Be Intensely Present In Your Moment
Today’s topic of the 21 day meditation presented and hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra was about the pervasive psychological dysfunction of modern man with respect to their relationship to time. I realized that my experiences during my ride to the sea to swim in chilly temperatures and all that approached my senses, was really living this liberation of being fully immersed in the present.
trees on bicycle ride to sea
Yesterday on my bicycle ride to the Mediterranean Sea along a path on the river Lez in Montpellier, I was acutely aware of all that was hitting my senses. Fragrances, colors, watching ripples of water surfacing along the river from activity within and considering how space is shaped to create these cylindric waves. Marveling over these trees I love, all in a row that have these massive bases that contain the base of three to five trunks shooting out. They all have this cool mottled bark, rolling contours, curves and indentations. I love to climb them. I looked at the glistening sparkles of water as the mid afternoon sun bounced off different patches along the river. Coming to the opening of the river to the sea you see contrasts in color and these pink flamingos. I look at the differences in tones and shades and always remember my mother commenting on this on our drive out to New Mexico from Pennsylvania the first time I moved there. When we reached the desert, she pointed out all of the subtleties of different colors.
Perhaps this is my homage to my ancestors, my parents, who are no longer physically alive. On this All Saint’s Day.
Halloween day, I left my place in the north of town and bicycled along the path along the river Lez from Montpellier to the Mediterranean Sea, to swim. I wasn’t the only fool in the water! After you break the psychological barrier, of the frrrreeeezing water – still not as cold as the ocean by San Francisco in northern California – your body adjusts. Once I finally put my head under, I was fine. Well, it was pretty icy cold that I couldn’t keep it in the water at first, but got used to that too. I love, love, love to swim. I love being in a body of liquid, especially outside in nature. I love the stretching and very slight resistance of swimming. I swam from one boundary of rocks to another, doing breast stroke, back stroke and freestyle. I swam as a kid on the swim team. I mention this because it is so incredibly stimulating to immerse oneself in this cold environment and then to bounce one’s body back to normal temperatures. I had to run to warm up.
I took pictures with my inadequate phone camera of stunning views, which fortunately are crystalized in my memory, for a while. ha huh. I looked closely, following the contours of these lovely ornate trees by the river, looking at their papered skin of differing hues. A little later I saw a large cluster of pink flamingos sitting still on the water in the distance, with the reflection upside down of their pinkness landing from my perspective, several inches below them. These other smaller sea birds were in the foreground, with black heads and white bodies that were smaller and perched in a row, little black and white spots in a line.
I came briefly today as I’m writing this, to Montpellier’s Jardin des Plantes. Every town of any size in France seems to have one. I listened to quite a chatter of the birds present as the afternoon sun was angling. I heard different species – really quite vocal – recording the clicks and tones.
sparkling sun reflecting off water
The whole 21 day guided meditation series is about being in the present, Making Every Moment Matter.
Ironically, today’s meditation is titled “Recognizing and Healing Time Dysfunction”. They each take turns introducing the concepts, Oprah Winfrey leading, and Deepak Chopra, accompanied by a tantalizing acoustic entrance, goes into a more in depth spiritual explanation. Today they talked about extracting oneself from being fixated on either the highs ore lows of whether or not one is accomplishing what one expects to accomplish in a certain time. We’re either delighted to be checking off our list or feeling guilty for not doing so, and letting this dictate determine how we feel. I know that my mother was fixated with this ‘to do’ list, and I’ve genetically and socially allowed myself to be swept into the same cultural dictates.
I decided to write about it because in fact, when I’ve allowed myself to go on these excursions without feeling guilty, and then feel so alive with all of the senses and discoveries, I can’t imagine not being open and completely immersed in the present. What a delight. The beauty of not being swept into the guilts and obsession with whether or not one is keeping this agenda, is to be fully enmeshed in the moment, whether one is pulled to a new task, or waiting, pausing to notice a flickering of light or shadow, and being fully with that moment, overwhelmingly present. Life is full of these impressions, sensations, intuitions and discoveries. When one is in this moment, immersed, one can gather from it the jewels that can only be seen if they are beheld.
I have developed a habit of taking notes to the oral presentation of Oprah and Chopra, so here are the notes I took of today’s meditation, unedited. 21 day meditation on time: Day 3 – Recognizing and Healing Time Dysfunction
Oprah:
• Deepak calls time sickness; if it resonates with you; the heavy feeling that all you set out to accomplish that day isn’t going to get done, something that throws you off
• living in the moment means eliminating the highs and the lows, the high from checking off all the things, and just being in the moment
• Eckart Toole says if you’re sitting in the moment, recognizing the time spent in enjoyment and what it is that causes anxiety, leads you to the path to what it is that is fulfillment and your true calling.
Chopra:
• time is an experience that shifts depending on what happens on the inside
• besides the biological basis of time, there is the psychological aspect: when you do something that you’re passionate about, time flies, when you’re bored, time drags, when you’re doing something that has no meaning for you, time has been wasted
• we experience time according to our psychological state: when you’re in love and you’ve spent time with your beloved, an hour feels like a minute, when you’re suffering from depression, a minute feels like an hour
• modern life takes our experience of time to an extreme; time sickness is an epidemic; it’s the ultimate life-style disorder, because under the pressures of time, life isn’t lived
• we become robotically trained to measure every day by what we have achieved or haven’t: chores left undone, the relationship we didn’t have time for, the exercise we put off…: this is what it means to suffer from time sickness
• this is born from our own experience of time; we can change that experience any time we want
• how do we know if we relate to time in a dysfunctional way; consider the following symptoms: feeling like there is never enough time in the day, constantly looking at the clock and racing against it, feeling frustration and failure of not accomplishing what you wanted to, dreading the passage of time because it saps energy and youth
• simply telling someone to slow down doesn’t work, there has to be an inner shift in the right direction
• you’re getting over time sickness when you enjoy your experiences and take time to appreciate them (like the fact that i absolutely delight in listening to bird’s chirping back and forth, a high slicing pitch and a little clicks, and also looking at this other magpie building its nest from the sheds of grass in this back yard)
• you feel that your day is flowing well when you find time to feel relaxed and when your day worries are absent; time dysfunction isn’t about time itself but the mismatch between your perception and reality
• life can unfold naturally with a sense that you have all the time in the world
• we don’t need better time management, we need a new state of mind
• as you experience yourself as present awareness, the symptoms of time sickness will melt away.
Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition
carol the blogger March 24th, 2017 in New Mexico
digesthis 