What is the sense I get when I hold this option in my mind?
The feeling that you don’t have time to consider a decision is almost never true. Much of our contemporary commercial life style is designed to convince you that there is not time for consideration. What is true is your mind and body need time to deliver a considered decision. Before deciding, stop, pause and wait for at least a few minutes. You almost certainly have that much time. You live in a world in which it has become a skilled profession for other people to suggest they know what your sense of good is and what it should be. Your first sense of non conscious bias may be right or it may be wrong, but for now it is yours. Grow your Sense-of- Good with integrity and be the whole, human being who decides and assumes responsibility and ownership for the shape the life they lead.
You need to connect your actions or potential actions to your Sense of Good. You must have language for good that grows and matures with you and your community. This is the work of Pause I.
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How do I connect with my Sense of Good
You are asked to remember the good people who raised, guided, supported, and or mentored you. Good is not a idea but rather a state of being inside you. You call it up through memory and proceed through the Pauses from there. Here are some things good is not.
. . . not a moral code but rather it is what informs and reforms the whole of you through the ongoing feedback of decision and responsibility
. . . not enthusiasm, but rather the curator of that enthusiasm. Not all enthusiasm is good.
. . . not intellectual integrity. Your intellect builds the components of integrity but cannot alone place the relationship of those components.
. . . not happiness or bliss, but rather a peace that comes out of deeply honest personal response of complete diligence. As they say, pain happens but suffering is optional. Peace is an alternative to suffering.
. . not aspiration to perfection, but rather accepting the humility of being a fully invested imperfect human being, You are not perfect or innocent, but acceptance of imperfection allows you to be what you cannot otherwise be; human
. . . not a strategy for doing good, but rather the foundation of your conscience and how that conscience applies to your sense of life and your religious beliefs.
Good is not so much a gut feeling as a whole body feeling pointing at what might be the best option. Pause I is rarely decisive on its own. Your understanding of Good for any decision matures out through the four Pauses. The gut feeling is frequently wrong because the gut works from memory feeding your decisions and therefore more on history rather than the demands and requirements of tomorrows issues. A good decision is decided out of the present information in body and mind.
The Pause: A physically required, necessary, inconvenience for making good decisions.
Thinking is more work than believing . . . but Pausing to feel is probably harder than both thinking or believing. The mind’s job is to find coherence in community for the good the body feels. The mind and it’s billions of neurons and networks need a little time to storm the brains regions in search of meaningful integrity and coherence; thus the Pause
Click on “Your Sense of Good”: Instructions and Worksheet
The Good Decision 