Hi %%FIRST_NAME%%,
Welcome to Week 14!
How did you get on with the mindful hand massage last week?
How about sharing how you got on – any questions, any insights – over at the forum?
www.clarejosa.com/soulsizedliving/showthread.php?305-Week-13-Is-it-time-to-get-hands-on
This week we’re moving on to my favourite magic wand for creating more time.
Could This Be The Solution To Not Having Enough Time?
How often do we spend our time fretting about not having enough time? It seems to fly by. And the more stressed we are, the faster it goes.
I’d like to share with you a near-magic-wand for creating more time in your day.
No, it’s not a time machine. And you don’t have to give up sleeping. It’s a single gratitude phrase – a mantra – that you can choose to say, with mindfulness. And its effects can feel miraculous.
The way we feel about time is determined by the stories we tell ourselves about it.
When we’re hiding away in the realms of the Monkey Mind and its stories of stress, time is a scarce resource over which we have no control. We run the mantra, “I don’t have enough time.” And we prove ourselves right. In fact:
Whether you think you have enough time or you think you don’t, you’re right.
Time is largely a matter of perception. When we convince ourselves that we don’t have enough time, we trigger the body’s sympathetic nervous system’s ‘fight or flight’ stress responses, setting off chemical reactions that pump you full of adrenalin and other stress hormones. These shift your thinking to the primal part of the brain, responsible for life-or-death short-term decision making, meaning it’s harder for you to concentrate and you will get less done.
It’s as though getting stressed about time steals time form you. Yes, sometimes we don’t have enough time. But mindfulness can help you to make the most of the time you have.
We all have the same number of minutes in a day. And, within reason, we have a huge amount of choice over how we spend them. The whole concept of ‘have to’ and ‘not enough time’ is a story concocted by the good old Monkey Mind, based on the diet we have fed it over the decades.
So how can you magically create the feeling of having more time?
By being grateful for the time you have.
Giving gratitude for the time you have lets go of the Monkey Mind’s stress-stories and helps time to expand. So if you feel rushed and need more time, here’s what you can do:
How to magically find more time
- Take three mindful breaths (see week 1)
- Allow yourself to settle in your body, rebalancing the body’s stress and relaxation systems for a few moments.
- Now allow yourself to experience the effects of the mantra:
I am grateful for the time I have. - Consciously choose to focus, mindfully, on feeling grateful for the time you have. Notice the shift – you’ll feel it in your body and mind.
After all, this moment is all the time we’re ever going to get, so why on earth waste even a moment of it by feeling grumpy about it?
This week I invite you to use your mindful breathing to bring you back to the present moment, then mindfully say the mantra:
I am grateful for the time I have.
And notice what happens!
When you’re ready to feed back on this, here’s the forum link:
How to magically create more time.
I hope you have a great week. I’ll be back next time with a sixty second ‘use-it-anywhere’ mindfulness technique.
Namaste,
