Regaining balance, creating time.

Writing about balance was, as you may have figured, inspired by real-time events. I was feeling off. Now my ‘off’ isn’t what it used to be. My ‘off’ has shifted upwards like my feeling ‘good’ has shifted. I love feeling really, really good, there is nothing better, until of course my really, really good will shift up a notch to really, really, really good, which it undoubtedly will some day.
My ‘good’ started to shift on the day I decided I wanted nothing more than to feel good. The more aware I have become of that, the better I have gotten at feeling good. Yet being somewhere between being an amateur and a top athlete, I still lose focus. You see, feeling good happens when you focus on feeling good, it really is as simple as that. But as life isn’t a hypothetical exercise, or maybe it is, I get distracted by things I perceive as real. Now interestingly, the distractions are always rooted in lack, usually deep-seated beliefs of lack. This is not surprising though as most of our societies operate under the paradigm of lack.
Several years ago, I made the conscious decision to live in a state of abundance no matter what. I believe there are endless possibilities and probabilities, it all depends on how I choose to view reality. No matter what the outside appearance of a situation may look like, I choose to see abundance, I choose to see the good that is present, I choose to find the bright spots. This is an exercise in focus. I guess it suffices to say that I am, after all those years, still training to master this and it remains to be seen if I will ever master it completely during this lifetime.

Recently, I got distracted quite some bit. Usually, it is enough to just refocus on feelings of hopefullness and optimism and positive expectation to get back to a mindset of abundance. Yet sometimes it is not. This time, everytime I got to a state of hopefulness, I got pulled back to feelings of frustration, to the point where I actually got frustrated and started to feel overwhelmed. I don’t like feeling overwhelmed, it does feel very, very off. The cool thing, however, was that this space between frustration and feeling overwhelmed  allowed me to emotionally and physically explore the aspect of lack I was perceiving to be true.
I felt tired and my body felt sore all over. My excuse was that my daughter had had a two-week school holiday and I had been to Istanbul for a long weekend with a friend. Apparently, it had been too much. It was normal to be tired, I told myself. I had expected to be tired and overwhelmed and I was. Then a voice inside of me said, “this is not in keeping with what you believe to be true. You are pure energy, when energy doesn’t flow something is blocking that energy. Yes, maybe your physical self is tired, and yes maybe you need time to rest your body and mind, but what if this runs deeper? What if this a recurring pattern caused by a belief you’re holding onto that simply doesn’t work anymore?”

This awareness allowed me change gears and I went from being frustrated over the mess in my home and the mess in my head to being the observer of what was happening. What I discovered was mind-blowing.
Life felt like swimming through molasse. My body felt heavy and dense, and was very literally holding on to weight. My brain processed thought so much slower that it became difficult to hold onto a thought for more than 15 seconds, and storing and retrieving data was nearly impossible. This resulted in my brain being easily overstimulated and I felt like doing nothing, absolutely nothing, I just wanted to lay in bed and sleep, or sit on the couch and stare outside. Normally, because, yes it is a pattern, I will fight this doing nothing, and then when I finally give in, balance is restored.

With my mind still and at peace, no matter how my body was feeling, I did a writing exercise. I started with ‘Wouldn’t it be great if….. I felt healthy and energetic.” I wrote and wrote and wrote, not lifting my pen of the paper, and before I knew it I was writing about having the time to do the things I want to do the most. That stirred some deep emotions in me. I realized I was onto something. And again I wrote and wrote without allowing myself to stop. I learned that at the heart of much of my stress is the old belief that I have not enough time. Inside of me still is a little frightened girl . She rushes everything because she is anxious of punishment if she doesn’t finish in a certain frame of clocktime. Every fiber of her being is stressed, the adrenaline and cortisol are running through her body, making it nearly impossible to concentrate, to do what she needs to do or make the right choices. Knowing that this past version of myself still lives inside of me, helps me understand why I so very easily come under the charm of ‘not enough time’, why it distracts me more than most things.
The incongruency between this old self and the self I am becoming creates an interesting mechanism. When I believe I don’t have enough time, somehow this creates a space frame in which time seems to be shrinking. It is as if I live in a bubble in which things start slowing down while on the outside things seem to speed up.  When I believe in a lack of time, somehow my body obeys this belief and slows down my movements, my metabolism and my brain function. This creates stress, because as I feel pressure to perform, to use every second of my time usefully and to do the things I feel I should be doing, I literally get done less and less in the same time frame. Yet, when I believe and feel there is an abundance of time, this creates an open space in which energy can flow freely, I do those things that make me happiest, I feel the freedom to explore and the whole dynamic changes. In my bubble, things start speeding up and outside the bubble things seem to down. When this happens, things go easily and I get more and more done in the same time frame. In me, this dynamic is very strong.

Isn’t that just perfect? Isn’t it just an ingenious mechanism? Wow! I just marvel at the perfection of all that I am, because when I was out of whack, feeling tired to the core, doing nothing brought me exactly where I needed to be again, it allowed me to regain focus and see the inherent goodness and abundance that is always available. I am now able to say that I love this piece of contrast, because it has expanded my awareness, I am now better able to see what is happening when I get tired, I can more easily find the words to soothe myself and to direct my thoughts to feeling better. This experience has opened up in me new ways to remain focused and to regain focus on feeling good. And when I feel good, time doesn’t really matter, it simply becomes a modality that I can play with. It is my perception that creates either a lack or an abundance of time. When I perceive abundance, I feel good, I want to do the things I love, and they just happen, like magic.

To close the gap between the older version of myself and all that I am becoming, to be more congruent, more in alignment with the All-ness of that which I AM, I have started to retrain this little girl by loving her for all that she is, unconditionally, telling her to take her time, to do the things she loves, reassuring her that she is safe with me, that time abounds in my Universe, I love her no matter what. It has only be a few days, but I  can feel that she is starting to relax already, ready to embrace this fuller and more expanded version of herself. I just love this newer and more relaxed version of myself, and, honestly, who wouldn’t?

photo by Colin Adamson