For a free copy of the first edition, download it from:
A new book on peak performance –
March 16, 2011
Mastering Linear Time workshop, Section 5 Script
December 10, 2011
Mastering Linear Time
Mastering Linear Time workshop, script for Section 5
Title slide
This is the last of five sections in the workshop on mastering linear time.
A measure of time stress
We can take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now? Make a mental note about what this number is right now.
Giant Body exercise series
Slides
1:
Here’s an adaptation of the Giant Body exercise series from the first TSK book.
Breathing through both mouth and nose, be aware of any sensation, or feeling in or on the body
Let awareness and feeling merge. . . . There’s no need to try to change anything
As things change, awareness can be drawn to other feelings. There’s a natural movement of awareness
Awareness can operate and interact with feeling at different levels of magnification or size
2:
As the interaction of awareness and feeling proceeds, see if there are any persistent feelings or structures
Do these continue to persist, or do they become more open?
Do they have some kind of feeling of reality, existence, or a substantial quality?
Is awareness hindered from interacting or merging with such structures or surfaces?
3:
Is there any awareness of size or shape related to various structures or regions?
Does the sense of size or shape come and go?
Is there any sense of extension in space, or a feeling of being located in an infinite ‘container’?
4:
Is there any distinction whatsoever between awareness and the structures or surfaces? If so, what makes the difference?
How do the forms or outlines seem to exist, to feel ‘real’?
Do the forms or outlines seem to somehow be imaginary or ‘unreal’?
————–
Notes:
While breathing through both mouth and nose gently, smoothly, and continuously, allow awareness to be drawn to any sensation, density, pain, heaviness, emotion, or other feeling in or on the body. . . . Let awareness and feeling merge , or let awareness arise from any feeling that is not completely open and spacious. . . . Just abide in the interaction. There’s no need to try to change anything–most likely the quality or location of feeling will change on its own, eventually becoming more open and spacious. . . . As things change, awareness can be drawn to other feelings. There’s a natural movement of awareness, possibly taking various positions, locations, points of view, or simultaneous viewpoints, or no apparent viewpoint, location, or direction at all. . . . Awareness can operate and interact with feeling at different levels of magnification or size, possibly at the level of organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. . . .
As the interaction of awareness and feeling proceeds, see whether there are any persistent feelings or apparently persistent structures or regions or surfaces or boundaries–such as ‘body’, ‘kidney’, ‘blood cell’, ‘belly’, or ‘skin’. Do these continue to persist, or do they become more open? Do they have some kind of feeling of reality, existence, or a substantial quality? Is awareness hindered or obstructed somehow from interacting or merging with such structures, regions, or surfaces?
Is there any awareness of size or shape related to various structures or regions or surfaces? Does the sense of size or shape come and go, depending on the related viewpoint, or lack of a located viewpoint? Is there any sense of extension of any aspects of ‘the body’ in space, or a subtle feeling of it being located in an infinite, yet empty ‘container’? Let awareness merge with any such feelings.
In the movement and interaction of awareness with forms and surfaces, is it ever limited to subtle positions or perspectives or directions? Is it ever obstructed in any way? Does it focus on distinct regions or fields? Does its breadth, range, or scope vary? Does it ever seem to lose all sense of definite scope and direction?
Is there any distinction whatsoever between awareness and the structures, regions, or surfaces? If so, precisely what makes the difference? How do the forms or outlines seem to exist, to feel ‘real’? Do the forms or outlines seem to somehow be imaginary or ‘unreal’?
Swimming in Space
Slides:
1: Stand with feet apart, and arms stretched out in front at shoulder height. Slowly move one arm up a little while moving the other arm down. . . . 10 secs
Gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves straight up and down. Attend to the sense or feeling of space. . . . . 50 secs
Continue 3 minutes . . .
—————–
2: Slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, extended in front at shoulder height. . . . 50 secs
Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings. . . . 2 mins
——————-
3: Slowly lift your straight arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor. . . . 45 secs
Swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead. . . . 45 secs
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three times. . . . 2 mins
————-
4: Lower your arms to your sides, and sit for five minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement. . . . 5 mins
Recording:
1: Now we’ll do a slow movement exercise called “Swimming in Space,” which can help us relax, balance our energies, and relieve time pressure.
Stand with feet apart, and arms stretched out in front at shoulder height, palms down. Breathing easily through both nose and mouth, simultaneously very slowly move one arm up and the other arm down, keeping arms and hands straight. First don’t move the arms very far. Gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves straight up and down.. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Continue 3 minutes. Pay attention to the particular sense of space; you may feel a quality like swimming.
—————
2: Slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, extended in front at shoulder height. . . . 50 secs
Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings. . . . 2 mins
—————-
3: Slowly lift your straight arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Moving your arms, head, and torso together, bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor. . . . 45 secs
Swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead. . . . 45 secs
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three times. . . . 2 mins
——————-
4: Lower your arms to your sides, and sit for five minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement. . . . 5 mins
Notes:
Swimming in Space, pp. 218-19, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2
Stand well balanced with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight, and your arms stretched out in front of you at shoulder height, palms down. Breathing easily through both nose and mouth, with your belly relaxed, simultaneously move one arm up and the other arm down, keeping the arms and hands straight and relaxed.
Move very slowly. At first do not move the arms very far—then gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves up and down as far as it can go. At the furthest points of the movement, relax the back of the neck and head. Pay attention to the particular sense of space awakened by this exercise; you may feel a quality like swimming.
Continue the full movement of the arms for three to five minutes, then slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, and extended in front of you at shoulder height. Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings.
Now slowly lift your arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Keep your arms parallel to each other and straight. Moving your arms, head, and torso together, bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor; then swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead.
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three or nine times. Be sure to keep the arms straight throughout the movement. To complete the exercise, lower your arms to your sides from the overhead position, and sit in the sitting posture for five to ten minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement.
Moments between Moments
Observe the flow of time from one moment to the next. . . .
You may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments . . .
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. . . .
———————-
Observe in your own experience the flow of time from one moment to the next. If the mind is calm and alert, you may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments:
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. LOK exercise 14, p. 119
“By learning to be sensitive to the infinity of ‘time’ available within any clock-time period, we can begin to appreciate more fully the value and possibilities life presents. We can begin by noticing more time, more available moments, and then later we can have a more intimate experience with ‘time’.” (Dimensions of Thought, p. 43)
Going without Going
Slide:
Look straight ahead and walk as slowly as you can, lifting each foot about six inches off the ground. . .
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . .
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . .
Let go of the emphasis on your doing it. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.
Recording:
Remove your shoes or put on light slippers. Looking straight ahead, walk slowly by lifting each foot about six inches above the ground. Walk as slowly as you can. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. Let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself. . . . [pause 12 mins]
———————
Remove your shoes or put on light, thin-soled slippers. Stand erect, with your spine straight and your hands relaxed at your sides. While keeping your upper torso erect and looking straight ahead, practice walking slowly by lifting each foot four to seven inches above the ground and stepping forward gently. Walk as slowly as you can. Now walk at only half that speed (yes, you can do it). Then slow down even more. Modify the walking technique by lifting or pointing the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before actually lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes should touch the floor first.
If you are having trouble with your balance, relax your shoulders, throat, and heart areas. Perfect balance will come as you let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. [“You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.” Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2, p. 173] Relax your body’s weightiness—let it be light and pervaded by space. Finally, leave your mouth slightly open and your throat unblocked, so that you are breathing very gently through both your mouth and nose. The ultra slow pace will help put you in touch with every minute aspect of the process of walking—the pressure of your foot on the floor, the lessening of this pressure, further lessening, rising through an arc, moving forward, almost touching the floor again, barely touching, etc. Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. TSK, p. 185
Seeing through Negativity
‘Negative’ is often just a label atop neutral energy
Arms straight out to the sides
Breathe easily through nose and mouth, with tip of tongue on upper palate a little behind front teeth
Relax all muscles you don’t need to use
Find center of ‘negative’ feeling, or breathe ‘from it’; merge with it
See if ‘negative’ character changes
‘Negative’ is a way of perceiving from outside
——————-
Recording:
When young, we learn to avoid ‘negative’ sensations and feelings, and intensify our sense of time passing over many years.
We can do a simple physical exercise that may help us see how the word ‘negative’ is often just a label on top of inherently neutral energy. Stand and put your arms straight out to the sides. See whether you can keep the arms there for a minute or two, and breathe easily through nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue on the upper palate a little behind the front teeth. Relax all the muscles you don’t need to use to hold this position. . . .
Before long you might feel some tension or pain. If so, while being aware of the feeling, breathe lightly through your mouth and nose, inhaling and exhaling gently and evenly. . . . A negative feeling tends to fragment one’s awareness and cause a lot of thinking about how to get away from the feeling. Try to focus lightly on the ‘center of the feeling’. Be aware of the feeling as if you were a spot of awareness inside the feeling itself. You might also try to breathe ‘from the feeling’; or to merge with it.
When you change your perspective in one of these ways, see if the so-called ‘negative’ character changes. Experiment in this way for a minute or so, if you can. Does the word ‘negative’ describe a way of perceiving a feeling from outside?
——————–
When young, we learn to avoid ‘negative’ sensations and feelings, and intensify our sense of time passing over many years.
I remember driving home from Yosemite National Park on a very hot day. My young son Dylan was in the back seat, and he was wiggling around trying to get comfortable in the heat. But he couldn’t get away from the heat. Then he said, “I can’t wait till we get home.” He couldn’t physically escape from the heat, so he distanced himself ‘internally’ from it. Instead of just feeling it and not taking a position on it, he observed and took a point of view apart from the sensations, and then the sense of time passing grew stronger, leading him to say, “I can’t wait till we get home.” He was visualizing a preferable future time that was separate from the present. Distancing himself from the heat intensified the unpleasant, slow feeling of time passing. Time was a mirror reflecting his way of looking at the heat.
We can do a simple physical exercise that may help us see how the word ‘negative’ is often just a label on top of inherently neutral energy. Stand and put your arms straight out to the sides. See whether you can keep the arms there for a minute or two, and breathe easily through nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue on the upper palate a little behind the front teeth. Relax all the muscles you don’t need to use to hold this position.
Before long you might feel some tension or pain. If so, while being aware of the feeling, breathe lightly through your mouth and nose, inhaling and exhaling gently and evenly. . . . A negative feeling tends to fragment one’s awareness and cause a lot of thinking about how to get away from the feeling. Try to focus lightly on the ‘center of the feeling’, whatever that might mean to you. Be aware of the feeling as if you were a spot of awareness inside the feeling itself. You might also try to breathe ‘from the feeling’; or to merge with it.
When you change your perspective in one of these ways, see if the so-called ‘negative’ character changes. Experiment in this way for a minute or so, if you can. Does the word ‘negative’ describe a way of perceiving a feeling from outside?
A measure of time stress
We can once again take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now?
Make a mental note of this number. How does it compare to the number you estimated earlier in the course?
The End of Section Five
This is the end of the last of five workshop sections.
Mastering Linear Time
Mastering Linear Time workshop, script for Section 4
Title slide
This is section 4 of five sections in the workshop on mastering linear time.
A measure of time stress
We can take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now? Make a mental note about what this number is right now.
Swimming in Space
Slides:
1: Stand with feet apart, and arms stretched out in front at shoulder height. Slowly move one arm up a little while moving the other arm down. . . . 10 secs
Gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves straight up and down. Attend to the sense or feeling of space. . . . . 50 secs
Continue 3 minutes . . .
—————–
2: Slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, extended in front at shoulder height. . . . 50 secs
Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings. . . . 2 mins
——————-
3: Slowly lift your straight arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor. . . . 45 secs
Swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead. . . . 45 secs
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three times. . . . 2 mins
————-
4: Lower your arms to your sides, and sit for five minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement. . . . 5 mins
Recording:
1: Now we’ll do a slow movement exercise called “Swimming in Space,” which can help us relax, balance our energies, and relieve time pressure.
Stand with feet apart, and arms stretched out in front at shoulder height, palms down. Breathing easily through both nose and mouth, simultaneously very slowly move one arm up and the other arm down, keeping arms and hands straight. First don’t move the arms very far. Gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves straight up and down.. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Continue 3 minutes. Pay attention to the particular sense of space; you may feel a quality like swimming.
—————
2: Slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, extended in front at shoulder height. . . . 50 secs
Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings. . . . 2 mins
—————-
3: Slowly lift your straight arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Moving your arms, head, and torso together, bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor. . . . 45 secs
Swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead. . . . 45 secs
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three times. . . . 2 mins
——————-
4: Lower your arms to your sides, and sit for five minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement. . . . 5 mins
Notes:
Swimming in Space, pp. 218-19, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2
Stand well balanced with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight, and your arms stretched out in front of you at shoulder height, palms down. Breathing easily through both nose and mouth, with your belly relaxed, simultaneously move one arm up and the other arm down, keeping the arms and hands straight and relaxed.
Move very slowly. At first do not move the arms very far—then gradually extend the movement until finally each arm moves up and down as far as it can go. At the furthest points of the movement, relax the back of the neck and head. Pay attention to the particular sense of space awakened by this exercise; you may feel a quality like swimming.
Continue the full movement of the arms for three to five minutes, then slowly decrease the range of the movement until your arms are still, and extended in front of you at shoulder height. Slowly lower them to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes, expanding your sensations and feelings.
Now slowly lift your arms in front of you until they are overhead with the palms facing forward. Keep your arms parallel to each other and straight. Moving your arms, head, and torso together, bend down from the waist until your fingers almost touch the floor; then swing up slowly until your back is straight and your arms are outstretched overhead.
Continue this slow swinging movement, down and up, three or nine times. Be sure to keep the arms straight throughout the movement. To complete the exercise, lower your arms to your sides from the overhead position, and sit in the sitting posture for five to ten minutes, expanding the sensations quickened by this movement.
Moments between Moments
Observe the flow of time from one moment to the next. . . .
You may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments . . .
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. . . .
———————-
Observe in your own experience the flow of time from one moment to the next. If the mind is calm and alert, you may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments:
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. LOK exercise 14, p. 119
“By learning to be sensitive to the infinity of ‘time’ available within any clock-time period, we can begin to appreciate more fully the value and possibilities life presents. We can begin by noticing more time, more available moments, and then later we can have a more intimate experience with ‘time’.” (Dimensions of Thought, p. 43)
Going without Going
Slide:
Look straight ahead and walk as slowly as you can, lifting each foot about six inches off the ground. . .
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . .
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . .
Let go of the emphasis on your doing it. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.
Recording:
Remove your shoes or put on light slippers. Looking straight ahead, walk slowly by lifting each foot about six inches above the ground. Walk as slowly as you can. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. Let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself. . . . [pause 12 mins]
———————
Remove your shoes or put on light, thin-soled slippers. Stand erect, with your spine straight and your hands relaxed at your sides. While keeping your upper torso erect and looking straight ahead, practice walking slowly by lifting each foot four to seven inches above the ground and stepping forward gently. Walk as slowly as you can. Now walk at only half that speed (yes, you can do it). Then slow down even more. Modify the walking technique by lifting or pointing the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before actually lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes should touch the floor first.
If you are having trouble with your balance, relax your shoulders, throat, and heart areas. Perfect balance will come as you let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. [“You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.” Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2, p. 173] Relax your body’s weightiness—let it be light and pervaded by space. Finally, leave your mouth slightly open and your throat unblocked, so that you are breathing very gently through both your mouth and nose. The ultra slow pace will help put you in touch with every minute aspect of the process of walking—the pressure of your foot on the floor, the lessening of this pressure, further lessening, rising through an arc, moving forward, almost touching the floor again, barely touching, etc. Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. TSK, p. 185
Seeing through Negativity
‘Negative’ is often just a label atop neutral energy
Arms straight out to the sides
Breathe easily through nose and mouth, with tip of tongue on upper palate a little behind front teeth
Relax all muscles you don’t need to use
Find center of ‘negative’ feeling, or breathe ‘from it’; merge with it
See if ‘negative’ character changes
‘Negative’ is a way of perceiving from outside
——————-
Recording:
When young, we learn to avoid ‘negative’ sensations and feelings, and intensify our sense of time passing over many years.
We can do a simple physical exercise that may help us see how the word ‘negative’ is often just a label on top of inherently neutral energy. Stand and put your arms straight out to the sides. See whether you can keep the arms there for a minute or two, and breathe easily through nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue on the upper palate a little behind the front teeth. Relax all the muscles you don’t need to use to hold this position. . . .
Before long you might feel some tension or pain. If so, while being aware of the feeling, breathe lightly through your mouth and nose, inhaling and exhaling gently and evenly. . . . A negative feeling tends to fragment one’s awareness and cause a lot of thinking about how to get away from the feeling. Try to focus lightly on the ‘center of the feeling’. Be aware of the feeling as if you were a spot of awareness inside the feeling itself. You might also try to breathe ‘from the feeling’; or to merge with it.
When you change your perspective in one of these ways, see if the so-called ‘negative’ character changes. Experiment in this way for a minute or so, if you can. Does the word ‘negative’ describe a way of perceiving a feeling from outside?
——————–
When young, we learn to avoid ‘negative’ sensations and feelings, and intensify our sense of time passing over many years.
I remember driving home from Yosemite National Park on a very hot day. My young son Dylan was in the back seat, and he was wiggling around trying to get comfortable in the heat. But he couldn’t get away from the heat. Then he said, “I can’t wait till we get home.” He couldn’t physically escape from the heat, so he distanced himself ‘internally’ from it. Instead of just feeling it and not taking a position on it, he observed and took a point of view apart from the sensations, and then the sense of time passing grew stronger, leading him to say, “I can’t wait till we get home.” He was visualizing a preferable future time that was separate from the present. Distancing himself from the heat intensified the unpleasant, slow feeling of time passing. Time was a mirror reflecting his way of looking at the heat.
We can do a simple physical exercise that may help us see how the word ‘negative’ is often just a label on top of inherently neutral energy. Stand and put your arms straight out to the sides. See whether you can keep the arms there for a minute or two, and breathe easily through nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue on the upper palate a little behind the front teeth. Relax all the muscles you don’t need to use to hold this position.
Before long you might feel some tension or pain. If so, while being aware of the feeling, breathe lightly through your mouth and nose, inhaling and exhaling gently and evenly. . . . A negative feeling tends to fragment one’s awareness and cause a lot of thinking about how to get away from the feeling. Try to focus lightly on the ‘center of the feeling’, whatever that might mean to you. Be aware of the feeling as if you were a spot of awareness inside the feeling itself. You might also try to breathe ‘from the feeling’; or to merge with it.
When you change your perspective in one of these ways, see if the so-called ‘negative’ character changes. Experiment in this way for a minute or so, if you can. Does the word ‘negative’ describe a way of perceiving a feeling from outside?
A measure of time stress
We can once again take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now?
Make a mental note of this number. How does it compare to the number you estimated earlier in the course?
The End of Section Four of Five
This is the end of the fourth of five workshop sections.
Mastering Linear Time
Mastering Linear Time workshop, script for Section 3
Title slide
This is section 3 of five sections in the workshop on mastering linear time.
A measure of time stress
We can take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now? Make a mental note about what this number is right now.
Clock Watching – A New Way?
We can experiment a bit more with personal time and do an exercise to see how it changes.
This clock watching exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. It also balances left and right brain hemispheres.
Set up your environment so that you have ten minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer starts, just relax and watch the timer’s hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous. Also, see whether the sense of distance normally felt between yourself and the timer can be minimized.
Timer slide
Clock Watching and Breathing
OK.
During the clock watching exercise,
Did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how?
Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
You can practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Going without Going
Slide:
Look straight ahead and walk as slowly as you can, lifting each foot about six inches off the ground. . .
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . .
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . .
Let go of the emphasis on your doing it. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.
Recording:
Remove your shoes or put on light slippers. Looking straight ahead, walk slowly by lifting each foot about six inches above the ground. Walk as slowly as you can. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Now walk at half that speed. . . . Let the body be light and pervaded by space, breathing very gently through both mouth and nose. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Slow down even more. Point the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes touch the floor first. . . . [pause 45 secs]
Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. Let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. You may discover that your body moves gently by itself. . . . [pause 12 mins]
———————
Remove your shoes or put on light, thin-soled slippers. Stand erect, with your spine straight and your hands relaxed at your sides. While keeping your upper torso erect and looking straight ahead, practice walking slowly by lifting each foot four to seven inches above the ground and stepping forward gently. Walk as slowly as you can. Now walk at only half that speed (yes, you can do it). Then slow down even more. Modify the walking technique by lifting or pointing the toes of the ‘lead foot’ upward before actually lifting the foot. On the downward motion the toes should touch the floor first.
If you are having trouble with your balance, relax your shoulders, throat, and heart areas. Perfect balance will come as you let go of the emphasis on your doing it and let all the experienced movements be seen as given by ‘time’. [“You may discover that your body moves gently by itself.” Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2, p. 173] Relax your body’s weightiness—let it be light and pervaded by space. Finally, leave your mouth slightly open and your throat unblocked, so that you are breathing very gently through both your mouth and nose. The ultra slow pace will help put you in touch with every minute aspect of the process of walking—the pressure of your foot on the floor, the lessening of this pressure, further lessening, rising through an arc, moving forward, almost touching the floor again, barely touching, etc. Even the slightest experience or sensation is important . . . infinite, in fact. TSK, p. 185
Abiding in Thought
Now we’ll do an exercise from the book Dynamics of Time and Space, an exercise called “Abiding in Thought.”
“On the surface of experience, thoughts come and go quickly, even instantaneously. One event succeeds another, one reaction follows the next in a powerful momentum that structures linear time. Let yourself become aware of this dynamic and the rhythm that supports it. . . . [pause]
Gradually introduce a different rhythm: As a single feeling or emotion or thought arises, enter into it and abide there—as though you would be ready to live your life right within that experience. . . [pause]
This abiding is not static. It invokes the dynamic rhythm of time without insisting on a linear momentum. . . .
As you sink into the experience, time expands. . . .”
[not read:]
“If we know how to look, the caring or support immediately available within each of the moments which combine to constitute our lives. The humble moment, when seen as time, space, and knowledge, is a target worth aiming at. It’s the vital center of the universe; if we hit it, we explode everything that prevents fulfillment, attaining everything that fulfills.” (Tarthang Tulku, Dimensions of Thought, p. xlvi-xlvii)
“With sufficient appreciation of our actually being ‘time’, we—or ‘knowingness’—can abide forever within the smallest duration of clock-time.” (Dimensions of Thought, p. 43)
Moments between Moments
Observe the flow of time from one moment to the next. . . .
You may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments . . .
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. . . .
———————-
The original text:
Observe in your own experience the flow of time from one moment to the next. If the mind is calm and alert, you may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments:
Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever ‘smaller’ scale, moments ‘between’ moments. LOK exercise 14, p. 119
“By learning to be sensitive to the infinity of ‘time’ available within any clock-time period, we can begin to appreciate more fully the value and possibilities life presents. We can begin by noticing more time, more available moments, and then later we can have a more intimate experience with ‘time’.” (Dimensions of Thought, p. 43)
A measure of time stress
We can once again take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now?
Make a mental note of this number. How does it compare to the number you estimated earlier in the course?
The End of Section Three of Five
This is the end of the third of five workshop sections.
Please go for a walk and when you return, make a few notes about your current experience, and especially your experience of time. It seems we often don’t notice changes after this kind of workshop until we leave our typical environment and walk around somewhere else.
Mastering Linear Time, Section 2 Script
December 9, 2011
Mastering Linear Time
Mastering Linear Time workshop, script for Section 2
Title slide
This is section 2 of five sections in the workshop on mastering linear time.
A measure of time stress
We can take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now? Make a mental note about what this number is right now.
The main cause of time stress
The gradual process of developing and strengthening the sense of time passing can be expressed in terms of three primary human energy centers:
Some feeling rises to awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, and allow it to dissipate and dissolve, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy of the heart is lessened and we feel somewhat pressured.
Excess energy flows to the head and a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies as our thinking skips about the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience.
Energy in the area of the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel a bit more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. Thereafter there’s a more dissatisfied sense of self trying to seek satisfaction through various objects and activities.
Relaxation Exercises (1)
When doing the following exercises, remember that you can pause the YouTube movies whenever you want to. This might be especially helpful if some interesting feelings arise and you want to get into them more fully.
During these movement exercises let the movements and breathing be very smooth and continuous, without breaks. This is very important for rapid progress.
Sit or stand comfortably. Bend your arms at the elbow, lifting your hands until they are in front of your shoulders with the palms facing forward. Imagine that a great force is pushing against your hands, and slowly push it away. Let strong tension build in your hands and arms, but relax your belly and lower back, and breathe easily and lightly through both nose and mouth. Keep pushing this force away until your arms are stretched out in front of you. Your hands and arms may shake with tension. (Continue on the next slide.)
Relaxation Exercises (2)
. . . Then without releasing the tension—as if the force is more powerful than you–slowly move your arms back in front of your chest, keeping your belly relaxed.
Very slowly release the tension–take about one minute for this–feeling the sensations in your arms, chest, and body. Then slowly lower your hands and rest briefly, continuing to expand the feelings stimulated by producing and releasing tension in this way.
This exercise is called “Nurturing Satisfaction,” and it appears on pp. 318-319, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part II
Relaxation Exercises (3)
Stand with your feet a few inches apart, and your arms at your sides. Slowly and smoothly lift your arms away from your sides until they are directly overhead with the backs of the hands close, and the fingers straight. Relax your thighs and minimize any backward arching in your spine. Slowly let your arms descend to your sides. Take one full minute to bring them all the way down. Pay attention to the feeling tone as you move, as if seeing with the inner eyes of the senses. (Continue on the next slide.)
Relaxation Exercises (4)
. . . take another full minute to move your arms up again. Explore the flow of energy . . . . Use the steady, slow rhythm to increase the energy flow. When the arms are directly overhead, stretch up very slightly, with your thighs and legs as relaxed as possible. This stretch clears and settles the mind: go deeply into your sensations at this point.
Continue the movement three times. Try slowing the movement down even more, taking two minutes in each direction.
This exercise is called “Flying,” and it appears on pp. 168-9, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part I
Relaxation Exercises (5)
Stand with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight. Breathing softly through both nose and mouth, slowly raise your arms in front of you until they are overhead, with the palms forward. With your knees relaxed and straight but not locked, slowly bend forward from the waist while reaching out slightly with your arms. Bend forward and down, very slowly and evenly.
Do not let your head dominate the movement; relax your neck muscles. When your fingers come near to the floor, stay down briefly. Be very still. Slowly spread your fingers apart more. Exhale fully, releasing tension from your belly.
Relaxation Exercises (6)
Now very slowly, breathing evenly and gently, begin to rise, keeping your head between your arms. When you reach an upright position, continue to bend slightly backward, with your arms quite close to your head. Move very gently, with your knees straight and your belly and lower organs relaxed. Bend backward only a little. In this position, keep your exhalations gentle, and let the front of your body feel open.
Slowly straighten your neck and back, bringing your attention to the base of your skull. Again bend forward as before, moving as gently as possible, relaxing your belly, neck, and back.
Do the exercise three times. When you locate a tension, explore it with your feelings as completely as you can. When you fully experience the tightness, you will then be able to let it go. As you move, become one with your feelings; let them move you, spreading their energy to every molecule in your body until finally ‘you’ no longer exist, and there is only feeling.
Clock Watching – A New Way?
We can experiment a bit more with personal time and do an exercise to see how it changes.
Usually looking at a clock causes some anxiety. Does it have to? If you can relax while watching the clock, you can probably stay relaxed in nearly any situation.
This clock watching exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. It also balances left and right brain hemispheres, as shown by research in applied kinesiology.
Set up your environment so that you have ten minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer on the next slide starts, just relax and watch the timer’s hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness–this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath is reflected in the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
Timer Slide
Clock Watching and Breathing
OK.
During the clock watching exercise,
Did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how?
Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
You can practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Time Calling Exercise
Most of us are so used to linear time that it can be difficult to recognize it for what it is. The following short exercise may help you clarify what linear time is, as well as demonstrate how your perspective on time gets set up within a moment.
The next slide will play a recording having some phrases referring to different times. Just pay attention to your experience of time. Try to see how past, present, and future quickly get set up in your experience when the phrases are heard.
Time Calling Exercise
“Just relax, listen, and pay attention to your experience of time. Try to see how past, present, and future quickly get set up in your experience when the phrases are heard.”
“One hour ago . . .
“One hour from now . . .
“Early this morning . . .
“Later this evening . . .
“Yesterday . . .
“Tomorrow . . .
“Last Monday . . .
“Next Monday . . .
“Two weeks ago . . .
“Two weeks from now . . .
“Last month . . .
“Next month . . .
“Last winter . . .
“Next winter . . .
“Last year . . .
“Next year . . .
“Five years ago . . .
“Five years from now . . .
“Ten years ago . . .
“Ten years from now . . .
Time Calling Exercise
Please think about your experience of the time calling exercise. Your feelings of time are especially noteworthy.
Do you see any reason or basis for the term ‘linear time’?
Did you notice how past, present, and future get set up within a moment? Was there any kind of swinging back and forth as you listened to the phrases?
Moments Between Moments
We can do a little inquiry exercise to explore our personal time. We talk about moments all the time, but how long is a moment? How long is your moment? At any time this could be different for all of us. Make a kind of mental note about how long this seems.
Now, between any two of such moments, see whether you can perceive additional moments, perhaps by just noticing what’s there, perhaps by relaxing while somehow turning up the speed of your awareness. Continue this experiment for a minute, seeing whether you can perceive additional, possibly subtle, moments between any two moments. . . . [pause]
OK. What happened? Did you find something you might call “moments between moments?” Did your experience of time change in the process?
Abiding in Thought
Now we’ll do an exercise from the book Dynamics of Time and Space, an exercise called “Abiding in Thought.”
“On the surface of experience, thoughts come and go quickly, even instantaneously. One event succeeds another, one reaction follows the next in a powerful momentum that structures linear time. Let yourself become aware of this dynamic and the rhythm that supports it. . . . [pause]
Gradually introduce a different rhythm: As a single feeling or emotion or thought arises, enter into it and abide there—as though you would be ready to live your life right within that experience. . . [pause]
This abiding is not static. It invokes the dynamic rhythm of time without insisting on a linear momentum. . . .
As you sink into the experience, time expands. . . .”
[not read:]
“At first, you will experience abiding as a special event, something like ‘stopping’ time. As you grow more familiar with it, however, you will realize that you can abide within the flow of linear time. The two temporal dynamics can unfold simultaneously.” Exercise 5, “Abiding in Thought,” p. 262, Dynamics of Time and Space
A measure of time stress
We can once again take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now?
Make a mental note of this number. How does it compare to the number you estimated earlier in the course?
The End of Section Two of Five
This is the end of the second of five workshop sections.
Please go for a walk and when you return, make a few notes about your current experience, and especially your experience of time. It seems we often don’t notice changes after this kind of workshop until we leave our typical environment and walk around somewhere else.
Mastering Linear Time, Section 1 script
December 7, 2011
Mastering Linear Time
Mastering Linear Time workshop, script for Section 1
Title slide
This workshop presents principles and quite a few methods that can be useful for mastering linear time. If you’ve taken conventional time management (CTM) workshops, you’ll probably find that little or none of this seminar is covered by those workshops, in spite of the importance of this material for practical time management and for optimizing our performance, health, and well-being. Besides conventional time management (CTM), which handles the objectives and tasks we do, there’s inner time management (ITM), which optimizes how we do things. This is an inner time management (ITM) workshop. It focuses on optimizing felt time, or experiential time, the way we actually experience and feel time, rather than what tasks to do with our clock time.
For people in all but the most routine jobs, learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is necessary to optimize our lives both personally and professionally. Neither CTM nor ITM by itself resolves our issues with time. But by combining the discipline of planning and organizing what we do with methods of improving the way we do things, there is no limit to our productivity and well-being.
What is Time?
Most workshops on time promise to help us get more done with less stress. Some even promise to lead to mastery of time. But how can we master time if we don’t understand what time is? How can we get things done without feeling pressured, overwhelmed, or anxious about time, if we don’t know exactly what it is?
This essential question of what time is, is not dealt with by most conventional time management (CTM) workshops and books. This is probably because it’s a very difficult question.
How would you answer the question, “What is time?”
Three Types of Time
Typical CTM workshops only use one word for different aspects of time. We need some clarity about the different kinds of time. Here are some descriptions.
Physical, or event time is the continual occurrence of physical and experiential events. The word event is used to describe something that happened, or is happening ‘now’, like getting up in the morning, or noticing that you’re hungry. Event time is what we hear and see on TV and radio news shows.
A second face of time is symbolized by the faces of clocks and watches, different tools for measuring ‘event time’. Different cultures measure event time in different ways. These measurements allow us to compare and coordinate our activities.
The third face of time is the one that is probably most important for our happiness, although it’s also probably the face that is least understood and most undervalued. Here we will call it personal or psychological time, though it might also be called experienced time. It includes all the different ways we feel or experience time. We may feel time move quickly when we’re having ‘a great time’. During some of the best moments of our lives, things seem timeless, with little or no feeling of time passing. We feel time ‘drag’ or pass slowly when we’re bored, or having ‘a bad time’. We feel anxious about time when it seems we don’t have enough of it. Our FTP sets up familiar problems: time pressure, anxiety, overwhelm, and the feeling we don’t have enough time.
Rather than measuring or mirroring an ‘external flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP is just the aggregate result of resisting past negative experiences. (You’ll see some examples of this later on.) A composite of repressed energy, the FTP is independent of external physical events and speeds. In other words, our feeling of speed and time pressure is a product of past resisted experiences, and not a measure of current external forces or events.
A very important part of felt time for Westerners is called linear time, a sense of horizontal time flow among past, present, and future that moves at the same unchangeable speed for all of us.
Finally, though it’s a kind of lack of any feelings of time passing, timelessness can also be considered a kind of personal time.
Linear time’s conveyor
Linear time is a term that represents the usual way that most adults in the West experience time. In the linear view, time is like a conveyor belt that moves horizontally at a constant and unchangeable speed between past, present, and future ‘rooms’ in our experience. Time feels like it’s out of our control.
Linear time is a major feature of our Western cultural world-view. It portrays time as an absolute physical reality, and says that the passage of time is independent of consciousness. So from a linear time worldview, it doesn’t matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time, time doesn’t change. As a result, we may feel some helplessness, and think we can only adapt to this ‘reality‘ and perhaps try somehow to ‘keep up with’ the flow of time.
A measure of time stress
We can take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now? Make a mental note about what this number is right now.
What causes time pressure?
Research shows that time pressure and anxiety accompanying linear time, the habitual Western perspective of seeing time flowing linearly, is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people. Dr. Larry Dossey wrote, “Many illnesses–perhaps most–may be caused either wholly or in part by our misperception of time. . . . I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.” (Space, Time and Medicine, Larry Dossey, M.D., Shambhala, Boston & London, 1982.)
What is the source of time pressure? Again, most CTM seminars don’t even seriously ask this question. But if we know the source, we can probably handle it better. Here are some common candidates for the factors involved:
My boss
A deadline itself
A plate (to-do list) that’s too full, or a lack of clock time
Technology
Likes and dislikes, attitudes
Disorganization and confusion about what to do
Unclear priorities
Lack of an effective scheduling system
Here are two uncommon candidates:
Chemical imbalance
Imbalance in one’s energy flow.
My research indicates that the last six of these factors do affect time pressures, and the most important of these factors is the last one, an imbalance in one’s energy flow. This imbalance seems to be primarily an aggregate result of past emotional residues. Rather than measuring or mirroring some ‘external time flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP is typically the result of repressed energy, completely independent of external physical events and speeds. In other words, our feeling of speed and time pressure is typically a product of past ‘undigested’ experiences, and not a measure of current external forces or events. So full schedules and modern speedy technology are not the problem.
The main cause of time stress
The gradual process of developing and strengthening the sense of time passing can be expressed in terms of three primary human energy centers:
Some feeling rises to awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, and allow it to dissipate and dissolve, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy of the heart is lessened and we feel somewhat pressured.
Excess energy flows to the head and a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies as our thinking skips about the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience.
Energy in the area of the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel a bit more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. Thereafter there’s a more dissatisfied sense of self trying to seek satisfaction through various objects and activities.
Breathing Exercise
We can relieve time pressure very directly by balancing the energies of the head, throat, and heart centers.
The following breathing exercise is the single best remedy I’ve found for time pressure and anxiety about time passing. This technique is used in many martial arts and has been researched in applied kinesiology. It immediately brings a sense of balance within the energies of pressure and emotion.
In this exercise, breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of the tongue on the upper palate just in back of the front teeth. This position of the tongue may be a little strange at first, but you’ll probably adapt to it quickly. It very effectively balances left and right hemispheres of the brain, and connects the front and back central meridians.
Set up your environment so that you have five minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer on the next slide starts, just relax and breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. You can close your eyes or not, whichever you like. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness–this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath is reflected in the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
The 5-minute timer on the next slide will keep track of the time, and I’ll say “OK” to let you know when 5 minutes is up.
Breathing Exercise
Relax and let the breath move gently through both nose and mouth. . . . As you continue, let the breath become more and more even and continuous.
Breathing Exercise
OK.
How would you answer these questions about the exercise?:
Did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how?
Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
As a preventative, practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Relaxation Exercises (1)
When doing the following exercises, remember that you can pause these movies whenever you want to. Pausing might be especially helpful if some interesting feelings arise and you want to get into them more fully.
During these movement exercises let the movements and breathing be very smooth and continuous, without breaks. This is very important for rapid progress.
Sit or stand comfortably. Bend your arms at the elbow, lifting your hands until they are in front of your shoulders with the palms facing forward. Imagine that a great force is pushing against your hands, and slowly push it away. Let strong tension build in your hands and arms, but relax your belly and lower back, and breathe easily and lightly through both nose and mouth. Keep pushing this force away until your arms are stretched out in front of you. Your hands and arms may shake with tension. (Continue on the next slide.)
Relaxation Exercises (2)
. . . Then without releasing the tension—as if the force is more powerful than you–slowly move your arms back in front of your chest, keeping your belly relaxed.
Very slowly release the tension–take about one minute for this–feeling the sensations in your arms, chest, and body. Then slowly lower your hands and rest briefly, continuing to expand the feelings stimulated by producing and releasing tension in this way.
Do this exercise two more times, resting briefly after each repetition.
This exercise is called “Nurturing Satisfaction,” and it appears on pp. 318-319, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part II
Relaxation Exercises (3)
Stand with your feet a few inches apart, and your arms at your sides. Slowly and smoothly lift your arms away from your sides until they are directly overhead with the backs of the hands close, and the fingers straight. Relax your thighs and minimize any backward arching in your spine. Slowly let your arms descend to your sides. Take one full minute to bring them all the way down. Pay attention to the feeling tone as you move, as if seeing with the inner eyes of the senses. (Continue on the next slide.)
Relaxation Exercises (4)
. . . take another full minute to move your arms up again. Explore the flow of energy . . . . Use the steady, slow rhythm to increase the energy flow. When the arms are directly overhead, stretch up very slightly, with your thighs and legs as relaxed as possible. This stretch clears and settles the mind: go deeply into your sensations at this point.
Continue the movement three times. Try slowing the movement down even more, taking two minutes in each direction.
This exercise is called “Flying,” and it appears on pp. 168-9, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part I
Relaxation Exercises (5)
Stand with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight. Breathing softly through both nose and mouth, slowly raise your arms in front of you until they are overhead, with the palms forward. With your knees relaxed and straight but not locked, slowly bend forward from the waist while reaching out slightly with your arms. Bend forward and down, very slowly and evenly.
Do not let your head dominate the movement; relax your neck muscles. When your fingers come near to the floor, stay down briefly. Be very still. Slowly spread your fingers apart more. Exhale fully, releasing tension from your belly.
Relaxation Exercises (6)
Now very slowly, breathing evenly and gently, begin to rise, keeping your head between your arms. When you reach an upright position, continue to bend slightly backward, with your arms quite close to your head. Move very gently, with your knees straight and your belly and lower organs relaxed. Bend backward only a little. In this position, keep your exhalations gentle, and let the front of your body feel open.
Slowly straighten your neck and back, bringing your attention to the base of your skull. Again bend forward as before, moving as gently as possible, relaxing your belly, neck, and back.
Do the exercise three times. When you locate a tension, explore it with your feelings as completely as you can. When you fully experience the tightness, you will then be able to let it go. As you move, become one with your feelings; let them move you, spreading their energy to every molecule in your body until finally ‘you’ no longer exist, and there is only feeling.
Clock Watching – A New Way?
We can experiment a bit more with personal time and do an exercise to see how it changes.
Usually looking at a clock causes some anxiety. Does it have to? If you can relax while watching the clock, you can probably stay relaxed in nearly any situation.
This clock watching exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. It also balances left and right brain hemispheres, as shown by research in applied kinesiology.
Set up your environment so that you have five minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer on the next slide starts, just relax and watch the timer’s hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness–this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath is reflected in the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
Timer slide
Clock Watching and Breathing
OK.
During the clock watching exercise,
Did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how?
Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
You can practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Time Calling Exercise
Most of us are so used to linear time that it can be difficult to recognize it for what it is. The following short exercise may help you clarify what linear time is, as well as demonstrate how your perspective on time gets set up within a moment.
The next slide will play a recording having some phrases referring to different times. Just pay attention to your experience of time. Try to see how past, present, and future quickly get set up in your experience when the phrases are heard.
Time Calling Exercise
“One hour ago . . .
“One hour from now . . .
“Early this morning . . .
“Later this evening . . .
“Yesterday . . .
“Tomorrow . . .
“Last Monday . . .
“Next Monday . . .
“Two weeks ago . . .
“Two weeks from now . . .
“Last month . . .
“Next month . . .
“Last winter . . .
“Next winter . . .
“Last year . . .
“Next year . . .
“Five years ago . . .
“Five years from now . . .
“Ten years ago . . .
“Ten years from now . . .
Time Calling Exercise
Please think about your experience of the time calling exercise. Your feelings of time are especially noteworthy.
Do you see any reason or basis for the term ‘linear time’?
Did you notice how past, present, and future get set up within a moment? Was there any kind of swinging back and forth as you listened to the phrases?
Please do the time calling exercise again and see what happens this time.
Do you think that it is possible to think about past and future times without having a sense of being swung back and forth?
A measure of time stress
We can once again take a simple measure of time stress, so we can compare levels of stress that we experience, and then learn to control the stress.
On a scale from 0-10, where 0 = the least and 10 = the most, how much stress do you feel about time right now?
Make a mental note of this number. How does it compare to the number you estimated earlier in the course?
The End of Section One of Five
This is the end of the first of five workshop sections.
Please go for a walk and when you return, make a few notes about your current experience, and especially your experience of time. It seems we often don’t notice changes after this kind of workshop until we leave our typical environment and walk around somewhere else.
This is the script for a YouTube video that depicts the habitual Western problems with time pressure and the feeling of not having enough time, identifies common ways of not dealing with the problem, and then suggests that there are ways to change our “personal time” (like a “personal space”). The methodology, including a free article and workshop, is available at http://www.tskassociation.org/mastering-linear-time.html
Got time? “Feeling pressed for time? You’re not alone. A study of Americans and time shows more than half of us feel rushed. One-third of us feel rushed all the time.” (ABC news report on time pressure, 1999)
The major cause of modern stress may be time pressure and anxiety about not having enough time. We’re time starved. Many of us are now in a hurry most of the time, and have the strong feeling that we don’t have enough time. These mental and physiological habits strongly and adversely affect our health and well-being.
Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen said, “I would say that 95 percent of the stress in our lives relates to our feeling of time poverty.” Dr. Larry Dossey wrote, “I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.”
And not just health and well-being are affected, but creativity also. Recent Harvard Business School research concluded that creativity is inhibited by time pressure.
What’s the cause of our chronic ‘dis-ease’? In Western cultures, we learn to believe that time pressures are somehow ‘built into’ time, or are due mostly to speedy modern technology, and the best we can do is just adapt to it. But this clearly isn’t true. If stress was really built into time, we could never slow time down, or have a sense of timelessness. Yet decades ago, Dr. Abraham Maslow’s research showed that peak performance predictably included a sense of timelessness, without our usual stress about time passing.
Some researchers, including Dr. Steve Randall and Dr. Dean Ornish, believe that time stress depends mostly on the way we experience events, on our frame of mind, or personal time.
“It seems that even our sense of time passing, something that seems so much a part of the outside world, is an internal process, a fundamental part of our psychology.” (from a BBC series on time, by Michio Kaku) We all have a personal time that is much more variable than most of us realize.
[The usual way we experience time passing in Western countries, called linear time, does include pressure and anxiety about time passing. But linear time is not a physical reality, it's just our habitual Western way of experiencing time, a mental and physiological habit.]
Extensive research shows that there is a way to ‘beat the clock’, but not by hurrying or racing against the clock, and not by ignoring time, the way some meditation instruction tries to do, and not by some magical intervention. And not by conventional time management alone, which usually presumes that physical time flows and then focuses on clock time, so that it never gets to the bottom of psychological time.
In modern experience it sometimes feels like we’re on a treadmill, going nowhere fast.
By thoroughly examining our experience and seeing precisely how linear time seems like a conveyor moving between separate past, present, and future ‘rooms’ in our experience, its character gradually and naturally changes.
Our sense of linear time flow gradually changes into a kind of serial time flow, a less complicated replacement process in the same ‘spot’. Then, by continuing the exploration, we find that time doesn’t flow anywhere at all, either linearly or serially. Time eventually shows itself as the dynamic and creative process at the source of all experience.
The path most of us travel is summarized by imagery used during biofeedback by one of Dr. Larry Dossey’s patients: the river of time flows in a straight line, gradually curving and circling around on itself. Then the ground at the center of the circular river is covered over, leaving a peaceful, nonflowing lake.
[The path we travel in changing our experience of time is also similar to what happens when we slow down the projection of a movie. Normal projection makes the movie seem 'real', progressing continuously and at a normal rate. But if the rate of projection is gradually slowed down, flickers of light and space between frames appear as the continuity is disrupted, and eventually we see that our sense of the plot's reality is just a function of the speed of projection.]
For over thirty years some Western students have used an effective methodology to explore their experience of time and decrease time stress in their lives. Now this methodology is more easily and widely accessible. With collaboration, we might be able to start a popular ‘time movement’ to significantly lessen the time stress that all of us in the West experience in our lives.
Final still slide: Visit www.tskassociation.org for free resources
Script for the workshop (see http://www.tskassociation.org/mastering-linear-time.html )
Title slide
This short seminar introduces the Mastering Linear Time workshop, and points out some limitations of traditional time management. It also introduces the full range of benefits possible with time management and time mastery, and introduces some principles and a few methods that can be useful for mastering time. If you’ve taken conventional time management (CTM) workshops, you’ll probably find that little or none of this seminar is covered by those workshops, in spite of the importance of this material for practical time management and for optimizing our well-being.
Slide 2
Here’s a preview of what we’ll cover. We’ll briefly explore linear time, that limiting feeling of time flow that we learn when we grow up in Western cultures. Then we’ll look at the very different experiences of time present when we’re in the so-called ‘zone’ of peak experience or peak performance. We’ll see how these different experiences are examples of personal time, or psychological time, in contrast with two other types of time, clock time and physical time. Personal time is the way an individual experiences time, whether flowing, timeless, or otherwise. Then we’ll briefly look at some limitations of conventional time management. Most important is that CTM assumes that time really does flow, which makes it impossible to get to the source of time pressures. CTM can help us accomplish more, but in the process it often adds stress to our lives. CTM also doesn’t adequately deal with interruptions, time wasting, procrastination, and the feeling of urgency. We’ll also see that with methods of CTM and ITM there’s a wide range of possible ways of relating to time–many different levels of mastery of time, and time stress. We’ll do a short inquiry exercise to look at our personal time, and see whether between any two moments, we can perceive additional moments. This is actually a very simple, yet effective way to open up the constrictive way we habitually experience time. We can experiment a bit more with personal time and see how it changes while watching the second-hand of a clock while doing a special breathing technique used in Tai Chi and some other martial arts. We’ll look at an example of how our feeling of time passing is created and strengthened. Finally, we’ll review additional resources that are available to you.
Slide 3
Here’s one image of how we relate to time. Can you relate to it? It depicts what is now sometimes called time poverty, the feeling that you don’t have enough time.
What do you see here? Time feels like it’s out of our control, and we feel anxious, even desperate, because we don’t have enough of it. It seems that the passage of time is independent of consciousness. It doesn’t matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time, time doesn’t change. We may feel somewhat helpless, and think we can only adapt to this ‘reality’.
Slide 4
Can you relate to this? What do you see here? Struggling against deadline pressure?
Slide 5
Here’s another image of time. What do you think this depicts?
Linear time is a term to describe time that seems to move linearly like the horizontal conveyor belt in this picture. The belt seems to move at a constant, unchangeable speed between past, present, and future rooms in our experience. Linear time is the usual way that most adults in the West experience time. As time passes in a linear and directed way from one moment to another, we are positioned now, in the present. We spend time by putting tasks, our activities, in equal-sized containers. What we can accomplish seems limited by the size of the containers on the conveyor.
Slide 6
What are the effects of the experience of linear time? Seeing time linearly causes us to struggle and race against time. All the images we saw involve struggling vs. time. Our work is effortful and stressful; time has a kind of built in friction. Physician Larry Dossey said, “Many illnesses—perhaps most—may be caused either wholly or in part by our misperception of time. . . . I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.” (Larry Dossey, M.D.)
The last point here is that, as indicated by the conveyor image, what can be accomplished is limited by the size of the containers, seemingly by the structure of time itself.
Slide 7
Here are a few questions for you to consider. We’re not looking for right or wrong answers here, just a description of your experience. First, do you think that time always flows? Or not? If it seems to always flow, does it flow at a constant rate? Or do you think that the flow can somehow be changed?
Slide 8
Let’s consider a few more questions, this time about the so-called ‘zone’ of peak experience or peak performance.
When deeply in love, what’s your experience of time or timelessness? In deep meditation, what’s your experience of time? When doing your best work, what’s your experience of time?
About 70% of people say there’s timelessness; 30% say time goes fast, but without friction or lack of control.
Slide 9
Here are some quotes from athletes and meditation teachers about the experience of time during peak experiences. “There is a common experience in Tai Chi . . . . Awareness of the passage of time completely stops.” (p. 47, ITZ)
[football player John Brodie:] “Time seems to slow way down . . . . as if I had all the time in the world . . . and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever.” (p. 42, ITZ)
Tom Seaver: “As Rod Gaspar’s front foot stretched out and touched home plate, in the fraction of a second before I leaped out of the dugout . . . my whole baseball life flashed in front of me . . . .” (p. 47, ITZ)
Note that conventional time management workshops don’t usually discuss these peak experiences.
Slide 10
Here are some quotes about the experience of identity during peak experience. Auto racer Jimmy Clark said, “The car happens to be under me and I’m controlling it, but it’s as much a part of me as I am of it.” (p. 32, ITZ)
Another quote: [When judo is practiced properly,] “You will become one with him. You and your opponent will no longer be two bodies separated physically from each other but a single entity . . . .” (p. 32, ITZ)
Slide 11
This diagram is from my book, Results in No Time [p. 16.]
At least from the few quotes we looked at, it’s probably clear that peak experiences are quite different from our ordinary experiences. To summarize the research I’ve done on peak performance and the ‘zone’, I’ve drawn a number of dimensions in this circle, including #11 representing time and timelessness. The ‘zone’ of peak performance is represented by various valued qualities of experience at the center of this diagram. Our ordinary Western experience is depicted on the periphery. Ordinary experience is the range of experience that conventional time management presumes. Despite the small font, you might be able to see that dimension 11 shows timelessness as an aspect of the zone, whereas ‘linear time’ appears on the periphery. Dimension 6 on identity shows “self” on the periphery, compared to “ownerless happening” and knowing in the center.
Slide 12
The circle diagram on the previous slide focuses on how best to experience, independent of what we do; it applies to anything we do. It attempts to present the essence of peak performance, not just ‘best practices’ that are limited to specific industries, and not just character traits that are not truly characteristic of peak experience. Focusing on the way we do things seems to be the most essential key to self-actualization and improving our performance.
According to Maslow, “Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption.” (pp. 43-4, FRHN) So self-actualization is complete involvement in what is at hand. Then in terms of the circle diagram of the zone, we might say that mastery in life is like moving from the periphery to the center of the circle, increasing involvement whenever we can. We might define continuous improvement as increasing involvement, moving toward the center whenever possible.
Slide 13
Typical CTM workshops only use one word for different aspects of time. We need some clarity about the different kinds of time. Here are some descriptions.
Physical, or event time, is the continual occurrence of physical and experiential events. The word event is used to describe something that happened, or is happening ‘now’, like getting up in the morning, or noticing that you’re hungry.
A second face of time is symbolized by the faces of clocks and watches, different tools for measuring ‘event time’. Different cultures measure event time in different ways. These measurements allow us to compare and coordinate our activities.
The third face of time is the one that is probably most important for our happiness, although it’s also probably the face that is least understood and most undervalued. Here we will call it personal or psychological time, though it might also be called experienced time. It includes all the different ways we feel or experience time. We may feel time move quickly when we’re having ‘a great time’. During some of the best moments of our lives, things seem timeless, with little or no feeling of time passing. We feel time ‘drag’ or pass slowly when we’re bored, or having ‘a bad time’. We feel anxious about time when it seems we don’t have enough of it. Our feeling of time passing (FTP) sets up familiar problems: time pressure, anxiety, overwhelm, and the feeling we don’t have enough time.
Rather than measuring or mirroring an ‘external flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP is just the aggregate result of resisting past negative experiences. A composite of repressed energy, the FTP is independent of external physical events and speeds. In other words, our feeling of speed and time pressure is a product of past resisted experiences, and not a measure of current external forces or events.
A very important part of personal time for Westerners is called linear time, a sense of horizontal time flow among past, present, and future that moves at the same unchangeable speed for all of us.
Finally, though it’s a kind of lack of any feelings of time passing, timelessness can also be considered a kind of personal time.
Slide 14
Have you studied time management? What does time mgmt focus on? Events and tasks? Since American-European cultures focus on measured time and events in physical time, time management in Western countries has most often become simply a matter of choosing, organizing, and scheduling events.
If you studied CTM, did you find that it sometimes made you more nervous or anxious or pressured about time? Although time management seminar graduates have been able to accomplish more as a result of their training, there is growing recognition that they still feel like they don’t have enough time, and some feel like things have worsened.
If you studied CTM, do you no longer have time pressures?
CTM usually presumes that time flows independently of us. Does CTM assume that time is external, outside us, independent of our consciousness? Yes, most seminars say something like: “We all have the same amount of time.” End of story. No mention that there are different types of time, nor that there are different ways to experience time. So peak experience is ignored. CTM focuses only on that lowest-quality, pit-performance domain of human performance on the periphery of the Circle.
Slide 15
In discussing the improvement of fourth-generation time management training over the third generation, time management teacher Stephen Covey said, “Concerns about quality of life are just as likely to come from someone with a high level of time management training as from someone without it. . . . the fundamental problem remains . . . . This requires a paradigm and an approach that is . . . a fundamental break with less effective ways of thinking and doing.” Stephen Covey
But Franklin-Covey’s training presumes, and is built on top of the linear time paradigm, and so it still doesn’t handle the basic friction of time passing. However, CTM training doesn’t need to presume the linear time view and limit time management’s possibilities and usefulness.
Slide 16
So CTM doesn’t directly handle the basic pressure and anxiety of time flowing, nor does it define or clarify different types of time. To my knowledge, the only course that focuses on transforming our experience of linear time is Mastering Linear Time from the TSK Association.
[ See http://www.tskassociation.org/mastering-linear-time.html ]
But what can CTM do? It addresses what we do, not how we do things.
CTM can help us plan and identify goals and priorities, break down projects, schedule, track progress, coordinate resources, and deal with procrastination.
Slide 17
Most people will need CTM skills to optimize their productivity and well-being, and to reach the higher levels of time mastery.
Here are the steps for mastering conventional time management: 1. Clarify and write down your long- and short-term objectives in major areas of life. Keep the objectives current.
2. Break projects down into doable tasks. Update project plans as necessary.
3. For all identified tasks, set priorities and estimate the time required so that you’re aware of what’s important and when things are scheduled.
Slide 18
Here are additional steps for mastering conventional time management:
4. Schedule periodically and create to-do lists and calendars with scheduled tasks and appointments
5. Do the tasks, focusing on top priorities, and doing things in the time allocated (except for unexpected changes).
6. Periodically ask Lakein’s question: “What is the best use of my time right now?” Change tasks as appropriate.
Whenever it’s useful and appropriate, you can learn these skills in Mastering Time 103, available at www.manage-time.com/103Frames.html
Slide 19
Here are some limitations of conventional time management. As mentioned earlier, CTM doesn’t directly handle time pressure and the feeling that we don’t have enough time. On the contrary, by leaving the underlying linear time flow untouched, it presumes that a certain level of pressure is a natural phenomenon that we must adapt to.
CTM can’t adequately describe time wasting. It usually simplistically categorizes tasks on the presumption that they either have inherent value or lack it. But with the possible exception of those things we’re doing but don’t really want to be doing, time wasting can’t really be defined in terms of specific tasks. Not addressing how we do things keeps CTM from recognizing different levels of functioning, with different degrees of wasting time.
CTM also can’t adequately describe interruptions, which are not always ‘bad’. Not addressing how we do things keeps CTM from recognizing different possibilities for being interrupted, some of which aren’t disruptive.
CTM seminars sometimes emphasize distinguishing what feels important vs. what feels urgent or pressing. Urgency is a feeling that seems to be an aspect of linear time’s momentum, which, again, is not directly addressed by methods of CTM. Although we can categorize things as urgent or important, this does little if anything to reduce the momentum associated with the task. However, with appropriate methods, the sense of urgency can be directly lessened.
Slide 20
Here’s the third slide on how to master time. In addition to using the methods of CTM, to master time we need to continually monitor how we’re doing things. We can use the idea of different levels of involvement, which might, e.g., be defined in terms of awareness, concentration, and energy, and try to deepen involvement whenever possible. You can use the question, “Am I completely involved in what’s at hand?” Or, “Am I timelessly involved?” (This question about doing things right corresponds to Lakein’s question about whether you’re doing the right thing.) Specific ways of improving involvement (in whatever terms it’s defined) can effectively handle procrastination, time wasting, interruptions and disruptions, urgency, etc.
Slide 21
Progress can be measured in two ways. Birds need two wings to fly–they can’t fly with one wing. One is not more important than the other; they’re both necessary. Similarly, it seems that to measure progress in life, we need to periodically consider two questions. One question is, “Am I doing the right thing?” A second one is, “Am I doing things right?”
Another way of stating the first question was provided by time management guru Alan Lakein: “What is the best use of my time right now?” (How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. Signet, New York, 1973, p. 96) Most of us have numerous tasks and objectives that we wish to accomplish. Among all these things, what is best to do right now? Occasionally asking this question is very important. This conventional time management (CTM) question helps us clarify what to do.
Another way of stating the second question is, “Am I timelessly involved in what I’m doing?” This inner time management (ITM) question helps us clarify how to do things. It asks whether we are doing things in an optimal, timeless way. People report that in peak experiences of all kinds, there is no sense of time flowing in a way that feels out of control. So it’s helpful to ask “Randall’s question” periodically: “Am I timelessly involved in what I’m doing?” If not, if we’re not totally involved, or if we feel time passing in a way that has even a slight bit of pressure or anxiety, there’s room for improvement in both productivity and well-being.
Slide 22
With methods of CTM and ITM there’s a wide range of possible ways of relating to time–many different levels of mastery of time, and time stress. Six levels appear here and on the next slide.
0. Struggling Against Time
Time is outside us, and we race and struggle against it. We are victims of pressure, overwhelm, and anxiety, thinking that it’s normal and unchangeable.
1. Wondering About Ways to Relate to Time
Our relationship to time has loosened up, and we’re wondering about the possibilities. We no longer feel consistently pressured and anxious.
2. Seeing Time As An Ally, Not an Opposing Force
We’re beginning to see how our experience of time is created, and are able to transform some time pressure and anxiety by various methods.
Slide 23
3. Allying with Time
During breaks, we’re able to reduce time stress by 50%. We see different levels of time and how they’re related.
4. Empowering Time
While working, we can reduce time stress by 50%. We are aware of subtle pointings, including a self-other duality, that can lead to linear time experiences. The Time, Space, and Knowledge Association offers courses that can help reach this level.
5. Abiding in Time
We never let time stress get established. We abide in the peaceful, yet energetic eye of our whirlwind of activities.
Slide 24
Now we’ll take a look at psychological or personal time, which is not addressed by CTM. Like a personal space, we have a personal time that can be defined as the length of clock time it takes us to process a bit of information. This varies but we don’t usually pay much attention to it. It’s like a frequency of awareness, similar to the flashing light that projects movies. We can learn to speed it up and slow it down, opening up new levels of performance and well-being.
Slide 25
We can do a little inquiry exercise to explore our personal time. We talk about moments all the time, but how long is a moment? How long is your moment? At any time this could be different for all of us. Make a mental note about how long this seems.
Now, between any two of such moments, see whether you can perceive additional moments, perhaps by just noticing what’s there, perhaps by relaxing while somehow turning up the speed of your awareness. Continue this experiment for a minute, seeing whether you can perceive additional, possibly subtle, moments between any two moments.
————————
OK. What happened? Did you find something you might call “moments between moments?” Did your experience of time change in the process?
Slide 26
We can experiment a bit more with personal time and do an exercise to see how it changes.
Usually looking at a clock causes some anxiety. Does it have to? If you can relax while watching the clock, you can probably stay relaxed in nearly any situation.
This clock watching exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. It also balances left and right brain hemispheres, as shown by research in applied kinesiology.
Set up your environment so that you have five minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer on the next slide starts, just relax and watch the timer’s hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness–this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath is reflected in the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
Slide 27
This is the timer slide.
Slide 28
During the clock watching exercise, did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how? Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
You can practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Slide 29
Having occasionally known the freeing timelessness of peak experiences, we might very well ask, “What is it that keeps us from having more peak time experiences?” This question can be answered in several ways:
First, our cultures in the West confuse physical time, measured time, and personal time, providing only one word for ‘time’. They implicitly teach that we should always feel time flowing (or we’re ‘losing track’ of time). This makes it difficult to facilitate peak experience of any kind.
Second, very few people are teaching direct methods to optimize our personal time. Numerous meditation techniques evoke a sense of timelessness, though they often try to just ignore time’s passing rather than examine exactly what time is. However, numerous direct practices are offered by the TSK Association to understand experientially what time is and transform it.
Third, Western cultures implicitly teach that turning away from, or even suppressing any kind of ‘negative’ experience is normal and natural. However, when we turn away from ‘negative’ experiences, the experience of time passing arises and is strengthened. An example of how this occurs is discussed in the next slides. Repressing or suppressing the energy of ‘negative’ feeling transforms it into a stronger sense of time flowing, whether it seems to flow more slowly or more quickly. Relating to experiences as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ (where ‘positive’ is understood as the opposite of ‘negative’) is only one of numerous possibilities.
Slide 30
Infants don’t seem to have a sense of time passing. But we start learning to avoid some feelings quite early on. According to the psychiatrist Peter Hartocollis (in Time and Timelessness, pp. 5-6): “The experience or sense of time, and later the perception of time as an attribute of objective reality, is a function of consciousness. It grows along with consciousness, beginning with the differentiation of the self from the object world.…What gradually establishes the sense of time as duration . . . is the felt inadequacy of the self in terms of growing unpleasure and the awareness of the possibility that the need-fulfilling object—mother—may or may not come.”
Slide 31
Let’s take a look at how our feeling of time passing is created and strengthened. Here’s an example from Jed, the ‘optimal worker’ in my book Results in No Time:
“My wife Becky and I were at the end of a wonderful weekend at a lake in Wisconsin. We had both slowed down to the point where we just timelessly looked out on the lake as the sun went down below a cloak of color. But she had to leave on a business trip that evening. After she packed her bags, we said goodbye. I felt very sad. But rather than deal with the sadness, I started thinking about when we’d be together again, a week later. As we put her things into the car I said, ‘I miss you already.’ And I actually did feel a bit as though she had already left. Time slipped by quickly as I unsuccessfully tried to savor the last moments with her. . . . I think what happened was that I avoided the sadness, and then the repressed sadness energy showed up as my intensified feeling of time passing.” (pp. 38-9)
Slide 32
In summary, there are two types of time management. CTM is used to determine what we want to do by organizing, prioritizing, scheduling, etc. But CTM usually presumes a SOTP and the linear time paradigm.
ITM helps optimize the way we do things by increasing our involvement in whatever we’re doing: We can move to increasing levels of involvement: (1) holding back from doing something; (2) resigning ourselves to doing something; (3) getting into it; (4) being involved; (5) being preoccupied, engrossed, or absorbed.
Slide 33
Although Western cultures still believe that a sense of time passing is ‘normal’, the pressure seems to be growing stronger and stronger. In this time of accelerating change and increasing time pressure, it’s becoming more and more necessary to change our perception of time. Time management teachers Hunt and Hait wrote, “Many corporations are aware that they need to alter how they perceive time and its relationship to personal satisfaction if they mean to remain competitive.”
Dr. Rechtschaffen wrote, “Shifting rhythm is essential not only to physical and mental well-being, but also to improved productivity. A good many management consultants believe this as much as I do.”
Slide 34
Here’s a list of resources available for time management and time mastery:
Training Seminars include: Mastering Linear Time, Organizing Your Life-Time, Taking the Pressure Out of Deadlines, Beat the Clock , and Turning Procrastination Around.
Coaching is available for individuals and groups—take advantage of a free, half-hour needs assessment interview.
Many publications are available: Two books, Flow, Glow, and Zero, and Results in No Time, numerous articles on time management and time mastery, cassette tapes, email newsletters, and two websites, www.tskassociation.org and www.manage-time.com. If you have any questions, or want more information email steve@manage-time.com
Essential Time Mastery — script for a short seminar on YouTube
November 5, 2011
The seminar/movie is on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/sGqV6KViRuw
Here’s the script for the seminar, by slide.
Slide 1:
This short seminar introduces essential definitions; inquiry about the zone, personal time, and the source of time pressure; and two powerful methods that can be useful for mastering time.
Slide 2:
Typical conventional time management (CTM) workshops only use one word for different aspects of time. We need some clarity about the different kinds of time. Here are some descriptions.
Physical, or event time is the continual occurrence of physical and experiential events. The word event is used to describe something that happened, or is happening ‘now’, like getting up in the morning, or noticing that you’re hungry. Event time is what we hear and see on TV and radio news shows.
A second face of time is symbolized by the faces of clocks and watches, different tools for measuring ‘event time’. Different cultures measure event time in different ways. These measurements allow us to compare and coordinate our activities.
The third face of time is the one that is probably most important for our happiness, although it’s also probably the face that is least understood and most undervalued. Here we will call it personal or psychological time, though it might also be called experienced time. It includes all the different ways we feel or experience time. We may feel time move quickly when we’re having ‘a great time’. During some of the best moments of our lives, things seem timeless, with little or no feeling of time passing. We feel time ‘drag’ or pass slowly when we’re bored, or having ‘a bad time’. We feel anxious about time when it seems we don’t have enough of it. Our feeling of time passing (FTP) sets up familiar problems: time pressure, anxiety, overwhelm, and the feeling we don’t have enough time.
Rather than measuring or mirroring an ‘external flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP is just the aggregate result of resisting past negative experiences. (For examples illustrating this, watch the longer introductory time mastery seminar that you can sign up for at http://www.tskassociation.org/got-time-introduction.html ) A composite of repressed energy, the FTP is independent of external physical events and speeds. In other words, our feeling of speed and time pressure is a product of past resisted experiences, and not a measure of current external forces or events.
A very important part of personal time for Westerners is called linear time, a sense of horizontal time flow among past, present, and future that moves at the same unchangeable speed for all of us.
Finally, though it’s a kind of lack of any feelings of time passing, timelessness can also be considered a kind of personal time.
Slide 3:
Now we’ll take a look at psychological or personal time, which is not addressed by CTM. Like a personal space, we have a personal time that can be defined as the length of clock time it takes us to process a bit of information. This varies but we don’t usually pay much attention to it. It’s like a frequency of awareness, similar to the flashing light that projects movies. We can learn to speed it up and slow it down, opening up new levels of performance and well-being.
Slide 4:
Research shows that time pressure and anxiety accompanying linear time, the habitual Western perspective of seeing time flowing linearly, is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people. Dr. Larry Dossey wrote, “Many illnesses–perhaps most–may be caused either wholly or in part by our misperception of time. . . . I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.” (Space, Time and Medicine, Larry Dossey, M.D., Shambhala, Boston & London, 1982.)
What is the source of time pressure? Most CTM seminars don’t even seriously ask this question. But if we know the source, we can probably handle it better. Here are some common candidates for the factors involved:
My boss
A deadline itself
A plate (to-do list) that’s too full, or a lack of clock time
Technology
Likes and dislikes, attitudes
Disorganization and confusion about what to do
Unclear priorities
Lack of an effective scheduling system
Here are two uncommon candidates:
Chemical imbalance
Imbalance in one’s energy flow.
My research indicates that the last six of these factors do affect time pressures, and that the most important of these factors is the last one, an imbalance in one’s energy flow. This imbalance seems to be primarily an aggregate result of past emotional residues. Rather than measuring or mirroring some ‘external time flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP is typically the result of repressed energy, completely independent of external physical events and speeds. In other words, our feeling of speed and time pressure is typically a product of past ‘undigested’ experiences, and not a measure of current external forces or events. So full schedules and modern speedy technology are not the problem.
Slide 5:
The gradual process of developing and strengthening the sense of time passing can be expressed in terms of three primary human energy centers:
Some feeling rises to awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, and allow it to dissipate and dissolve, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy of the heart is lessened and we feel somewhat pressured.
Excess energy flows to the head and a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies as our thinking skips about the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience.
Energy in the area of the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel a bit more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. Thereafter there’s a more dissatisfied sense of self trying to seek satisfaction through various objects and activities.
Slide 6:
Let’s consider a few more questions, this time about the so-called ‘zone’ of peak experience or peak performance.
When deeply in love, what’s your experience of time/timelessness?
In deep meditation, what’s your experience of time? When doing your best work, what’s your experience of time?
About 70% of people say there’s timelessness; 30% say time goes fast, but without friction or lack of control.
Slide 7:
Here are some quotes from athletes and meditation teachers about the experience of time during peak experiences. “There is a common experience in Tai Chi . . . . Awareness of the passage of time completely stops.” (p. 47, In The Zone (ITZ), Murphy and White)
[football player John Brodie:] “Time seems to slow way down . . . . as if I had all the time in the world . . . and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever.” (p. 42, ITZ)
Tom Seaver: “As Rod Gaspar’s front foot stretched out and touched home plate, in the fraction of a second before I leaped out of the dugout . . . my whole baseball life flashed in front of me . . . .” (p. 47, ITZ)
Note that conventional time management workshops don’t usually discuss these peak experiences.
Slide 8:
We can do a little inquiry exercise to explore our personal time. We talk about moments all the time, but how long is a moment? How long is your moment? At any time this could be different for all of us. Make a kind of mental note about how long this seems. . . .
Now, between any two of such moments, see whether you can perceive additional moments, perhaps by just noticing what’s there, perhaps by relaxing while somehow turning up the speed of your awareness. . . .
Continue this experiment for a minute, seeing whether you can perceive additional, possibly subtle, moments between any two moments. . . .
OK. What happened? Did you find something you might call “moments between moments?” Did your experience of time change in the process? . . .
Slide 9:
We can experiment a bit more with personal time and do an exercise to see how it changes.
Usually looking at a clock causes some anxiety. Does it have to? If you can relax while watching the clock, you can probably stay relaxed in nearly any situation.
This clock watching exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. It also balances left and right brain hemispheres, as shown by research in applied kinesiology.
Set up your environment so that you have five minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. When the timer on the next slide starts, just relax and watch the timer’s hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness–this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath is reflected in the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
Slide 10: timer
Slide 11:
During the clock watching exercise, did the sense of time pressure and anxiety decrease?
Did the feeling of time change? If so, how?
Did every minute seem equally long?
How were pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time?
You can practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember it. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will probably change.
Slide 12:
Here’s a list of resources available for time management and time mastery:
For a free 45-minute movie on mastering time, sign up at http://www.tskassociation.org/got-time-introduction.html
For a complete Mastering Linear Time workshop, see:
http://www.tskassociation.org/mastering-linear-time.html
Coaching is available for individuals and groups—take advantage of a free, half-hour needs assessment interview. For more information, email steve@manage-time.com
Other available publications: Two books, Flow, Glow, and Zero, and Results in No Time, numerous articles on time management and time mastery, two websites, www.tskassociation.org and www.manage-time.com, cassette tapes, and email newsletters.
When there’s deadline pressure, the situation is always somewhat inflexible and intensely charged, like a carbonated beverage that’s been vigorously shaken. So all the keys to releasing the pressure loosen up this structure in some way.
The Situation You’re Starting With
Before moving on to the tips for releasing pressure, it’s important to understand exactly what we’re dealing with. Here’s a description of a typical deadline scenario:
1. Experience of time. Time is flowing from past to present to future at a constant and uncontrollable rate. You’re in the present looking toward a distant future deadline. But the deadline in the future is relentlessly coming closer. Every time you think about the deadline closing in on you, there’s anxiety and pressure, because you ‘realistically’ might not have enough time to get the work done on time. You may struggle or race against time, but nothing that you do can slow time down.
2. Well-being. There’s dissatisfaction or a lack of fulfillment here in the present. It might feel like you are being squeezed or confined, overwhelmed, or there might even be a sense of impending doom. Since the feelings are so unpleasant, there’s a tendency for you to look forward to a better time after the deadline.
3. Effort. The work feels stressful and takes quite a bit of effort. It’s gradually wearing you down. You might think that if things continue like this you could get sick.
4. Clock time estimation. Equal units of clock time seem to hold equal and limited potential for accomplishing things. Estimating how long it will take to finish the task is based on this idea of equal capacity/unit of time, as well as past experiences of how long it took you to accomplish similar things. This way of estimating appears somewhat reliable.
The Optimal Work Experience
Now that we’re clear on the problem we’re starting with, let’s see whether we can get an idea for the ideal way that this pressured scenario can change. From your own experience take a minute to recall three projects during which you worked under a deadline and performed at your best for a while. What was it like to work optimally? What were the different qualities of those experiences?
Now see whether your examples fit the following description of peak productivity under a deadline, when the worker is in what might be called ‘the zone’. This description is a summary of peak performance research.
1. Experience of time. Only during breaks do you feel time flowing from past to present to future. During peak work performance you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that there’s no awareness of time flowing. If you had to describe your experience of time, most likely (90% probability) you’d say it was timeless. You might (10% probability) say that time was going very quickly, yet it wasn’t making you anxious with its passing. Time certainly doesn’t feel out of control, and you’re not trying to race against it.
In general you don’t feel a lack of time—you just concentrate on what you’re doing, which is going very well. You occasionally plan and think about the deadline, but this thinking doesn’t cause much anxiety or pressure.
2. Well-being. There’s very little sense of dissatisfaction; in fact you feel invigorated, whole, and happy with the way things are going. As you work, you might occasionally think of the fact that the task isn’t done, but this is very inconsequential. You’re not worrying about not being done, nor are you looking foward to being done because that will be a better time than the present. The important thing is that you’re really involved in what you’re doing—you’re getting results and having a good time by being engrossed.
3. Effort. The work may be requiring mental or physical energy, but it doesn’t feel very stressful. The work might even seem to be effortless in a sense, flowing with a momentum of its own. You may not feel separate from the activity. Like being in the eye of a hurricane, there can be a sense of presence and peacefulness even in the midst of quick or physically demanding activity.
4. Clock time estimation. Time seems very flexible and changeable, even unpredictable. Occasionally you check your progress and estimate whether you’ll be able to finish on time. But you don’t take these estimates very seriously, partly because time doesn’t seem very real during this peak experience, and partly because you know these estimates proved inaccurate so many times before. There’s a sense of everpresent opportunity and possibility: perhaps, for example, you’ll get some insight on how the work process can be improved.
Nine Tips for Releasing the Pressure
Now you can try the tips to change an inflexible pressured situation into a more flowing and enjoyable experience. Remember that there’s nothing really fixed about pressure situations. Pressures aren’t built into certain jobs—we add them to neutral situations. If the situation seems unchangeable, it’s just because this feeling of unchangeability is still part of the structure. Do one of the following tips to transform this feeling.
1. Concentrate your energies. Deadline pressure is actually a sign that we’re resisting what we’re doing rather than getting totally involved. So see how involved you can get in what you’re doing. Drop any concern about not having enough time and get absorbed in the work. By focusing and holding nothing back, identifying completely with what you’re doing so that you’re aware of nothing else, your awareness and energy integrate, work becomes peak performance, and your sense of well-being can soar.
Periodically see whether some aspect of yourself or something in your awareness is still split off from the activity. Can you bring the energies together somehow? If you can, your productivity and sense of integration will improve a bit more.
2. Balance your breathing. For some immediate relief from anxiety and pressure, practice this kind of breathing: Relax and breathe through both nose and mouth with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate a couple of inches behind the front teeth. This technique is used in many martial arts and has been researched in applied kinesiology. It immediately brings a sense of balance within the energies of pressure and emotion.
As a preventative, practice this way of breathing as often as you can. After a month or so your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will change. (See pp. 35-7, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 1, by Tarthang Tulku (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 1978).
3. Turn time around. Under a deadline we’re stuck thinking about some future date when the project is due. Loosen up this habitual perspective once in a while by looking from a time in the future back towards the present and past. This can be done in different ways.
Try a different way of planning the rest of the project. Suppose it’s the day after the deadline. Look back over the past toward what used to be the present, and make a few notes about what happened on the project up till this day after the deadline. How does looking back after the past events feel? Does it relieve the pressure and sense of incompletion that you felt before? Do you get any insight about unexpected directions that the project took?
From the present, look backwards at a previous deadline from some other project. Find another one farther back in the past. Another, farther back. Another. Etc. After doing this for a few minutes, notice how you feel. Is there any relief from the habit of looking foward? Is there a sense of relaxation, contentment, or presence that wasn’t there before?
4. Find out what emotions are adding intensity. If you don’t complete the task/project on time, what will happen? If you do complete things on time, what will be the result? Why are you motivated? What feelings are involved? Would some of your feelings like to push things away or get rid of something? Would some of your feelings like to get something or draw something closer? Are you confused about something? If you hear yourself saying, I’m really looking forward to . . . ,” see whether there’s a negative feeling of some kind that you’re avoiding by anticipating being done with the job.
5. Change the way time is flowing. Pressure is part of a way of experiencing time flowing moment by moment from past to present to future. It’s this relentless and uncontrollable flow of time that makes us anxious. But we don’t need to experience time this way. We’ve all had many experiences when time slowed down or when we weren’t aware of time passing. And we all have certain activities or projects or techniques that easily foster such ‘time warps’ or timelessnesses.
Think about what you like to do that normally does away with the feeling of time flowing from moment to moment. Then do one of those activities until the pressure lightens. The choice is ours whether we continue to reinforce the restricted and pressured linear flow of time or open it up to some less fixed experience.
6. Relieve your tension. Either standing or sitting, put your hands close to your shoulders with your palms facing forward. Breathe through both nose and mouth with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate a couple of inches behind the front teeth. Now, while imagining that a great force (the pressure of your job? the deadline?) is pushing against your hands, slowly push the force forward. There should be strong tension in your arms and shoulders, but your belly and the rest of your body can be relaxed. It’s as though part of you is balanced and undisturbed within the eye of a tornado while there is strong energy and movement around you. Keep pushing the force away till your arms are straight out in front. Then while maintaining the tension slowly move your arms back to the starting position.
Slowly release the tension, letting it melt. Just keep relaxing for three minutes and attend to the sensations and feelings as they become more subtle. (This exercise is from pp. 318-19, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2.)
7. Exaggerate your current perspective on time. From your present position in time look forward to the deadline. What do you see then? Now look farther ahead into the future until you identify another event. What do you see then? Once again look farther ahead into the future for another event. What do you see? Continue. What do you notice? Is there any outcome of this process?
8. Find gaps between moments. Our typical linear view of time, with its sequence of continuous and equally spaced moments, is only one view of time, not ‘the realistic view’. This view can be explored and opened up.
Watch sensitively as one moment slips to another moment. As you continue, notice whether one moment always follows another in a line. Are there variations in the flow? Are there occasional gaps between moments? Is time more flexible than you normally think it is?
9. Defuse the projection that you don’t have enough time. Your estimate of ‘how long’ your job will take is probably a projection of your past performance rather than some ‘realistic’ view of time. Most of us are used to working in a certain fixed way. So our estimate is really a measure of the past, not the future. You can either continue to see it as realistic and fix it in your mind even more, or you can drop your belief in its truth and allow the possibility of accomplishing the job in less time.
What Happened Next Year?
October 9, 2011
Have you given up making New Year’s resolutions because they don’t seem to work? Some say that people keep only 20% of their resolutions.
How about a different approach to resolutions? Making resolutions is often a matter of will power and guilt, an exercise in strongly desiring and intending to do what we think we should. Here is a great way to intuitively plan work projects and clarify personal directions and effortlessly cut through the New Year’s hazards of guilt and wishful thinking by reviewing accomplishments from a future time.
Did I say, “reviewing accomplishment from a future time?” Yes, it may seem strange, but it works. Try this: set up your environment so you will be undisturbed for 20 minutes. If it’s really January 1, 2012, for example, assume it is the morning of January 1, 2013! At the top of a piece of paper, write: “It is January I, 2013.” Now write down what happened during the year of 2012.
As much as possible, do not just imagine, but get into the experience that 2012 is over and you are remembering what happened. Then write whatever happened, whatever comes to mind, in past tense. Do not try to be optimistic or pessimistic. Just stay open and take whatever comes to mind as you look “back” over the year and write what you “remember” in past tense.
Whatever happened is over, so no effort need be involved in thinking about it. Take 15 minutes or so for this process, and write everything in past tense.
Quite often people will get insights about their goals and the obstacles that might arise as they work toward the goals.Sometimes people ‘see’ that they actually want to pursue a different goal than the one they first intended. Sometimes it looks like their goals won’t be accomplished in the time period. Nevertheless, they often get a sense of relief, peace, presence, or rest, even if their goals did not appear to be reached. Why? Most of our lives seem to be spent trying to get somewhere ‘up ahead’, become someone else, or to get satisfaction from objects, events or relationships outside ourselves.
Very often we expect that we will be happier later on, up ahead, after we complete our goals and projects. But our experience is continually depreciated by habitually ‘looking forward’ to things. We are always trying to get there, somewhere or somewhen else, rather than allowing ourselves to be here.
When we change our perspective on time with an exercise like this one, we can break through this off-balance way of seeking happiness “up ahead,” or “going forward.” Then, instead of struggling against time to get to our goals, we can just be here in peace and presence. We can–if only for a moment–be here, instead of trying to get there. We can end up in a peaceful sense of timelessness, even while thinking about past and future.
