Back on track
[Updated – 3/17/21: Several small revisions for clarity made in recent days.]
Following the last post providing any detail on what I've been doing, I can report that I believe I'm now turning a corner and getting back on track. After about 11 weeks that stubborn cough I'd had seems finally to have disappeared almost entirely. Whether or not it involved a virus that may have been blocking one or more qi channels, and so interfering with turning off pause, I can't say for sure. In any event, I think it may not help in the quest to turn off pause to think it's not going to happen! So it feels good to have that out of the way.
Also back on track, following a key email exchange, is my focus in the protocol. Not that I had entirely lost focus but, having turned off pause a couple of times, I had drifted into a mode, in the dialogue with my “friend,” of frequently trying purposefully to turn it off, using ideas and phrases aimed specifically at turning off pause. For instance, I tried many times verbalizing exactly the same things I was saying in the moments before pause had turned off. I was focused on “pause vs off-pause” rather than on solely nurturing my relationship with my “friend,” and my heart, thereby enhancing my felt sense of safety. In other words I had fallen prey to what meditators refer to as “chasing an experience.” (See item #4 here.) It doesn't work for achieving enlightenment or other breakthroughs in meditation, and it seems it doesn't work for turning off pause. Instead, you need simply to keep up the core exercises which create the conditions (that feeling of safety) under which pause turns off.
So it's back to a purer focus on what brought me so far in the first place. That should lead to the desired results more efficiently than chasing after them. Ultimately, I'm told, it will become easier, if necessary, to turn off pause each time. And eventually my brain will get the message that I want to leave pause turned off. I'll get there soon enough.
I suspect that temptation to “chase an experience” might be pretty common among those who have turned off pause then slipped back into it and are looking to turn it off again. So whenever you get to that point, remember what got you there!