How to Slow Down Time

I don't know about you, but my life sometimes feels like I’m one of those high-speed bullet trains in Japan, or a skier flying down the slope of an icy mountain moving a million miles an hour. So much to do, so little time. So I've been investigating how to slow time down, how to get more of the juiciness of life.

And of course, the clocks in Greenwich don't change and the Internet never sleeps. But time can change. Because we can change. Time is a totally subjective experience... As Einstein says, "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity".

So basically, to slow down time, I need to slow something in myself down. Something really magical happens when I'm slow enough to actually experience what's happening. And to really get the full delight of something, someone, some experience, it really helps to be able to experience it through the body, through the full capacity of our senses.

When I introduce somatic coaching, I often mention how the body is always in the present moment. It is always here, and always now. In our mind we can go flying off into infinity, we can speculate about next week's dinner party, we can relive the past in our memory. We can spend the whole day zooming between windows on our devices, have multiple threads of conversation open with people and machines all over the world. But even as we do this, our snazzy little brain is held in our body, sitting at this desk, on this day, in this moment. While we're dreaming of fantasy lovers or shiny new shoes, our body keeps breathing in and out, in and out, here and now.

An interesting thing to notice about time is that when we're zooming around like this in our thoughts, time in our actual life seems to move very fast. Suddenly the day is over and we're surprised, "Whoa, where did that day go...?" But it disappeared so fast because in many ways we weren't fully in it.

But when we do come back and notice what's actually here, when we do consciously experience our body, the sensations and feelings that are there all along but we were too distracted to notice, all of a sudden we're in a different time zone. Then the atmosphere changes and we have access to a lot more of what's already happening. We then have time to feel ourselves, to feel others, to digest information and get creative. In the time zone of the present moment, the threads of past and future come together in a sinuous dance that gives meaning to our choices. It's only here that we get satisfaction and delight. 

Just try this out: Sit for one minute and just notice your breath rising and falling. Not thinking, just breathing. I guarantee you it'll be a looooong minute. Or try it out while you walk. Instead of rushing towards your destination, start to notice the movement of walking. Feel the strength in your thighs, the pull in the hamstrings, the stretch of the soles of your feet. Drop your attention down into your sacrum, into the undulating swing in your pelvis as you walk. If you really let go, you'll even let your shoulders relax and let your arms sway with the movement. You don't have to slow down the pace of your walking, but just pay attention to what's happening in your body as you walk down the hallway, or along the street.

And as you do this, notice what happens to time. How does the rhythm of time feel now, as you bounce into the next step? What happens to the quality of your awareness, what else do you start to see, smell, hear as you walk? 

I call this moving in BodyTime. It doesn't mean you have to stop everything and go on retreat for a month. On the contrary - your body comes with you wherever you go, you don't have to go anywhere...! Your body is a natural anchor, the easiest place to reconnect with your natural rhythms and tides. And it's the easiest way to slow down time. And who knows, you may even discover that there's a whole world around and within you full of treasures waiting to be discovered... :-)