The next time you see a three-year-old child, spend some time with her or him, preferably a couple of hours, but if you only have five minutes, start with that. You may be in for a surprise! As you sensitively observe this child, let yourself come to a deeper awareness of the miracle presented in the physical-emotional body. Here is a time in one's life where the entire world is a stimulus to which the whole body responds effortlessly, as long as it is not interfered with. The child is simultaneously in harmonious relationship with the self and the environment she lives in. She cooperates easily with the organization of her design. The three-year-old feels her body supporting her as she continuously opens to the world around her, satisfying her endless curiosity by learning through experimentation.

As you continue to observe this child, let her become your teacher and role model. How would your body respond if in this very moment you could feel fully supported by the world? If all the happenings in your life could be perceived as a series of experiments in how to stay light, easy and simply curious, how would you use your body as a tool to embrace the world rather than brace against it?

Dip into your body's memory bank and remember first that you are wired for wholeness. Remember that you don't have to make anything happen, but rather you can let it happen. Release doing. How? Begin by witnessing your response as your own curiosity pulls you in a certain direction and notice which muscles, or muscle groups, want to start the action. And here comes the most important moment: instead of following your first response, do nothing. Rather, let go of this first moment of habitual response. Release the learned effort and start over. For example, notice something you want to reach for, or walk to, but instead of doing it you practice non-doing, you pause instead and slow down the moment into "being with." I call this the "great pause." Practice this pausing several times, and observe your emotional responses. Are you relieved that "you don't have to" or are you getting antsy that "nothing gets done"? You may find that you have an automatic response in which your muscles jump into action. This first response reflects all of your previously learned efforts at making something happen in relationship to the demanding, coaxing, seducing, convincing voices of your past. We internalize these voices in order to please, to become lovable and acceptable to the people in our life. They eventually become our own voices and even the standard, the role models by which we conduct our lives. We try harder to achieve and to measure up. We get trapped into believing that to reach the goal is the most important thing: that the getting there is more important than the quality of the journey.

Our body continues to try to support us but it loses its natural ability to stay easeful and authentic. Instead it tries to follow the dictates of our belief that more is better. It tries harder, more muscles get activated, and instead of being in harmony with our natural design we constrict and distort it. We over-work some muscles and under-work others. We begin to favor our outer "action muscles" over our inner "being muscles." Instead of allowing the deeper muscle groups designed to support us in "just being" to sustain us, we begin to over-work our surface "fight-or-flight" muscle groups, and thus set the stage for chronic muscular tension and body armoring. This starts to pull at our bones from many directions and takes our skeletal system out of alignment. Now we have additional voices to contend with: "Sit straight, pull your shoulders back, flatten your belly!" And to get our body "back in shape" we exercise, often further pounding in habitual patterns of tension.

Thank goodness we have choices! Let's have a look at some other options. First, we need to release the fear that the "great pause" is making us inefficient, that we won't know how to do anything anymore since we are leaving behind the habits of how we have done things most of our lives. We need to let go of the impulse to panic, and learn not to fear getting lost in the space of the pause. Instead we can observe our automatic response and then we have a window to make a different choice in opposition to our habit. In this moment, we let go of the habitual gripping that comes with not being certain of our core support and feeling that we must constantly effort in order to be safe. Rather we remember in our "core knowing" the internal support which the three-year-old child was still conscious of before the Self was pushed and pulled into a belief that support comes from others (self-consciousness is a short step from there).

Our kinesthetic and tactile senses can tell us how to feel and experience support. Notice when your muscles brace and lock, and then form the intention to let go of some of this pressure. Observe how that intention can ripple throughout your entire body. Then try this experiment: touch a cement wall or a wooden table thinking of it as a dead and inanimate object and notice your body's response. Was there a certain amount of bracing and contracting? Did the 'deadness' or lack of vibrancy of the object extend to how you experienced your own body? Now try touching the same object as if it were a bundle of energy, a configuration of vibrating particles masquerading as an "inanimate" object. Does this affect how you experience your own body? Can you feel a new sense of lightness? Can you can sense your jaw freeing away from the skull, the throat softening underneath your chin, the shoulder blades easing away from each other, the wrist moving away from elbows and hands, and fingers releasing out and away? Now your head can move up and off the spine so that the spine can lengthen, which engages the deeper muscles along the spine to give you your internal support. Now your center of gravity is re-establishing itself. Your weight changes over your feet; the compression is taken off your bones and muscles, and you create a different balance. You become lively.

As the quality of contact with yourself has shifted, has your view of the world changed? After a few attempts at this, you too may fall in love with creative experimentation using your body as a tool to remind you of your natural internal support. Instead of being fixed on a certain outcome, you enter a field of unified intelligence and pause there again and again. Feel yourself invited to expand your life by including more of yourself, living with less effort, more ease and more curiosity. Allow yourself to pause, release self-consciousness and remember how to be conscious of the Self.

I wonder what would happen if…