Speaker 1: The observer is awake. You built that through the weeks
Speaker 1: of noticing, through the moments you caught the thought before
Speaker 1: it named you, through the pause you found in places
Speaker 1: where there used to be no pause at all. The
Speaker 1: observer is awake, and today something new begins. Breathe feel
Speaker 1: the particular quality of this breath. Not the first breath
Speaker 1: of someone beginning, but the breath of someone who has
Speaker 1: already been changed by the work of paying attention. There
Speaker 1: is a pattern somewhere in your life. You already know,
Speaker 1: the one, not the most dramatic, not the most shame fall,
Speaker 1: the one the observer has already noticed, the one that
Speaker 1: arrives on queue, the one that runs before you have
Speaker 1: quite decided to let it. Let it be present now,
Speaker 1: not as a.
Speaker 2: Problem, not as evidence of anything about your character, simply
Speaker 2: as a pattern, a pathway worn smooth by repetition, a
Speaker 2: route the nervous system knows by heart. Feel how familiar
Speaker 2: it is, how ordinary, how automatic. Now find the moment
Speaker 2: just before the Q, the trigger, the particular feeling or
Speaker 2: time or situation that has always preceded the dramatic.
Speaker 3: Sit at that threshold. Not to fight it, not to
Speaker 3: judge what comes after simply to notice there is a
Speaker 3: moment here, a breath width of space, a gap so
Speaker 3: small it was invisible before the observer was built. It
Speaker 3: is visible now.
Speaker 2: In that gap. The chooser lives, not a warrior, not
Speaker 2: a disciplinarian, not a voice that shouts or strains or
Speaker 2: white knuckles through the wanting something quieter, a presence that
Speaker 2: simply asks, is this what I'm choosing? That question is enough,
Speaker 2: not because it always changes what happens next, but because
Speaker 2: it inserts you, the conscious, choosing, awake version of you,
Speaker 2: into a process that was running without you. You are
Speaker 2: in the room now. The automatic may still run, and
Speaker 2: if it does, you will notice that too. And that
Speaker 2: noticing is not failure. That noticing is the chooser learning
Speaker 2: the territory breathe. Think of one moment in a recent
Speaker 2: day where the automatic ran before you noticed. Hold it gently,
Speaker 2: no verdict, no weight, just the plain fact of it. Now,
Speaker 2: find the moment just before that moment, the cue, the threshold,
Speaker 2: the breath with gap where the chooser could have been.
Speaker 2: It is there, It was always there. You can see
Speaker 2: it now. That is enough for to day, not to
Speaker 2: change it, yet not to overcome it. Simply to see it,
Speaker 2: because the nervous system cannot change what it cannot see.
Speaker 1: And you, you can.
Speaker 2: See now the observer is awake, the chooser is beginning.
Speaker 2: And what begins quietly in the ordinary moments and the breath,
Speaker 2: with gap between the cue and the automatic, it becomes
Speaker 2: over time the architecture of a life built not by
Speaker 2: accident
Speaker 3: But by choice,