Episode 230 - The Power of Pause
“Somewhere just at the edge of the apparent end of a matter is a door to a place where we might put a breath into the sentences of our lives – a place where we are stripped of all questions where more than we can imagine takes place.” - Rob Wykes in Pause - A Spiritual Power, Discovering the Entrance to Our Spirituality
Opportunities to enter a spiritual place are all around us but we often don't recognize them, opting instead to move on to the next thing. In his book, Pause - A Spiritual Power, author Rob Wykes helps people to identify those moments and enter places of ‘spiritual pause’ which exist ‘just at the fingertips of our mortal grasp.’ A former builder turned Chaplain and then charity Chief Executive, Rob trekked through Europe, India, Iran, and Pakistan as a young man, where he awakened to the deep and profound experiences that cross cultures. While he is a practicing Chrisian, the power of pause is not confined or defined by any one faith tradition. In this episode Rob defines pause as a spiritual power, talks about the importance of attending to the spiritual life, and shares his own pause experiences. Some of the things we talk about are:
• There is much more to us than meets the eye
• What is spirituality?
• Categories don’t apply to our spiritual nature, so words can’t describe
• God inhabits the spirit not the mental or emotional
• Pause is when we get to the edge of the material
• Why pause is a spiritual power
• The spirit within us is fixed and needs no improvement
• The soul, like the body needs feeding too
• How prayer can be an internal conversation in our head
• What ‘ask and it will be given’ really means
• At the end of our mortal grasp is the spiritual realm; at the end of our prayers, we discover God
• Unity and individual experiences
• The importance of being expectant, waiting and listening
Links:
https://www.facebook.com/rob.wykes.1
© the spiritual forum 2023
Rob Wykes
Quotes from the book:
Pause: “A space between our normal rational approach to life and the spiritual world at the very edge of all we can imagine, a world just at the fingertips of our mortal grasp.”
“Yet many of us are wired to press on. In doing so we miss the promise of a memorable moment….This is how some of us do life. We barely break our stride even when standing before us there is a wonderful invitation to stop ana allow our spirit to draw life in in our thirst for the next summit in life we can, at times, pass over the encounter with the spiritual.”
“There is a vast difference between saying prayers and praying.”
“Sometimes human beings – individuals or communities – are confronted with something which they must either reject outright or which, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.” – Tom Wright in Surprised by Hope
“I believe that the more we become acquainted with and engage around the spirit within us the less we are taken up with what divides us.”
“Somewhere just at the edge of the apparent end of a matter is a door to a place where we might put a breath into the sentences of our lives – a place where we are stripped of all questions where more than we can imagine takes place.”
Regarding prison “At times I observed that violence was a warped way of having much needed physical contact with other humans.”
“It is an important point to distinguish between a oneness which says we are all really the same thing and a oneness in which individuals are experiencing a unity of experience.”