Cultivating TIME & SPACE - finding the PAUSE PLACE
The concepts of TIME & SPACE have been the themes for May/June LIVE sessions.
What is your relationship with TIME?
Always feeling there is not enough of it?
Feel against the clock daily - never enough done or time to do all.
Feel it in your stage in life and the aging process? The body ages, gets more lined and wrinkled, sags, looks less seemingly ‘radiant” then it did in it’s youth? The irony is there has never been a time when you were wholly satisfied with your body. MOre on aging processes and societies view on it in a late blog. A HOT SPOT FYI!
And what of SPACE?
Find yourself needing more space? Inf act is SPACE not synonymous with TIME? What has been our relationship with space (social distancing ) in LOCKDOWN?
Oh what a dutiful consuming society we exist in!
I don’t know about you- but as long as I can remember huge importance was placed on what I “should” do with my TIME & SPACE. This wasn’t just from family (who were only sharing what they had received) but from communities, media, governments, society.
I was inspired recently by a poem written by Rob Poynton - (whose prose and poems I often draw snippets from in my LIVE sessions which many of you ask me about).
His writings have inspired my own dialogue.
PAUSES are important.
Vital in fact to daily existence. Vital for cultivating more TIME and SPACE.
Whether it is simply sitting for a moment with eyes closed to acknowledge the ending of on thing (a task, meeting, conversation, meal) before something else begins, or
A longer sit of quiet. Meditation.
ISN’T IT IRONIC… don’t you think?
The PAUSE creates MORE time and space.
HOW?
The PAUSE is what makes the difference between considered, helpful action, and mindless action that can contribute to: stress, resentment, anger, uncertainty, anxiety.
Now of course there can be people that fall in to stagnation.
Indecision. Inertia. Inability to make decisions. This is the opposite swing of OVERDOING. Known as TAMAS in the Vedic philosophies.
What I am suggesting here it the importance of being quiet to simply allow for a sensation or experience to consciously be processed and to be aware of something new beginning.
How comfortable are you at making a conscious PAUSE?
The voices of judgement… (the GREMLINS!) that oppose the PAUSE.
We ALL have them.. they sound something like this:
Sitting around doing nothing will get nothing done!
I’m too busy to pause.
Doing nothing is L.A.Z.Y.
Doing nothing is what bums do whilst the rest of us actually need to make things happen.
You’re only finished when your done
The WISDOM of the PAUSE:
With things re-emerging after weeks of lockdown... I can feel a current of “fast” life beginning to beckon. Can you feel it?
How I feel right now is that I actually want to resist it. I want to savour some of this SLOW rhythm. I’m fairly practiced at it. Some find find this rather annoying in me.
I often hark back to the words from Rob Poynton. And add in some of my own;)
The true wisdom of the pause:
Pauses matter.
No human being has an always ON setting.
We all need to Pause.
When we pause - knotty problems find a more easeful way to untangle themselves.
When we pause - we invite freshness and perspective.
When we pause we allow for confidence, clarity and even-mindedness to settle in.
When we pause we invite silence in to the inner and outer space.
And it is there… in the silence that…
…(as Rumi said) "a hundred voices thunder messages you long to hear”.