and another step, between one thought and another thought, between one sensation and another sensation, etc. When you are aware of the three centers, then you are carried to Svacchanda, to God-consciousness.”
Feeling the space between the breath is actually a means of feeling the breath itself— because triple awareness doens’t mean awareness of three, it means awareness of one.
Duality is awareness of two, of inhale and exhale as separate, of like and dislike, accepting and rejecting. Non-duality posits a third option, that of surrender— this is what allows us to feel the breath as a flow, instead of just separate parts. The reason it is called ‘triple awareness’ is because this experience of surrender always exists within the realm of duality—duality is what we are surrendering in order to feel unity. So the pause between our breaths isn’t a separate practice, but a deeper practice, of breath awareness.
The pause, though, is elusive. If you think of our breath as a swinging pendulum, inhaling as it swings one way, exhaling as it swings the other way— the still point is almost mathematically impossible to calculate. This is because as the pendulum swings to one side, its distance towards that end point keeps getting exponentially smaller— Like slicing a cake in half, then fourths, then eighths, then sixteenths, then thirty-seconds, and so on— when will the cake slices become so small they disappear? When does the inhale become the exhale? Math and the mind can’t tell us exactly, but of course with a little practice we can all experience it for ourself. Meditation lets us directly experience a reality that our mind simply can’t comprehend.
To support our path to the pause between the breath, this triple awareness that yields an experience of one-ness and unity, we are taught to watch the breath turn, to watch it taper down and taper up around this infinitely small yet existent pause. In this way we allow the pause to arrive within us, which is the only way to fully experience it. On our meditation cushion this would look like watching the exhale dissolve into stillness, and then watching the inhale spring up from that same stillness. Then watching the inhale almost levitate into a pause, and then the exhale rains down like a fine mist. When we pay attention to the tapering edges of our breath, the pause comes to us vibrantly.
In our daily life this is possible too, as each experience of our day has a creation, maintenance and dissolution phase. In Sanskrit the dissolving phase is called a Nimesha, and the arising phase is called an Unmesha. When we watch the tapering edges of a situation beginning or ending, we naturally become more present during the activity, and the space between the activities. We do this for kids all the time, telling them that we’ll be leaving the playground in 10 minutes, then five minutes, then another five minutes, then ‘this is the last thing’, then another ‘last thing’, then the playground is dissolved fully as we drive home.
It’s not easy for kids and its not easy for us, but its not only possible, but essential for our health, consciousness and bliss. We unconsciously relate to the space between breaths and events in our life as a void, which makes it sound empty, but when that void is described by lineage texts and teachings it is anything but, which is why the Vijnana bhairava teaches that “This [liminal] state, which is absolutely pure and filled with universal consciousness, fills the whole universe with bliss. (Vijñānabhairava Tantra 15)”
Further, when we can maintain our awareness on the two ‘voids’, there is an ‘upsurge’ of energy in our Shushumna, which then causes ’the formation of Bhairava [to be] revealed’, meaning that awareness of this liminal space causes a rise in spiritual energy and an awareness of our true nature. Paul Reps once wrote that when we pause we overflow like a well from within— which is a vivid description of this ancient process. So we see that the space between our breaths and our activities is not empty, it is actually the potential energy into which the entire universe both dissolves and from which it rises.