The 15 second rule: A pause is powerful
A long time ago, a CEO called me and said, “Gurudev, you saved my job. Once, I had written a nasty letter to my boss, and I was going to send it off. Then I remembered what you said: ‘Give yourself a 15-second pause before you are about to do anything important.’ I took a 15-second pause. And when I read through the letter again, I couldn’t send it! I had written such a nasty letter that, if I had sent it out, I would have lost my job.”
If you look back at your own life, you will notice that all mistakes happen at the spur of the moment due to a lack of awareness. When you are in a great rush and under a lot of stress, you are bound to make mistakes. Also, when you are in the midst of a storm of emotions, you are more likely to make mistakes. See, for example, when you are upset, what do you want to do? You just want to pick up the phone and yell at somebody! You want to get it off your chest. Before you do that, just give yourself 15 seconds. Freeze for those 15 seconds. What happens when you do that? Your emotions get time to settle; you regain your awareness and alertness. And your whole attitude changes. Everything changes around you. When you hold your breath, the mind stops too.
Let’s do an exercise. Are you breathing? Continue to breathe. Now stop the breath for a few seconds. Breathe again. Stop. Hold your breath. Continue breathing. Did you observe what was happening within? Stillness dawns in you. Stillness is the precursor to infinity. In this moment of stillness, awareness blossoms inside you.
Taking that little time, that 15-second gap, can make a big difference. You can do this several times during the course of the day. As children, we used to play a game called ‘Statue’, where we would be running and someone would say ‘Statue’, and we had to stand still wherever we were. This game is a brilliant activity to help bring the mind to the present moment. Just a few seconds of pausing transports the mind from a state of impulsiveness to greater centredness.
How important are these momentary pauses? Everything emerges from silencing the mind. The purpose of speech is to create silence within you. If it doesn’t, then the speech hasn’t fulfilled its purpose. Whenever you say ‘Yes!’ or whenever you have a sense of wonder, your mind pauses. In such a state, you want to know about that object or person more closely. When you know something, it leaves you with a deeper sense of wonder. And wonder is the doorway to a mental pause. When you are amazed at the whole of creation, with all that you see, smell, or taste, each of these experiences that we derive from our senses leads us to a space of absolute tranquillity. And that is what meditation is.
When you start meditating regularly for a few minutes, when you are calm and collected, you become spontaneous and intuitive, which is quite different from being impulsive, which happens when you are emotional and restless. Once you calm your emotions, the decisions you take are spontaneous, intuitive, and correct.
No matter how busy you are, take a few moments and observe your breath. Using simple meditation techniques, calm down your mind. Bring it to this moment, relax each part of your body, relax your mind, your senses. You’ll find such peace, so much love gushing from within. We are all born with this gift of love and peace. And somehow, we forget to look within. That is most important. Take a few moments to see what is happening inside.
Very ambitious people cannot have deep sleep because the mind isn’t free. The more anxious you are about doing or achieving something, the tougher it becomes to sleep. Before going to sleep, if you pause, surrender your worries and ambitions to some Higher Power, and simply let go of everything, only then are you able to rest, isn’t it? Why not apply the same thing to life as you live from one moment to another? When you want to sit for meditation, let go of everything.
The human mind is very complex; it has both delicate and tough aspects. If you have had a misunderstanding with a friend or colleague at work, you can become stiff inside, and this can distort your emotions, leading to negativity, which you carry wherever you go. In your day-to-day activities, the mind gathers many such impressions, anxieties, and tensions. They do not allow you to be happy; they block your intuition and your joy. These impressions strain and burden the mind, and eventually they can lead to many psychosomatic issues. But when you pause the mind with meditation, its tendency to hold on to negative emotions simply disappears. You gain the ability to live happily in the present moment and let go of the past. Pausing the mind for a few minutes every day is how you move it from a state of chaos to a state of bliss and clarity, and from restlessness to deep restfulness. And it is only from this state of deep rest that something creative can emerge. Deep silence is the mother of creativity. No creativity can come from one who is too busy, worried, over-ambitious, or lethargic.
The mind vacillates between the past and the future. It is either occupied with what has happened or busy thinking, planning, or feeling uncertain and anxious about what is to come. Wisdom is being aware of this phenomenon of the mind, of what is happening right now in your mind as you are reading this column. Information can be acquired by reading books or browsing the internet. You can open a book on any subject — how to lose weight, how to prepare for an interview, success 101, and so on. There are innumerable volumes on countless topics, but awareness of your own mind cannot be learnt from a book. That can come only from meditation.
Total rest is meditation. Only when the mind settles down can total rest happen. Restlessness, agitation, desire, and ambition stir up the mind and keep it busy planning for the future or feeling regretful and angry about the past. A mind in the present moment is meditation. A mind without agitation is meditation.
Why have practices like meditation and silence been given so much importance in our spiritual traditions? Greater awareness alone can root out misery from our lives and break the patterns we live with. Nothing helps achieve this more than stepping into brief periods of meditative silence. This is not something alien to us; it is built into our nature. The human body is made that way. You’ll notice that when you are faced with something too much for the mind to take, the mind goes into silence. What happens when you are surprised or shocked? The mind drifts into silence. Something stunning takes you into silence. Words disappear. At the helm of every emotion, at the peak of every event, there is silence. And by recognising it, practising it, and manifesting it in your life, you cross the ocean of ‘samsara’, the sea of misery.
