The Pause and the Space in Between: Dispatch from Varanasi
India has a way of rearranging you. I came here for a project bringing embodiment into international education, and decided to visit the one Indian city that has called me for years: Varanasi, the city of life and death.
It’s the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world — a place where dawn begins with conch shells and dusk ends with fires on the ghats. And within hours, I understood why I’d been dragging my feet on giving my German translator the rewrite she requested.
I realised the woman who wrote Embody two years ago was writing from a shallower place than where I stand now. Not wrong. Not unfinished. Simply earlier in the journey.
Her question reached a deeper landscape within me — a place I didn’t yet have access to when I wrote those words. And from that depth, a clearer understanding emerged. One I want to share with you now, because it offers a powerful Body Intelligence tool.
It begins with a pause.
Don’t Get Caught in Your Own Drama
Everyone has challenges to overcome, but at the heart of every struggle lies the same task: freeing ourselves from the grip of the busy mind. The specifics of your story matter less than what they leave inside you.
Did they close you? Did they open you? Did they break patterns keeping you small?
Often what feels like destruction is simply life clearing space for the person you’re becoming.
You do have a path, and you can surrender into it. What you think you want may differ from where life is guiding you — and life has a way of insisting.
If you feel like a victim of your circumstances, the first step is simple:
Pause.
The Pause as Doorway
The pause is not the solution — it is the opening. You stop. You breathe. You become aware.
Your task is not to push forward but to soften inward. This can feel unfamiliar because it asks you to unlearn habits shaped by the mind’s need for control. It also requires something rare today: silence.
When you pause, remove distractions — reading, music, news, scrolling — and simply be with yourself. Stillness allows your nervous system to settle. Only then can you sink below the surface of the mind and into the interior stillness waiting beneath everything.
Your mind will want to pull you back toward the surface where it feels safe. But the unknown beneath the mind — the quiet space you usually avoid — is exactly where you need to go.
This is where Body Intelligence becomes essential. When you pause, the first thing you reconnect with is your body — because it is your home. Your body tells the truth long before your mind does. If you can’t feel your body, you can’t enter the space in between.
The Space In Between
The space in between is something I know well from sixteen years of working with consciousness and the body. It is the silence between musical notes, the pause between words, the stillness between moments of action. Through the lens of Body Intelligence, it is the moment when the nervous system shifts from reactivity into awareness — a doorway into the deeper layers of yourself.
Viktor Frankl understood this territory intimately. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he lived the truth of the “space between stimulus and response.” Thrown into a concentration camp, he observed the human psyche instead of collapsing into despair. He found relief in the smallest moments: a sunset, or an hour of rest in the infirmary. When a student interpreted a prisoner’s expression as despair, Frankl said, “On the contrary. He wasn’t working. Do you know how relieved that made us feel?”
My teacher Lorraine lived this truth as well. People looked at her with pity as she crossed a street slowly, weakened by illness, yet she would smile and say: “What they don’t realize is that it’s their pain they’re sensing, not mine. I’m one of the happiest beings on the planet.”
Once you find this doorway within, you can sense instantly when someone else has found theirs. It is the same doorway in all of us.
A Doorway Back to Yourself
The space in between is where you meet yourself — not the version shaped by fear, but the version shaped by truth. Your mind will tell frightening stories, but their outcomes rarely matter. I could have gone inward and still died of cancer. I might never have met the love of my life. Many things could have unfolded differently — and many still might.
But the peace that comes from choosing presence has shaped everything that followed. Because of this — and because of what Lorraine taught me — I encourage you to explore your own space in between, not as an escape but as a return.
And here is the truth: there is no shortcut. No quick “digital pause practice.” You cannot rush your way into depth. This is work for a quiet afternoon, a full day, a weekend. It cannot be squeezed between emails and lunch.
After my final week of teaching here in India, I’ll be going offline for my own retreat: no screens, no noise, just presence, breath, body, and the space in between.
Whatever is unfolding in your life, there is hope. Life is not happening to you; it is happening for you. You can pause. You can return to your body. And you can step through the doorway into the inner world that has been waiting for you all along.