Trusting the Timing of Life 

Scarcity of time

What is time?  Who set the clocks and put the hands where they reside?  Who decided how many days make up this thing we call a year?  Why is it that we never feel like we have enough time, or sometimes too much of it, or that things aren’t occurring in proper rhythm within it?  Time is but an arbitrary construct that we’ve created in our mind and yet we allow ourselves to feel controlled, confined or ruled by it.  We tell ourselves that such and such (i.e. a project, the trajectory of a relationship we are in, something we want to buy or create, the healing of our body, our healing process in general, our spiritual evolution, etc.) must be completed or accomplished within a certain time frame or else it means xyz.  Xyz is “I’ve failed”, “It’ll never happen”, “I won’t make it”, “Its hopeless”’ “Everything will fall apart”, “I won’t have enough money, love or support”, “I’ll die”, “Things won’t work out for me”, “I’ll hurt or suffer forever”, and the like.  You can see there is a lot of pressure we place on ourselves and life all due to the stories that we create about what the timing of things means.  

There is also an overarching tendency for us as humans to rush things and make them occur as fast as possible.  We have very little tolerance for a slower pace particularly due to our increasingly fast paced world.  Advancements in technology have allowed communications to happen nearly instantaneously that used to take a week or month to occur.  We are learning to expect that everything move at this instantaneous pace less we get impatience or start to think that something is wrong with us, others or the world if it doesn’t move quickly.  This expectation for immediacy along with bombardment of the senses has placed our nervous systems into sympathetic dominance (active mode) and has left us challenged in our capacity to relax and be present.  Instead we are easily distractible and have trouble maintaining our attention in the present which is here now because we think that what is here now should include something else or more and we can’t pause ourselves long enough to even see what is here.  

Our story of scarcity of time has its foundation in our lack of trust of the natural unfolding.  Our perspective of not enough time, things not occurring fast enough or not happening now when we want them be happening now leaves us feeling victim to time while doing our best to try to beat time.  We focus on what we feel we will lose, what we will have to shift and all the things that will occur that we think we don’t want to occur because the timing of life isn’t working out for us.  We think that we know what is the best unfolding of everything and forget that we actually don’t.  We truly don’t have a clue what or when things are supposed to happen.  Things occur exactly at the pace they must whether or not we are personally in agreement with that timing.   

Being in the Present 

Stably awake

Being present brings with in a sense of wakefulness and aliveness that we all hunger deeply for.  To be stably present or awake is the goal of all healing and of the spiritual path.  Get that.  The goal is not that you feel different, have different sensations, achieve certain things, succeed in finishing projects, get the relationship you want, have connection to your higher self, experience all the mystical inlays and outlays of universe, etc, but instead the only goal is that you arrive to now.  Not replaying the past, not focused on the future, but here now.  No matter how comfortable or uncomfortable the here now is, it is the only place that life occurs.  To not be here is to be lost in thoughts or other distractions.  This is the place of wishful thinking and hoping things change, but not being able to make any impact because you aren’t present and are stuck in your head/thoughts instead.

This goal of presence if you will must be realized in the moment rather than one that occurs in the future or “in time”.  When you are fully present you then realize that there is no time, but until you arrive here in this moment life will seem like a constant linear progression with past and future.  Presence is key so that we are awake to whatever wants to unfold in this moment, rather than what our mind tells us should be happening in this moment.  To be focused on our minds timeline will produce suffering each and every time.  To instead be present is to know everything that is needed in this moment and to move perfectly with it.  

Humility is the number one required ingredient when you arrive at the door of the present moment.  Humility means that you drop all of your insistences of what should be here now and accept that you don’t know the timing of things.  Your mind simply does not know.  You have access to one perspective that you call you within an infinitely large mind that is communicating with itself in ways that are currently unfathomable to your one perspective.  Its like being the letter “A” on a computer keypad that has infinite letters and although you know all about the letter “A”, what it feels like to be it, how the world looks from the letter “A”, you have no awareness of what it is to be another letter or even what occurs when you combine with different letters, you become something else completely when you do.  You lose your identity as A and therefore your perspective changes.  

When we have enough humility to say that we don’t know we allow a larger perspective to reveal itself and we come to know ourselves as something different than we thought we were.  It is here that we can perceive an orchestration of timing that we could not perceive before.  The timing of events, situations, circumstances, feeling states, sensations, the body’s healing and more reveal themselves.  We see how not a single strand of hair, a single breath, or a single event or situation has ever been out of place or out of timing.  This is the process of transformation from scarcity of time or fighting the timing that what is occurring into being rested, present and in sync with the larger organizing principle of life.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado