Written by Irma Velasquez. Edited by Karin Luner
Irma Velasquez is an artist and author, and the co-founder of Deep Living Lab, an international nonprofit focused on creating spaces for inner exploration that shape social and cultural life. Her work explores the impact of presence, reflection, and curiosity in times of personal and collective challenge.
Through immersive installations such as Pause 9, she creates intentional spaces for stillness, inviting participants to slow down and notice what is happening within themselves so that they can act, in a broader social context, with clarity and purpose. Central to this work is an engagement with a less ego-driven orientation—one that supports holding inner experience with care, curiosity, and responsibility rather than reactivity.
A Sacred Space Inside
There’s a sacred space inside each of us that we rarely visit. Not the noisy thoughts in our head or the insights that propel us into the studio to work on the next art piece for an upcoming show. I’m talking about the deeper voice that sits beneath, the one that asks the question that we may not be ready to hear.
I’ve been a painter most of my life until recently when I dived into the medium of experiential art. This art form has been around since the 1960s, but gained momentum in the digital age of smartphones at the beginning of the millennium.
I’ve created, along with fellow artists, the upcoming installation called Pause 9: An immersive Inner Journey through The Four Sacred Portals. This is the second iteration of this work. Unless you plan to be in Egypt in February 2026, it will be an exhibit you watch from a distance.
For those who will be present at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, it’s a space you step into, an experience.
Here is a glimpse of this unfolding journey and the work that inspired it.
A Pause in Motion In today’s world, we rarely stop long enough to notice ourselves outside the frame of FB, Instagram, TikTok, or the myriad reflectors of ourselves and our culture.
Pause 9 invites people to slow down, to listen, to open their hearts to themselves and to those with whom they will share the experience. Instead of screens or explanation, it offers silence, light, and questions, not towards clever answers but towards an inner conversation that will continue after they leave the installation.
Sacred Ground: Echoes of the Desert Spirit—Egypt’s deserts have long drawn seekers into silence. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, a spiritual movement emerged there. The Desert Fathers, early Christian hermits who turned the desert into a city of the heart. These men and women withdrew from noise and distraction to dwell in solitude, prayer, and stillness.
Their wisdom was passed down in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. These sayings are short, often stark or aphoristic, meant to convey spiritual insight, though describing them as explicitly “poetic” is interpretive rather than strictly historical. I interpret these stories as a means to awaken the heart.
In the lonely expanses where they sat and prayed, the desert itself became sacred, a mirror of the inner landscape.
Pause 9, based on Roxanne Howe-Murphy’s book The Four Sacred Portals, follows that thread as a modern echo of the desert’s invitation to look inward and listen deeply. The Four Sacred Portals Pause 9 unfolds through The Four Sacred Portals, each portal offering a pathway to heal inner division and strengthen the inherent capacities to engage with presence in what calls us. The portals offer a threshold for exploring questions that may seem simple, and yet profound.
This is art as inner dialogue. This experience is short, about ten minutes in linear time, but generous in inner awareness.
A Bridge to Deeper Knowing Pause 9 steps into a broader world where art, technology, and inner life converge.
In and around Cairo and its ancient sands, art has taken new shapes. From global exhibitions among the pyramids to immersive installations that honor our inner space as sacred.
Pause 9 offers a holding space to step into the inner sacred space, bringing attention back to the heart’s internal landscape.
Pause 9 won’t answer questions. It will help start the conversation.
And sometimes, that’s where our awareness of interconnectedness begins.
(images are from the Pause 9 website)
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