Time

It slips through your fingers, can drag on forever, sometimes feels like you’re on that hamster wheel and other times like you are simply marking time. In the 100 meter dash one-hundredths of a second can separate first from last place. In a marathon the difference can be hours.

It takes 22 months for an elephant to gestate, 22 days for a mouse.
We set our clocks to rise in the morning, whether it’s at 4 AM or 8 AM, based on our morning routine (exercise, meditation, bathing, breakfast, commute, etc), timing it down to the minute, so we can be “on time” to work and the duties that await us throughout our day.

Time! What a crazy concept, what an elusive measure, one that we’ve divided into segments based on the earth’s rotation around the sun into years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

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Time can be your friend or taskmaster, depending on how you choose to have a relationship with it. It’s all a matter of tuning in, of becoming aware of the pace at which you are designed to travel through the world and being at peace with it. In Yoga most all postures, kriyas, meditations and mantras involve a time factor. It’s a way to create a particular vibrational affect on your being by holding the space with discipline, focus, and an inner calm.

Creating a time boundary gives you a parameter, a goal allowing you to continue to hone and elevate your practice. When you set the timer for 11 minutes to do a particularly challenging kriya and let yourself go into it deeply, surrendering to whatever physical or mental discomfort there may be, committing yourself to “keep up” until the chime goes off and you take a deep inhale, then time is beautiful, it is your ally.

Using time to “confine” you is one of those yogic paradoxes that allows for the amazing possibility that you will experience a sense of timelessness, of floating free in the eternal sea of now.