So I am now changing direction. I am off a detour exploring ‘focus’. I am asking myself how do I get more focus for more of the time. On Monday (public holiday) I had a fabulous day and went to the movies in the morning. This is focused indulgence at its best. We saw the movie “Its Complicated” and it was absolutely great. I laughed, cried and really lived someone else’s life for a while. I came home intent on making more focused time for creating loveliness and homeliness in my home. I so admired Meryl Streep’s character for her earthy, beautiful home and abundant, yummy cooking.

So this week, I am concentrating on living in my home. I see that sometimes I just exist there in between all the other things I do. Just having this intention since Monday has brought feedback from my 7 year old daughter who told me she would rather snuggle on the couch with me than do anything else in the world today (what a gift for me!) and my partner who left on a flight felt sad leaving the ‘homely warm chaos’ even though he was headed for the bright lights of London, but most importantly………….

It feels good for me too. Thanks to Meryl Streep for her inspiration. So I have to let go of time and am focused instead on ‘living’ and on ’homeliness’ this week. I wonder what will come of this new intention.

My journey with time has taken on a whole new direction. I have been on a hypnotherapy course for the past 4 days and have realised how much better I feel for having stopped the bus a little bit. I became aware that my head was so full of the ‘hurry up’ message and I was getting more and more entrenched in this pattern even although I was trying to change it. My subconscious mind was holding a story about there being too little time and my conscious mind was finding endless evidence that this was true. Much like if I ask you to scan a room  full of people for the colour white and then when you have done this and have a clear picture of all the white, I ask you how much blue you saw. You would have very little idea about blue and would be thinking completely about white. So while I have been on course, taken out of my normal environment and not in control of the use of time, I have had a chance to see what has been happening. It feels so ‘timeous’ having tea break, lunch and afternoon tea and no pressure at all for most of the day.

So my thought for today and this week is: search for evidence of ‘timeousness’. I have decided to bring this into my week and see what happens. So far I am seeing more time and more space. I feel more relaxed and perhaps this will enable my pre-frontal cortex to work better. I know that the pre-frontal cortex is knocked out in the face of stress. I want its brilliance, so maybe I will be rewarded for this new attitude.
Let me know if it works for you! and if not what you feel about this idea.

The weekend went by in a social blur and the only thing I noticed pertaining to time this weekend is that my mindfulness practice provides an open spacious feeling regarding time. I have been more aware than ever these past few days that when I do 1 thing at a time and think about what I am doing, I feel time goes a little slower and I don’t feel quite so rushed. I did more mindfulness practice than ever on Saturday, because Thursday and Friday I had so many things going on that demanded my mental attention and disturbed my peace of mind, I felt like my head was a railroad station and would never quieten down.

On Saturday, I watched my breath when I ran and felt the air moving in and out of my lungs, I felt the toothbrush working my teeth and my gums when I did my teeth and I focused on feeling the beautiful cleansing water on my body when I showered. These are my three mindfulness practice slots and I have promised myself to try to stay as present as I can in my thoughts when I am either running, brushing my teeth or showering. I am well aware of how my mind wanders even when I am aware of trying to keep it present and I have been working with this practice for a very long time already. I know I am on a journey with it and am not asking for perfection. This weekend I noticed from the stark contrast from my busy mind to the quieter state that it made me feel more spacious with time than I had on Thursday and Friday when I was not very “present” in my thoughts.

 I was mindfully not present, which is still mindfulness practice. The aim is not to get goal orientated about it, just to be aware. So I am not saying my improved presence on Saturday was better or worse, I am just saying I noticed it and it felt more time abundant.
I have decided on not being goal orientated with time this week, I know what I resist will persist, so I am going to try to be okay with whatever my journey with time presents to me this week. I realise that there has been a strong “fix it” bent over the past few weeks, and my intention is just to ‘be’ with time this week…..

My attempt to solve my paradigm: there’s not enough time

The gift of a few minutes
So here I sit with ten minutes to spare and a determined attempt to use the ten  minutes wisely. This is something I often experience, someone cancels an appointment and I find myself with an unplanned 20-30 minutes. Often I waste the time. I start in the kitchen, because there are so many things I need to do and I do not know where to start so I start with the known… the pantry and the kettle.  So when I have had something to eat and a cup of coffee I didn’t really want or need, I feel relaxed enough to make use of the ten minutes that remain.

I wonder if I believed in abundant time whether I would handle this time in this way. I often promise myself that I will just settle down and read when I have a gap, I always feel there is not enough time to read and so maybe if I was going to do something easy and concrete like read and if I had permission from myself to do this then I would use the time better. I will give this a bash and let you know what I find.
I always set an intention for every day first thing in the morning and this morning I set the intention of being grateful for all I have today. Maybe this seemingly wise solution to my time problem is an answer to this intention. I will be grateful for an unexpected gift of 30 free minutes and instead of feeling I have to be productive in them I will use them as a gift and enjoy them. I know from Einstein that you can’t solve a problem with the same mentality that you used to create it. Here is a completely fresh mentality. The question is do I have the courage to try it??? I believe in change, so I promise to give it a week’s trial.

Unexpected moments will be used for reading not being productive on the work front. ( please believe me reading is productive to me, it just fits in the recreation box not the work box! And work time is for work in my mind)
Let me know what you think….

My journey through reframing my idea of time has taken me over some hectic bumps. On Wednesday night I had a learning group. I volunteered my battle to them and was told that many people in the group found being on time the easiest thing in the world. Most of the people thought being late was just a bad habit that I should just change and get out of. I realised how easily we judge other people’s reality out of our own. I also realised how unhelpful advice is, because I felt worse than ever after everyone told me how time was for them and I realised even more than before that I have a belief system that needs changing.

 Anyway I am not going to be deterred. I am going to soldier on in the quest for answers and a new frame of reference. I believe it is possible and I will share what I experience along the way. I have watched myself with this blog writing and I am so keen to do my usual fixing thing that I have tried to find answers rather than do what I set out to do which is explore the subject, so I have decided to get really honest here. I am not looking for solutions yet. First I want to identify exactly what my belief system is regarding time and then I will be clear about what I am working with. So here are some factors on time for me: My Mom was really busy always (surprise surprise!). I was one of four children. She loved to walk and the only real way to get time with her was to run along beside her for a walk as often as I could. The other way to get time with her was to do her chores with her. I literally ran beside her from shop to shop when she was shopping, and leapt into and out of the car with her as she did what she needed to do. I was her helper and I suffered quite a lot of resentment from my siblings who weren’t as forth coming with helper behaviour. They thought I was the favourite.

When I look at my Mom now, bless her, I see she doesn’t move even a tenth as fast as I thought she did, neither does she come close to moving as fast as I sometimes make my poor children move when I am unconscious and am functioning in automatic pilot! I was a really diligent worker at school. Doing very well was essential to me. I tried my very best all the time and when I did not do as well as I wanted to do, I just turned up the volume and worked even harder. I never got the concept or even a hint of it, that working smart not hard was where success was at. So as school progressed I spent long hours studying and by standard 7 the feeling was already imprinted on my psyche, that there wasn’t enough time for everything.

Somehow at varsity I managed to find a far better balance, maybe because I left home and also because I had the student’s 3 months of holidays a year to play with. I had a vacation job in many of the holidays, but I managed to travel and do sport and have loads of fun and gradually relaxed with time, but the pattern was still lurking below the surface. I went overseas after I graduated and found myself in a hurry to earn enough money to manifest my greedy dream of travelling the whole world. After only four months of hard work, I set off for Europe with my backpack and my thumb and no particular plan except to start in Scandinavia and to move through Europe and Eastern Europe tearing up the place as I went. I had a blast, and packed an extraordinary amount into my trip, returning to London broke and in desperate need of filling the coffers. If I reflect on a 6 month trip, I am forever grateful, but realise that I was spoiled to ruination by that trip…. That was the master copy and no trip since, has ever provided the sense of freedom to explore and discover. Every trip since then has been rushed and too short! I remember the feeling beginning then: so much to do and see and so little time to do it all in! I came home from London and started work. I was in a big hurry this time to pay off my student loan and to buy myself out of my bursary. I hate owing money and was relentless in my quest to clear my debt, so I worked weeks and weekend and every hour God made. However, I also wanted to run the Comrades, study further, party up a storm, decorate my home and much, much else too. So this is not an autobiography, just an exploration of where this belief system pertaining to RUSHING has come from. And in addition to all of this, I chose a career where every 45 minutes for 20 years I have another ‘deadline’ to meet (another patient). It is a stressor to know that whatever I do, I have to make a difference to the person who I am consulting before the 45 minute deadline is up. The one thing I have noticed is that in a previous attempt to solve my time problem, I decided to do 20 minute appointments and to my surprise I managed to make the same sort of difference in 20 minutes as I had previously made in 30.

 I decided after 2 years of this that I wasn’t actually satisfying me even if I was satisfying my patients. Whatever amount of time I have available I see I will fill. So I know that finite time is an illusion and if I find the way to change my illusion to a different one I will solve the time problem for once and for all. So I am going to finish here because I have a deadline of a dinner to go to and if I write more I will be rushed in getting there on time. I have a lifetime to write, so why rush what I say today? Maybe I can change this bad habit……..