On the STOP technique, writing & week 41 of 52
all the things we forget as we walk through the fire
Yesterday, for a few moments, I stood with my dogs in a winter wonderland and felt held by the silence, by the snow-coated scene. My thighs began to prickle, and I felt total peace.
It was a single moment in which I could stop all the chatter, all the worry, all the planning, all the striving, and all the news. Reality was as much about what was within as it was what was external, seemingly propelling toward me.
I didn’t need a meditation cushion.
I didn’t need a complicated ritual.
I just needed to stop.
STOP is a mindfulness acronym, a simple reminder you can take with you throughout the day, employ while reading the news, or it is something you can practice when you meditate.
“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
This is especially helpful if you have trouble focusing or indulging times you’d ordinarily slow down. STOP is a simple concept. The acronym stands for Stop, Take a Breath, Observe, and Proceed. If it seems overly simplistic, there’s a short audio that explores it a bit more below.
In the meantime, we can tackle it through expression. I’ve been playing with this, and the exercise is freeing.
Writing prompt: Turn this mindfulness acronym into a prompt. I tried it this week a few times and wanted to share. This works with poetry or micro-fiction/micro CNF. So pick your genre and proceed …
Stop: Write a scene or line in which time stops and there is space, perhaps the space Viktor Frankl speaks of.
Take a breath: Describe a single breath and all comes with it.
Observe: What is noticed in the moment of pause? What sensory details come to life? What thoughts magnify or swell?
Proceed: What happens next, where is one to head from here?
AYTL experiment: Implement the STOP mindfulness practice each day, just once. If you forget one day, try it twice the next day. You can always return here and practice with me. Let your view of the world slow enough to see it all.
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In community,
Currently we have plenty of opportunities to practice our Viktor Frankl.
This is a wonderful piece. And it is a great reminder to us that we really do rush. And do not stop. Do not notice. Do not breathe. I hope it's OK, but it brought to mind a part of my novel (being shopped by my agent) in which beforehand, I tried to imagine stopping. Completely. I tried to imagine dying and then waking up. Which, I guess, is an extreme example of what you are talking about, that is, that when we stop, when we really really stop, that is the time when we come to life, when we see what we hadn't seen, feel what we hadn't felt. That imagining led to this passage about a mysterious character that emerged from a typo (yes, that's true) and I imagined him waking:
"The man’s eyes open, close, open again. He sees only blackness. Feels only the vibration coming from the stone under his body. Hears only the sound of his eyelashes against the air, whoosh whoosh whoosh, a sensation more than a sound, like rubbing a peach against your cheek.
"His lips part, a pop softly as they separate, held together by the crust of being closed for so long.
It will be some time before he will see light, before what he sees shifts from vague shapes to more distinct forms illuminated only by the light filtering through the crack in the northwest corner of the cave’s ceiling.
"It will be some time before he hears sounds beyond that of the high-pitched ringing and low thrumming in his ears, a constant that envelops him. It will be some time before he makes out the sound of a single trail of moisture sliding down the wall, falling off a tiny precipice and landing on a clump of moss below, before he hears the footsteps of ants skittering across the floor of stone with its veins of gray and black and white and rust, before he hears the vibrations of the spider’s web as the spider spins another tendril at the top of the opening in the tunnel in which he lies. ..."