Out of Time or Timelessness • Nicole Doherty Ananda

by Nicole Doherty, Certified Yoga Teacher

Inspiration from a recent meditation of mine…

Life is moving really fast. What is happening with our time? Don’t you remember when you were a kid and summer camp felt like an entire year’s worth of time? Now a friend says “I’m pregnant” and a few weeks later the baby’s picture appears on your iPhone, right? 😉

We are all moving at warp speed. We are busy people, living busy lives and making things happen. Yet with this much productivity we fail to take a moment to just be.

Sometimes just being is confronting. I remember when I went to do my healing work in Peru for three months at the Temple of the Way of Light. That was probably one of the most confronting times of my life. I had no choice but to sit and not do anything for long periods of time. No technology, cars, traffic or electricity. I was with myself…in the jungle… alone. I felt very alone. It was one of the most terrifying, challenging, revealing, and rewarding experiences of life.

Coming out of that and moving right back to the city was quite a jarring transition. Our lives are fast paced, dynamic, active and frankly a bit insane here in the U.S.. What are we all running around so much for? What are we escaping? What is this race against time? What is this competition we’ve created to build the best resume?

I’m very challenged in this way. I’m overly productive. For example, after teaching 11 yoga classes on top of my full time 40 hour a week job, I decide that Friday night I will build a new website. So I did. Saturday day I wrote a yoga workshop and training. Sunday I taught two classes and practiced a new song with my guitar partner. Yet, this was my weekend off! Really Nicole?

Sunday night I was tired, yet I felt compelled to meditate. I have been reading Rod Stryker’s book, The Four Desires, that I highly recommend everyone read! It includes incredible case studies of people that have transformed their lives through his Yoga of Fulfillment workshops and the meditations that accompany it. I learned from the book that when his clients’ wanted to find their dharma (their soul’s purpose) and create the means by which to get there, what they really needed to do was slow down and listen for the answers which are always within us.

Most of his meditations are 20 minutes or longer. For a person like me compelled to move, this is a lifetime of stillness! I felt a lot of resistance to sitting up for that long after such a packed week, so instead I turned on my iPod to an hour-long ambient sound meditation track. I figured I’d try to sit, but honestly I just figured it would put me to sleep.

When we stop moving, it’s extraordinary what appears! I set an intention before I began this track to ask God how I could work less and slow down more in pursuit of my dharma. I closed my eyes and I began to go inward. About 20 minutes later I was rattled awake (I think I fell asleep) by a very clear, loud female voice that said, “Nicole, TRUST!” and I blinked my eyes open.

I was confused at first because it was so clear that I thought it was for a moment a part of the meditation CD. I checked too. It wasn’t. 😉 It was my inner voice, my highest Self, that which is connected and is God, telling me that if I trust myself, my guides and my path that I am supported.

It resonated so powerfully that I decided to say no to a few sub gigs this week. As I did more and more appeared. It was as if the universe was showing me that opportunities are abundant always. We get to choose what we do from moment to moment from this place of abundance.

If I say no and let go a little bit of my control and my pushing, I can live more in my heart and in the flow of life. I am beginning to reset my mind on abundance versus lack. Going back to my work with the Laws of Attraction, I know this, but putting things into your life is a practice and often times we get sucked in to patterns and we forget.

What this also revealed to me is this same programming that controls our language around time. We say we don’t have enough time. Yet that is also lack mentality versus abundance mentality as well.

The reality is, time is something we have created, but there is no big clock in the sky that is running out of time. There is timelessness. Energy is everlasting, maybe not in this particular form (and that program could probably be changed too), but always and forever it will be. We have all the time in the world actually.

Instead of saying “I don’t have enough time” and letting myself be controlled by the Ego, I’m observing that patterning and redefining the concept of time for myself. What about saying “I have all the time in the world” and “I’m watching patiently as things unfold in timelessness”? What if I say, “I’m filling my life with amazing opportunities” as a way of expressing my energy instead?

My beloved and I created a “Should” jar, knowing the malfunction of this program. We filled it with enough money to support a good portion of our trip to Belize this December!

I think another jar is in order. It’s in my nature to be productive, so I will continue to be. I will also be sure to sit more, slow down, breathe, create more ways to listen and above all, TRUST!