When the mind gets going we often stop attending….

How often do we hear ourselves say… “where has the time gone?” We seem to fill our time and our moments with so much activity and distraction that we often don’t even realize how good we have become with our seemingly timeless preoccupations. Much of these unconscious patterns we carry out day to day have carved deep “habitual ruts” into our psyches. When we start paying attention to our impulses as they arise we may find that we are actually addicted to distracting ourselves… as nearly 50% of our waking moments are spent somewhere other than right here & now.

In our practice we need to ask ourselves- “what is our relationship with time?” “Is it wise?” How can we expect to be here when our mind is habitually somewhere else…moving and thinking… anticipating and ruminating… even when we are still we have trouble hearing and listening to the sounds of silence as the noise of our mind occludes the sensory experience of peace and tranquility.

Memories, reveries, and desires keep our minds occupied even when our bodies are not. For many of us, we cannot be still with time for the state of non-doing opens the gates of boredom. Busyness helps us avoid engaging a state of non-doing– and it is our misguided perception of the boredom that is often associated with this kind of activity. “Who has time for non-doing when there is so much to be done”. Conditioning keeps us outwardly directed and motivated as much of our inner landscape suffers from a lack of attention.

Our impulses- our force of habit continuously provide self-distraction and prevent us from being completely in our present moments. We seem to have become disconnected from simply being comfortably ensconced at home… in ourselves, independent of circumstances, wherever we are. Time is not always the issue… it’s the quality of heart and state of mind in relation to the time we have. One cannot arrive with complete presence lacking clear intention and motivation to be in the here and now- otherwise, the mind has been trained to carry one elsewhere.

Time is simply a measure to sequence events, to compare the duration of events and the intervals between them. It is a concept of measure that can significantly limit our presence when we remain bound to the perception of its momentous force. One cannot avoid the demands that time places on our presence, but one can mindfully attend to what is happening in the moment without the force of its measure. Taking pause, even if its just for a moment or two to breathe into one’s being stops the repetitive cycle of habitually filling our time- and if we can more often pay attention to what we are doing when we are doing it, we may find so much more in our moments than we could have ever imagined only because we were too preoccupied to sense what we only thought to be happening. In other words, our place in time is filtered through a conceptualization through the construct of thought and idea rather than purely sensing through direct experience.

Time to sense is time to know, but there needs to be SPACE in our hearts and in our minds for this state of being to manifest and grow. It begins one moment at a time…

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