Piazza dell’ Anfiteatro — Lucca, Italy

Inner Mediation & the Strength of Pauses

Gui Curi
Gui Curi
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

First-person learnings from experimenting with no interruptions or self-led distractions

After a grueling 2017, it dawned on me the need to carve out some time to recalibrate this year. Initially, I was seeking a mental and geographical break from my life in Los Angeles looking to get the typical package of new perspectives and inspirations — personally and professionally.

Since my work as a Life Designer happens remotely, I had the flexibility to embark on a solo two-month trip across Italy and other European capitals while working, cycling, and occasionally meeting friends here and there. This post was birthed as I sat at a cafe near Piazza dell’ Anfiteatro, in Lucca, Italy, moments after an insightful realization I had earlier that day.

Although traveling with friends or family is certainly pleasurable, it is interesting to see what happens when you travel by yourself — something I’ve done for a couple of decades now. When traveling alone, you get to chose how to spend your days and what to prioritize. There’s no one else to negotiate with on how you are making use of your time but your own self. Not to be mistaken, negotiation still happens, only inwardly.

Internal negotiations can be just as difficult, if not more, than negotiating with another human. They live within the realm of polarities, as a byproduct of our vacillation between our own sense of identity (our individuation, who we think we are) and our identifications (our fixations or projections).

When traveling in three people, there is always a chance that one of them can fill the role of a tiebreaker. When two are traveling, one can find her/himself in a dualistic dynamic advocating in favor of her/his interests. When traveling alone, however, internal conflicts take main stage and suddenly you find yourself having to hold up to three different positions: the yes, the no, and the mediator of the middle.


Back to my trip.

Lago di Garda — Italy

Even when visiting jaw-dropping locations, I occasionally experienced alone times with a felt experience of sadness whose origins I simply could not pin down. It was weird to realize that what presumptively was supposed to be a “perfect” experience of free traveling through Europe, actually proved not to be that at all. Just as in my regular day-to-day life, days varied astonishingly from bad to great, no matter where I was or who I was with.

During these challenging lone times, I noticed that my default reaction was to always (re)visit similar moments in my recent past, as an unintentional way to find the immediate answers to why I was experiencing these unexplainably unpleasant states of mind. Sometimes, I went to the sources of my own perceived weaknesses, in typical self-deprecating fashion, while in others I saw myself remembering recent moments of distress I experienced in the not so distant past. I soon noted that those merely configured a powerful product of my own habituation.

Needless to say, this default reaction would not work. What then would normally follow was a self-imposed distraction to switch my bandwidth and put me in a different mood. Of course, the usual instrument for the task was the cell phone, with its all-encompassing window to the world out there, promising me a getaway from in here. Quickly, I learned that this is just a big a fallacy as my default reaction mentioned one paragraph above.

During a particular time of the trip, I caught myself checking my cell phone way more than my normal, and I could also feel increased anxiety from this repetitive motion that had grown in me. After a few times noticing this pattern, I became very frustrated and that's when I decided it was time to mediate my selves. Putting on the researcher hat was key in this, so I pondered:

What would happen I integrated these moments of unexpectedness sadness, instead of pushing them away?

I chose to experiment with longer periods of pause, with minimal human interactions and without self-led distractions, curious to see what would unfold. From the get-go this taught me that pauses are very much like any habit: in the beginning, it’s really hard to break from the ones you already have, but as you experiment with it you gradually get used to different ways of being, until they are built into your fabric.

In the beginning, I had to either literally leave my phone at home in the morning or at least put it in airplane mode for a few hours in the day. As I gradually became used to facing the discomfort of not having something to look down to, I noticed that I could just deliberately leave my phone in my pocket and look up to what was around me.

It was then when I concretely experienced that when you open yourself to life, life opens itself to you.

Psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel describes the mind as an incredibly fluid and incessant stream of energy and information flow

My mind suddenly had more space to naturally let emerge what it probably had been bottling up for several months, if not years, as a result of continually being "told" what to focus on by my own deliberate actions and distractions, or by the interactions I have while going about my days.

Pauses are the moments in which you are you move away from human-doing to human-being. No interruptions, and no actively pursued distractions. They are stretches of quietness and brain wandering that are not only necessary for the mind's well functioning, but are profoundly revealing and potent in allowing us to integrate what Carl Jung named shadows — the unwanted side of us that we constantly attempt to hide.

When I chose to provoke pauses during my trip, I initially aimed at fully immersing myself into the moments I was living to see what would happen with the sudden sparks of sadness. In reality, it gave me a chance to reframe them and note that actually I was being presented with them by life. It meant paying more attention to my senses, staying attuned to movement and colors around me, and allowing myself to just be in the midst of full-on body-mind flows of stimuli.

Torre delle Ore, Lucca — Italy

Curiously, what I ended setting myself up for with these pauses was the beauty of uncontrollable, the free streams of thought that would come and go, just like the birds flying around one of the bell towers in Lucca. I would be amazed with new memories of my day, of my year, and memories of my life that I thought were forever gone. Additionally, I would notice long and deep gazes at nature, wandering off at the vastness of the ocean, until where the perfectly drawn horizontal line lies; tripping out on the beauty of our planet.

The peacefulness that colors our life when our existence is put into perspective with that of rocks, mountains, our planet and space, always overpowered my own sadness; replacing it with a profound contemplation of the mere fact of my aliveness. More than that, it would have showed me that low times are what make high times. We need to experience the low to fully enjoy the high.

Gui Curi

Written by

Gui Curi

Founder of Sunny Minds Life Design, in service of human development and ego-to-eco social systems transformation. sunnyminds.us/

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