Discussion of Step 3:

Moment by moment, I take a mindful pause to deal with my life calmly and effectively.

When you hear a phrase like “find yourself,” it probably feels intimidating. It probably feels like a huge thing, some major shift, some revelation. Something that it would take a lot of work to arrive at. So you might have the intention of finding yourself, and you say: “Yeah, so it’s vital. And therefore, I will do that when I have a substantial chunk of time. When all the stars are aligned. When it feels right. When I’m okay. When something is supporting me in doing that…” And as a result, you don’t do it.

So the wording of this Step is not just “to find myself,” it is “to find myself moment by moment.” We’re not talking about something that’s going to be a significant revelation with a big drum roll. Something enormous. We’re merely talking about being in touch with yourself moment by moment. Now again, that might feel a little mysterious, but let’s take it in a very down-to-earth way.

A mindful pause

What this Step talks about is taking a mindful pause. You do this it in the middle of your day, in the middle of what you’re doing. It could be a minute, it could be two, but it could be even less than a minute. And during that moment, you stop.

Now it’s called a mindful pause as opposed to “just stop.” When you stop, what you had been doing is interrupted. Your focus is on: “Okay, so can I go now? Can I continue?” During that moment, you’re closed off to anything other than impatiently waiting for the possibility of continuing.

What’s different in a mindful pause, compared to that kind of stop, is that, during the mindful pause, you shift your attention somewhere else. A simple way of doing that is to pay attention to consciously breathing.

So you breathe in. You breathe out. Your attention follows the breath. The in-breath. The out-breath. You’re not in the middle of doing a yoga movement, or some mysterious meditation practice. You’re merely slowing down and paying attention to the quality of your breath. You’re noticing the “in” movement and the “out” movement. As you shift focus to your breath, you are no longer lost in your thoughts or lost in what you’re doing.

Mindful vs Mindless

Being mindful is the opposite of being mindless. So we’re merely shifting from mindless to mindful as we take a pause and pay attention to our breath. And so you could do this for a minute, or more, or just for a brief moment. You could even do one breath in, one breath out, and nobody will notice that you’re taking a pause. You can do that while talking to people.

What this gives you is a chance to do is to reconnect with yourself. So, again, this is not like a big thing about finding yourself in some mystical way or some surprising psychological discovery about yourself. It’s a sense you have, as you breathe in and out, that sense of: “Oh, there’s something here. There’s somebody here. What I’m noticing is me breathing. Me paying attention to what it is that I notice at this moment.”

It is possible that, when you first experiment with this, and for quite a long time, you’re either going to have a sense of: “I don’t notice anything” or you might be noticing a sense of tension, a sense of: “I can’t wait to get it over with.” And that does not mean that you’re doing this badly. There is no way to do this badly. Whatever happens, and whatever you’re noticing, is what is.

Of course, in the long run, as you do this, you will progressively find a way actually to feel calmer and more open as you do it. But you’re not going to get there by forcing y...