Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. — Rollo May, The Courage to Create (1975)
Yesterday we looked at the full catastrophe and what it means to face life instead of flee from it. Today we look at what Rollo May calls the seat of human freedom. That sliver of space between what happens to me and what I do next.
Jon Kabat-Zinn draws a distinction between reacting and responding. Reacting is automatic. Something happens, my buttons get pushed, and before I know it I’ve said something I regret, reached for something I shouldn’t, or spiraled into the same old pattern. The reaction happens faster than thought. By the time I notice, I’m already in it.
Responding is different. It requires a moment of awareness between the trigger and what comes next. That moment is the pause.
Here is how it works. When I feel the first signs of reactivity rising, I notice what is happening in my body. The jaw clenching. The shoulders tensing. The stomach knotting. The heart beginning to pound. These are not problems to fix. They are information—my body telling me something is happening, and I have a choice about what to do next.
In that moment, I say to myself: this is it. Not to make it go away, but to acknowledge it. Here is a stressful situation. Here is fear. Here is anger. Here is the old urge to escape. Naming it doesn’t dissolve it, but it changes my relationship to it. I am no longer lost in the reaction. I am watching it unfold.
Then I turn to the breath. Kabat-Zinn uses the image of the ocean. On the surface, the water is choppy and agitated. But ten or twenty feet down, there is calm. The breath takes me there. Not to escape what is happening on the surface, but to find ground steady enough to respond to it.
The practice is simple. I focus on the sensations of breathing at the belly rather than the chest or nostrils. This is where opera singers and martial artists breathe from—grounding, calming, far from the agitations of the thinking mind. I don’t try to control the breath or change its rhythm. The belly rising on the inhale, falling on the exhale. I’m not thinking about breathing. I’m feeling it.
The breath, Kabat-Zinn writes, is like an old friend. It anchors me, gives me stability. And it is always with me, no matter the circumstances. When I touch base with this part of myself, even for a moment or two, my perspective shifts. I can see things more clearly and act from balance rather than be tossed about by the waves.
This pause does not guarantee I will respond perfectly. I will still react sometimes, still fall into the familiar spiral. But each time I remember to pause, even after the fact, I am building something. I am training the muscle of awareness. In that space between feeling and action, something different becomes possible. I respond, and then it is finished. No new damage.
This is the practice: notice the body, name what is happening, breathe, and choose. Not once, but moment by moment, for the rest of my life.
What does my jaw, my shoulders, my stomach tell me before my mind catches up?
Can I feel my belly rise and fall right now without trying to change it?
Can I practice saying “this is it” the next time I feel reactive, not to fix it but simply to name it?
What might become possible in the pause between trigger and response?
