The sacred pause is something I’ve been exploring deeply in the last twelve months. It might sound like a lovely, restful process, but it has in fact been one of the hardest ever aspects to move through.

The sacred pause asks us to shed everything that has been moving us on a certain trajectory.

And in that process, it might feel like procrastination, lack of motivation, stuckness, confusion, lack of clarity. These feelings are more about how we experience it rather than the actual energy. What unfolds beneath those sensations, as real as they are, is far more intentional than it appears. My experience of a sacred pause is going to look and feel different to yours, and yet, at the core of it, we are both moving through the process that is stripping away all the non-essential programming, conditioning, thoughts and beliefs.

The sacred pause is not what our human aspects would consider to be glamourous or exciting.

In fact, our minds find it about the most boring thing possible and so help us to cling on far more than we need to to all those old beliefs and mental structures. There is seemingly endless looping, there is frustration, there is rage, there are all those niggly emotions that prod at self-worth, self-belief, just the self in general. I want to be clear about this because I feel that so much of “spirituality” these days veers either to bypassing or drama. In other words, I’m above the drama or I’m stirring it up. (In fairness, this is not restricted to spiritual circles these days either.) But neither of these viewpoints allow for the wholeness of the human experience. One places the energetic or spiritual above the human experience and just bypasses it, the other wields spirituality as a weapon of drama, of division, of “rightness” and of elevation.

The sacred pause asks you to get messy with your human stuff.

It asks you to really get down there in the muck with it. It asks you to re-connect with the lineage of your human body, and the gifts and blessings of your ancestors as well as the weight of their lived trauma. So many of us are being pushed into this work now because the collective patterns can’t be carried forward in the same way. The sacred pause asks you to not only re-connect with this ancestral experience, but to choose to step in to hold it, to heal it, to celebrate it and to thrive in it. The sacred pause cannot be experienced outside of the human body.

There have been many, many, many deeply painful moments for me in the twelve months since Samhain 2024. Many moments where I have taken it all so personally and said “I am so done with this year” (like 2025 is really sitting there going ah, you feel like you’ve just recovered from that last little surprise do you? Hehehehehe. How about this then? How’d you like me now?). There have been moments where I felt my heart would break, and where I simply had had enough. Enough of trying, enough of worrying, enough, enough, enough...

And yet, the sacred pause is not a dark night of the soul.

There are similarities, mostly through how the body processes them, but the sacred pause has a deeper, calmer stillness than the other. They both feel like walking through fire, but the sacred pause has more moments of quiet, more of peace, more of the knowing that the surrender is happening for expansion, even if it’s hard. There is an awareness, an observing, a noticing that is both curious and slightly detached, quite neutral. Watching the swirling of the emotions and the experience and knowing it’s all more on the surface than it feels. That the releasing of ancestral weight, of lived experienced conditioning, of old habits and patterns is all unfolding quite perfectly, if messily.

The sacred pause is messy. It is uncomfortable. And it is necessary.

I know that so many of you are or have been walking through this space, sitting in this space, crying in this space, laughing in this space, growing in this space, remembering in this space. You chose a human form and a human life, and some of you chose this sacred pause right now. It probably doesn’t feel like perfect timing to your human aspect, and yet… isn’t there a part of you that knows that it is? That knows that every step, every insight, every shedding, every remembering is bringing you into a strength and a power you didn’t know you had?

And so as 2025 comes to a close, I invite you to remember there’s no rush to emerge from this space. In fact, the sacred pause cannot be rushed. It has to be experienced; it has to be lived. So that when you do flow into your next stage, something in you has steadied, cleared, and chosen your next step with deeper power and clarity. Because the sacred pause isn’t a gap in your life, or something to be endured. It is your life. It is an integral part of your soul’s commitment to your expansion. The sacred pause reshapes you in ways the mind can’t track, but your heart and your life will feel it, and will hold the benefit of it in ways you can’t even imagine right now.