You might have noticed that as we go about our days, we often lose our connection with our inside. This is where the trouble starts. Yes, we can decide to be mindful with our parrots, but many things happen during the day, don't they?
These things can be your trigger points. When someone insults you. When work gets rejected. When you over-react. When things are unfair. When something frightens you. It is at these points that we tend to lose control. We say and do things that we regret later. And that feeling of regret operates at a low vibration, pulling us down as a whole. So what can you do?
Here's where you can bring a highly energizing acronym into your life. P-A-C-E PACE…
PACE is short for Pause, Accept, Check, and Exit. When we face some situation – like the low vibrations of guilt or anger, what we do in PACE Awareness is, we Pause. It is important not to say anything.
You know, you might find your parrot is asleep or has flown away at that very moment, so there's nobody to ask you any question anyway… just Pause. After pausing, Accept. Let's take my case. I accept that I goofed up, or someone else did, or everything is wrong, or whatever the situation is… from the other person's perspective. My perspective is not important at that moment.
Next, I Check. I check for where the other person's vibration is. Are they fearful, angry, ashamed, guilty, proud, or what is it that they are rubbing off on me? And finally, E means I Exit. I don't hold the baggage of the situation or their vibration. Because the moment I do, I get sucked into the whirlpool too.
This, my friends, is 30-seconds of relationship advice that you'd get from a whole library of relationship books. So says Guru Pranachandra, the one who also says that our planet is a mere 30 habits away from renewal… at renewalism.com. Check out the site.
Coming back to PACE, Pause, Accept, Check, and Exit is also a method of cultivating mindfulness.
Because we are mindful, we remember that we are neither the person nor the situation that we are embroiled with. We are we… and they are they. And we are going to accentuate that difference using the Pause. We are also going to Accept that this is not the time we can change them. And before we Exit, we will record what drove them there, so we can – at the appropriate time – operate from a higher vibration and bring them up effortlessly. Doing so gives us control, and in reality, all the habits we form, we form because we desire control.
You must inculcate the habit of Pausing as soon as you're confronted by a situation. Once you can Pause, more than half the battle is won. Why? Because by doing so, you can be an observer, distanced from both, the thoughts in your mind, and those in the other person's.
This distance allows you to be curious. And curiosity absorbs the mind. Now the monkey mind gets on a trail. It is not jumping up and down anymore. It can accept… like a detective accepts evidence. And it can Check… so it files the evidence correctly. Exiting, I admit, can be a little tricky… because the mind craves to give back in the same coin.
But remember this… you have 60,000 thoughts every day. You do not act on all of them. Can't you shelve this as another of the thoughts you don't act upon? Exit!
Now you might challenge me, how can we Exit… we have to say something. For example, if we have been accused of something, we have to make our stand clear, right?
Well, right… for your ego. Not right… for your relationship. For that, your ego will have to
be trained to shut up. And this must be done at the Pause stage itself. Because the ego will not want you to pause just when an argument is beginning to get juicy. You have to tell the ego, buddy… it's only a pause… we will get back on this stronger. Once co-opted, at the Exit stage, you merely remind the ego. The deal was sealed at Pause.
From the energy point of view, it is our egos that cost us our happiness. The trick the ego plays is that it infuses doubt. Doubt like, am I not right? Or some such idea. Doubt is nothing but fear wearing trendy clothes. The vibration of fear is low. And it brings us down.
PACE is a mindful way to choose the higher vibration of joy and renew relationships at a different level. Provided we do Exit, for if we don't, the ego replies, and we may have an undesirable outcome. But to Exit, we could effectively use a line like, 'I will not respond now because I value our relationship over our egos,' and let it pass. This is a Renewal Control Mechanism, if you'd like a label for it.
Remember, your ego, and you are not fighting with each other. You are, in fact, your ego. All you are doing is training it. Training means you get your ego to buy into your habit switch… whether it is 3-conscious-breaths every 2 hours, or noting your vibes after every meal, or consulting your parrot, or pausing. Once that switch is accepted by ego, anytime it speaks up again, you merely show it the acceptance contract.
In the next lesson, we will learn three more techniques, to make these habit switches easy peasy. Hop on board, and here we go.
