#3: The Dangled Pause
Sense the hook, choose the color.
Most days, it sneaks up on me.
Not so much the news anymore, as every day broadcasts something “unprecedented,” and the inbox rarely rattles me. I quit doom‑scrolling years ago, broke up with social media over a decade ago, and try to treat slow traffic as free‑range thinking time. My children, meanwhile, continue to expand their appreciation for the range and “flexibility” of certain choice words, thanks to my ongoing field‑testing of patience.
And the hooks still drop.
Even around the arts and crafts area where a child's well-meant "organization" detonates the logic of crayon, glue sticks, and rainbow loom bands. Or when half the toothpaste tube takes up residence on the back side of the hand towel I just assumed was for drying hands. The familiar spark arrives and tightens my temples, furrows my brow, and triggers my urge to leap in, correct, and fix. A tidy sermon on minimalism leaps forward as an investigation into the mysterious case of the scattered paper scraps kicks off. Other times, the hook initiates versions of unsolicited wisdom on the lost art of not using the hand towel to mop up oversqueezed toothpaste. Whoever's around gets the free-flowing "wisdom" transfer.
Why do I still do this when I’d rather not be that version of myself? What’s my attachment to these responses?
There's a word for the hook. Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, reaches for the Tibetan shenpa, “getting hooked.” It doesn’t translate neatly, but shenpa (say it shen-pah) is that subtle, sometimes hot, sticky urge that pulls us toward reactivity. It’s the primer behind our thoughts, words, and actions, that “charge behind ‘don’t like’ and ‘like,’” that sticky pull when we want things to go our way.¹ More than irritation, it's the hook that snags attention, spins a story, and, before I know it, has me halfway into an unnecessary lecture or muttered choice words. Sometimes, I check my heart rate just to see if my body is as hooked as my mind. Sometimes, I just sort of lose the thread mid-lecture because I forget why I'm so upset.
Chödrön calls it biting the hook, and I know the bloody taste all too well. The rush to tidy, correct, or control. The moment I’m hooked, my world narrows. Possibilities collapse. Senses falter. I become entangled in the contents of my reaction: a dad, a partner, a person making a case for order, while the moment itself slips away. “I am“ quietly yields to “I am upset,” or “I am cleaning,” or “I am a parent.” I become the feeling, the activity, or the relationship. Usually, someone wanders out of the room during this transformation, which is probably for the best.
When we blow past shenpa without pause, we drift a bit further from ourselves.
The tangle runs deeper than one feeling or task. We build a whole story around it: I’m an upset but good parent, because I organize and I parent. The story swallows the awareness that held it. Rupert Spira, a potter turned teacher of awareness, keeps pointing at exactly this: tangle our awareness with the contents of experience, and we lose the presence of awareness itself.² Shenpa is our alert system that sounds before we vanish into the story.
When we blow past shenpa without pause, we drift a bit further from ourselves. The gap closes and fills with reactions not always of our choosing. The accumulation of these small, unnoticed acts can pull us apart from our true nature, or, when noticed, bring us back. We can disentangle from our contents. Shenpa offers momentary reminders that “I am,” rather than “I am [insert thing],” if we use that hot, sticky pull as a beacon of aliveness.
The pause allows space where we resonate with the full musical measure of our I-ness, the very knowing of our existence. Without this pause, noise and cacophony, our habitual reaction fill the space. As French composer Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the notes.” The very hook that threatens to snag us also signals the next note. Shenpa inspires that space between. We become the resonant chamber that offers our I-ness to sing its music.
Like any instrument, we sound rough at first. But each noticed shenpa offers a lesson, and slowly, ever so slowly, what once required white-knuckle effort becomes second-ish nature. The room within us settles.
Sometimes, on smoother days, or maybe just more attentive days, the practice shows. The hook dangles, and for a breath, I notice it. That’s the gap Chödrön describes in Practicing Peace. The sliver of space between sensation and story, trigger and response.
Shenpa inspires the space where choice awaits and music wakes.
Sometimes, I even remember I can use those scattered, displaced kids’ paint brushes. Shenpa catches me tensing up, so I feel its rush and hold steady, and I choose a color. Most times, I reach for a dishtowel instead, or just start peeling dried glitter glue off my sock, but even that is a stroke in the picture. The space created when I recognize but don’t bite the hook gives me the chance to shape the mood, the tone, refine the melody, and maybe even the transition.
That’s the power of the pause. Naming its genesis allows potential its creative space. Shenpa gives me language for that elusive gap between thing and response. Once I name it, I can see it, then, maybe, I can tame it. With a concept in mind, I construct my perception, paint my interpretation, and describe the world I inhabit beyond mere reaction. And, to top off the concept cake, shenpa is a heckuva lot of fun to say, nearly satisfying that itch for other four-lettered choice words.
Science applauds the pause. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett found we can’t perceive what we don’t have a concept for.³ Our brains don’t only react to the world, they actively predict and construct it from the concepts we already carry. In the pause, inspired by our sense of shenpa, we give ourselves the chance to sift through entanglement, choose a new description, a new color for the moment at hand. We can modify our brain’s predictive power for the situation while seeding its interpretive pattern for meaning-making.
Choosing colors expands the view.
It’s rarely dramatic. Sometimes I pause because I fumble the marker cups or knock over a glue bottle and have to clean up some sparkly goo before saying anything. Sometimes I pause on purpose, supported by a deep breath or a slow count to three, a moment to remember that neither my kids nor I are on trial for craft supply chaos or marker mishaps. Occasionally, I just stare at the mess and hope it will sort itself out if I blink long enough.
In that pause, potential opens. I feel the contraction, the script about to start, the pull to react. If I stay there, just a beat longer, the urge softens. I don’t have to bite. I can breathe, notice my feet on the cool, sticky playroom floor, let the story drift through me. Sometimes, I even manage a smile and embrace the ridiculousness of my upsettedness: they’re freaking kids, man. Humor gives me the absurd perspective that often slips below the mess when I’m moving too fast and snagging dangling hooks. Other times, I say nothing at all and just listen to the clink of markers settling in the cup, trying to remember who taught me that messes are never permanent.
So, I keep trying. And lately, when I recognize my shenpa, I ask myself, “What’s this in service to?”⁴ It doesn’t always change the moment, but it tilts me toward curiosity. It colors the palette of my pause. It allows me to employ my shenpa in a way that better serves me. Sometimes the response is connection, sometimes it’s relief, sometimes it’s just the hope of fewer sticky hand towels next time. From this pause point, this space of momentary uncertainty yields freedom to choose my color, expand my options, and take in my view.
Each pause pans back the camera, and I see the wider room: the small humans elbow-deep in glue and glitter and loom bands, none of them troubled by whether it lands in the right cup, or any cup at all for that matter. Spira threw clay for twenty years to circle back to this. My kids haven't left the wheel. A spill becomes a lake. The bald patch on the page is where the dog will go. They don't fight the limits of the thing in front of them, they befriend it, and it turns into something else entirely because a kid absorbed in making has no self-story to defend. No “am I good at this,” no right cup. There never was one. Just doing. And redoing. Imagination on the loose.
That imaginative ease runs on the ever-present, unchanging I am, the same I-ness in them, in me, and in you, the true bassline Peter Russell calls “the heart of our being.”⁵ We can just be without becoming our contents. Brush the glitter from our feet, or twirl once and go.
The wisdom behind shenpa never asks for perfection. Hooks will land. Over and over. (Just ask my kids.) But perhaps the barbs sink in a bit less over time. It’s really more about seeing the urge to attach and choosing another path. We’re not perfect monks, yet I suspect we’re all humans who’d rather preserve connection than win the “organize the bin” battles, the petty and serviceless scenarios that populate our day.
And that’s the practice: not making enemies of our triggers, but greeting them with curiosity and care, even when our curiosity is mostly, “What’n the hell?! How would glitter glisten from there?!” It can lead to: “Why am I upset about it? Do I even need to fix it?”
This is where lifelook comes alive. Choice colors the view: I can’t always control what arrives, but I can choose how to attend, how to respond, and what meaning pulls to the surface as I move through each encounter with life.
So I pause. I notice the hook, nod to its persistence, and let it dangle while I step back into the wider field of experience. Some days, the best I do is ask what my response might serve.
The markers may not end up in the right cup. But the playroom sure feels a bit lighter.
NOTES:
¹ Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace (Boulder: Shambhala, 2006), see also: “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked,” Lion’s Roar, https://www.lionsroar.com/how-we-get-hooked-shenpa-and-how-we-get-unhooked/.
² Rupert Spira worked for years as a studio potter before he turned to teaching. He now points people back to awareness itself, the open space in which experience comes and goes. His steady claim: awareness is the one thing we never truly lose, only overlook. Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware(Oxford: Sahaja Publications; copublished by New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2017), 45–57.
³ Research by psychologists like Lisa Feldman Barrett show our brains don’t just react to the world, they actively predict and construct it. Concepts allow us to interpret what would otherwise be meaningless patterns. Shenpa is our concept for that gap between sensing and response. You can’t perceive what you don’t have a concept for. Once you see it — like the blurry bee in Barrett’s experiment — you can never unsee it. In the pause, we give ourselves the chance to move through entanglement and choose a new description, a new color for the moment at hand. See: Lisa Feldman Barrett, interview by Niall McKeever, “How the Brain Creates Emotions,” The Weekend University, April 24, 2025 for source notes integrated above. For more of Dr. Barrett’s work, go to: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/academic-papers/
⁴ James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2018).
⁵ I use I-ness the way Peter Russell does. The personal me changes with age, role, and mood. Beneath it sits the bare fact of being aware, the silent knowing in which every thought and feeling appears. Russell adds a startling turn: strip away every personal trait, and the I-ness left in you is the same as the I-ness in anyone. Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2021), 113.