Being a mother of young children, one of my daily challenges is when my children need my help, I would need to put away whatever is in my hands and assist them. I cannot be self-absorbed. And I need to feel ok when my chain of thoughts are broken - many times a day - and feel fine about it.

I heard about something called "pause bracelet". Every now and then, the bracelet vibrates out of the blue. It can be when we are working, in a conversation, reading fiction… Whatever we are doing, whenever it vibrates, we take a pause, no complains, no cheating, we do our pause practice.

Of course we don’t really need a bracelet. We can simply find our own way to remind ourselves to do this pause practice every day. It can be an alarm clock, it can be whenever we remember.

During the short and profound pause practice, we first take three deep conscious breathes, bring our awareness into the present moment.

We can stop and look out at the sky, get out and put our hands in the dirt, or in the snow. If we have some time, we can even take a short quick walk in the woods.

We try to allow our senses to heighten. We listen, smell, look and listen without thinking. We completely take a pause from what we were doing, just for a few moments, to feel the silence, to feel the timelessness.

Simply be there for a few moments. Notice the silence, listen to the basic "hum".

This is a practice of being comfortable with flows, a practice to notice gaps and space, a practice to connect to our fundamental spaciousness and timelessness of the situation, a practice to get out of our cocoon. The practice is to develop a unshakable friendliness with ourselves, an unconditional friendship for whatever arises in the situation, being fully present with ourselves just the way we are.

Pause, acknowledge, notice, connect and allow. We ground ourselves in the present moment.