By Deepak
Almost every other day, I take my daughter to the park and push her on the swing. Forward, back. Forward, back. She laughs on the way up, and she laughs on the way down.
But there’s one moment I’ve started to notice. At the very top of each arc, the swing stops. For just an instant, it’s not going forward, and it’s not coming back. It simply hangs there, weightless.
And if you watch her face in that moment, there’s something in it. A kind of breathless wonder. She isn’t thinking about the last push or the next one. She’s just there.
I think about that moment a lot. Because in a way, we’re all on a swing. We move back and forth between wanting and avoiding, between hope and worry, between success and disappointment. One moment we’re replaying the past, the next we’re rushing toward the future. Our days swing from one task to the next, one feeling to the next, one thought to the next. We’re so caught up in the motion that we never notice the stillness at the turn. But it’s there, every single time.
And here’s the thing about the swing: the stillness isn’t separate from the motion. It’s what makes the motion possible. Every swing forward begins from that pause.
The breath works the same way.
Just like the swing, the breath has two turning points. There’s a pause at the top, when the inhale is full and the exhale hasn’t yet begun. And there’s a pause at the bottom, when the exhale is complete and the next inhale hasn’t arrived. Forward, back. In, out. And at each end, a moment of stillness.
The ancient Lord Shiva’s teachings call this pause the center, the very heart of consciousness. And the teaching is simple: don’t chase the inhale. Don’t force the exhale. Just rest your awareness in this gap, where all opposites meet and form dissolves.
This is where Shiva and Shakti meet. Shakti is the movement, the whole dance of life. Shiva is the stillness, the awareness in which the dance happens. The pause is where they touch.
And that awareness isn’t something we have to create or earn. It’s already here, in every breath, thousands of times a day. We just move past it too quickly to notice.
I’ll leave you with one thought. When the mind realizes, “I am not the body,” a gap appears between awareness and everything it observes. Shiva says: remain in that gap. There, neither body nor mind defines you. Only pure witnessing remains.
