I will also understand, but I won’t believe you.
The reason it seems that life is fast and there is never enough time is that most of us made choices long ago that helped in the creation of the life we are living today.
The path of your life now is so heavily walked that there are deep grooves in the road. You’re walking on this path, called your life, and your neck is in line with the level of the road. You are deep in.
Sometimes people stop this death walk by getting a divorce, getting cancer, or changing their work.
I did all three, and at the same time.
Those deep grooves in the path that I called my life made it almost impossible for me to get out. To make a change. I almost died doing it- and it wasn’t just the cancer. Leaving work that I created and loved was its own sad death. The marriage had pain and trauma that included generational abuse. It was all very threatening. I was scared, alone, and wanted to stay neck deep, because that was what I knew. But I did something.
I learned how to bend time.
I walked away and kept living and the only way to do that was to slow down and get real. Before I died, for real.
Happiness is a lot like good sex.
The happiness that I experience on most days now is similar to the feeling after you have had really, really good sex. It’s deep, quiet and connected. With sex, there is the rush of oxytocin after orgasm (same as after experiencing natural childbirth) but the hormone oxytocin also builds up within the body from a life that’s lived well over time. You have to slow down to get this kind of experience. It’s literally physical and emotional happiness.
Time moves slowly for children because they live in the present. Children know there is a future but they are absorbed in what is happening now. Their concentrated focus is all there is and that presence affects the next moment. Over time, the world, adults, and their karma, takes them away from this innate understanding.
When my daughter was young, we were living in San Francisco. I had a fancy black stroller which I referred to as my second car. Great for cities, as they are like a luxury shopping cart. You can walk the city streets and put everything you need in them, including your child. My child wanted to walk and I would let her. It would take us an hour or more to walk around one city block. This is because she was absorbed in the world that was so new and interesting to her ~ the cracks in the sidewalk, the steps up to a Victorian, the cat in a window, the tree roots lifting the sidewalk. It was an incredible experience to see her being so curious and also to move at that pace as an adult.
I am not suggesting that you live your life like a child. I am suggesting that when you take time to slow down enough to know what is really interesting to you, your life gets better. It also gets a lot slower. And you end up with more time.
When you begin to practice yoga and meditation, you clear away unnecessary prospects that would otherwise take up space in your mind, getting your attention and causing you to act upon them. You can clear space for nothing to happen. Or things to happen that make your life a beautiful, mystical, and enlightened experience. I mean it. And this is hard to do. This is bending time and it takes hard work and practice.
The Huffington post did an article entitled: How To Slow Down Time: Meditation And The Theory Of Relativity. It’s very basic information. Some of you will likely know much of what they write about already, but it’s a good reference to back up what I am saying in this blog. You can read the article here.
We live in a culture that values being productive, busy, fit, rich, attractive, and almost anything that causes us to try and be more in an external way. It is hard to move against this pull. I dont think it’s realistic to go from fast and moving to sitting and meditating. The yogis of the past didn’t think this was a good idea either. That is why the yoga poses (asana) are learned first. It is the yoga practice that prepares you for breathing (pranayama) and then meditation.
There is efficiency in yoga and mediation as it carries you from where you are now to where you would like to be. I am not talking about money or status. I am referring to practical steps to bend time for your benefit. When you are happy and aligned with your life, everything around you shifts. In this way, just being you, helps others and the planet.
Bending time is very real. It may not sound as exciting as time traveling, but what are you going to do in another time or dimension if you aren’t present?
When you get yourself in a place where you are really present, it’s the best place in the Universe to be. And if you still aren’t sure of what I am saying, just remember how you feel and your presence of mind after really good sex.
If in your whole life, you have never been present, then, where have you been?
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