An experience I had in Central Park one morning prompted me to think about the gift of time in all its various guises.  There’s a maple tree on the edge of the Great Lawn that’s not been well in recent years, and I thought it might be dying.  Each Spring, it would come into its leaves only on lower branches, and the leaves weren’t particularly vibrant.  This year, much to my surprise, it is coming into leaf on its upper branches and with much more energy than I have seen in recent years. This got me to thinking about the gift it received in having enough time for it to sort itself out and to heal.

In our time-pressured world, one of the things so many of us have lost is the sense that we have enough time – enough time to get our work done, enough time to rest, enough time to allow ourselves to unfold naturally and without stress.  Discovering how time has allowed the maple tree to begin to heal brought back into my awareness the importance of finding a way to allow time to do its restorative or creative work.  This doesn’t mean that we have to add more minutes to the day, or find days off that we don’t have.  Rather, we can develop an internal sense of time, an internal sense that we have all the time we need in the time we have.

In my hypnosis training in the early 1980’s, one of the first suggestions I learned, in fact, was that we have all the time we need in the time we have to do whatever needs to be done – whether that is an external activity or an internal process of healing or creativity.  When I learned this concept, it was called “time distortion” and we explored it in a state of trance.  These days, I use it as an ongoing form of positive self-talk whenever I begin to feel time-squeezed.  At the very least, it relaxes me enough to move through stress with less wear and tear.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to explore your relationship with time, in terms of how you respond internally to feeling that you have or don’t have enough time to do the things you need to do – or to play in the ways you’d like to play.  In particular, when you’re busy and feel like you don’t have enough time, notice what happens if you use the mantra, “I have all the time I need in the time I have to get done what needs to get done” as a form of ongoing self-talk.  Or, when you’re in the midst of doing something you like, but are concerned you don’t have enough time to fully enjoy it, say to yourself some version of, “Time is my friend.  It stretches and expands to allow me to have all the time I need in the time I have to fully enjoy what I’m doing right now.”

Also notice any negative or limiting self-talk you may have around time.  In an experiment a while back I talked about a term I heard somewhere along the way – “time poverty”.  When we’re in a state of time poverty, chances are we talk to ourselves about how little time we have, about how awful it is to be so busy, etc. This kind of self-talk actually makes us feel more squeezed and we lose out on the opportunity to notice that we can be more relaxed in the presence of deadlines and mountains of work to be done.  In fact, you might find it useful to notice the sensations in your body when you engage in time-squeezed self-talk and the sensations in your body when you tell yourself you have all the time you need in the time you have.

As with all the experiments, this one is offered to allow you to play with living consciously and to notice the impact of the kinds of self-talk you give yourself, the choices you make, the ways in which you respond to the present moment.