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Pause, Don't Stop

A simple practice for letting your feelings actually land.

Most people don't pause long enough to let their own feelings land.

We tell the story. We explain the situation. We give the context. We move quickly through the what happened and the why I'm upset and the what I should do about it. And the whole time, the feeling itself, the actual experience in the body, never gets a chance to be felt.

So I've started using a phrase with my clients lately.

Pause that for a second. Where do you feel that in your body?

It's not stop. Stop sounds like put it away, we're done with that. Pause is different. Pause says we'll come back to the story in a minute. Right now, let's actually feel what's there.

A Story About Grief That Wasn't About Death

I did this with a long-term client recently. He'd been telling me about something that had been quietly bothering him for weeks. Surface story. Work frustration. Family logistics. I asked him to pause, drop in, and tell me what he was actually feeling underneath.

He sat with it. And what surfaced surprised him.

Grief.

Not about a death. About the loss, decades ago, of his close relationship with his ex-wife's family when the marriage ended. The aunts and uncles and parents-in-law who had taken him in as one of their own. The Sunday dinners, the holidays, the inside jokes. All of it gone the moment the marriage ended, even though none of those people had done anything wrong and neither had he.

He hadn't let himself feel that grief in years. He didn't even know it was still there until he paused.

I Know This Grief Personally

My first marriage ended thirty-five years ago. And I still miss my Chinese in-laws. The Chinese New Year gatherings. The weekly dim sum. The cousins and aunties who loved me without conditions. Coming out as gay ended my marriage, and the right path forward for both of us also meant the loss of an entire family I had loved.

Nobody tells you about that part.

We have whole rituals around grief when someone dies. We have nothing for the slow disappearance of a family you joined and then had to leave.

What Happens When We Don't Pause

When we don't pause, the feelings don't go away. They just go underground. They wait. They surface later, sideways, in places that don't make sense. We snap at the person who didn't deserve it. We can't sleep, and we don't know why. We feel a heaviness we can't name. We numb out, push through, keep moving.

The pause is what lets them come up cleanly. The body knows. It always knows. We just have to give it a second to be heard.

Try This Today

If something has been quietly tugging at you and you can't quite name what, try this:

  1. Pause. Don't stop, don't analyze, don't fix. Just pause.
  2. Put a hand on your chest or your belly.
  3. Ask: Where do I feel this, and what is it?
  4. Listen. Let whatever surfaces have a moment to be felt before you do anything with it.

You don't have to fix it. You don't have to understand it. You don't have to do anything about it yet.

Just let it land.

You might be surprised what's been waiting to be felt.

Rick Reynolds is a transformational soul coach, clinical hypnotherapist, and Reiki Master based in Sedona, Arizona. He works with individuals and couples through TranceBreakers and as a senior practitioner with Sedona Soul Adventures. To explore more tools or to inquire about coaching, visit trancebreakers.com.

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