#3 The Dangled Pause Option
Sense the hook, choose the color.
Most days, it sneaks up on me.
Not so much the news anymore as everyday reveals something “unprecedented,” and the inbox rarely rattles me. I quit doom‑scrolling, 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.
Yet 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?
Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun and mindfulness teacher, employs the word shenpa as “getting hooked.”¹ The Tibetan word doesn’t translate neatly, but shenpa is that subtle, sticky urge that pulls us toward reactivity. It’s the “charge behind our thoughts, words, and actions—the charge behind ‘don’t like’ and ‘like.’”¹ Not just irritation, but 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 actually so upset.
Chödrön calls it “biting the hook.” 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.” The I-ness slips away and becomes the feeling, the activity, or the relationship. Usually, someone wanders out of the room during this transformation, which is probably for the best.
We so often find ourselves entangled with the contents of our experiences. We become the feeling (upset), the activity (organizing), the relationship (parent), or the story (I’m an upset but good parent because I organize and parent). Philosopher and spiritual teacher Rupert Spira reminds us that when we entangle our awareness with the contents of experience, we lose touch with the presence of awareness itself.² Shenpa serves as our alert system we’re about to entangle.
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 essential nature, or, when seen, 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 it.
The pause creates space where we can resonate with our I-ness or Self. We reverberate and allow the moment its full musical measure. 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 sounds the note. Shenpa inspires the pause; we become the resonant chamber; our Self creates the music.
Like any instrument, we sound rough at first. But each shenpa offers a lesson, and slowly, what once required white-knuckle effort becomes second 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 reach for my paint brush; shenpa catches me tensing up, I 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 ending.
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. I can deliberately influence my brain’s predictive construction. And, to top off the concept cake, Shenpa is a heckuva a lot of fun to say, nearly satisfying that itch for other four-lettered choice words.
Science applauds the pause. As psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research reveals, we literally can’t perceive what we don’t have a concept for.³ Our brains react to the world and actively predict and construct it based on concepts. In the pause, inspired by our notice 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 at hand while seeding it’s 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—a deep breath, 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 playroom floor, let the story drift through me. Sometimes, I even manage a smile or a gentle joke. Sometimes 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.
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 form my view. Each pause pans back the camera. I see the wider room, the small humans learning life’s messes, and the ever-present unchanging sense of “I am.” In the pause I can sense the I-ness that scientist turned spiritualist teacher Peter Russell describes as our true baseline, “the heart of our being.”⁵ We can just be without becoming our contents. Brush the glitter from our feet and move on.
The wisdom behind shenpa never asks for perfection. Hooks will land. Over and over. 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?!” We 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 feels 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, 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 Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2021), 113.