What time is it?
"A hair past a freckle!” This cheeky answer reminds us that some people just don’t care! How we experience time is almost as individual as the colour of our eyes, or the shape of our feet, or how many freckles we have on our hands!
Minutes and hours
This seems obvious. Of course we all experience life uniquely so time is part of life. And yet a minute – 60 seconds – is a minute for everyone, everywhere. Or is it? Can we actually choose how long a minute lasts? Can that minute breathe itself into being slow or fast?
As we start to carefully and deeply think about something like our experience of time - - how spacious or constricted it feels - - it seems to be entirely dependent on how conscious we are, and how embedded in the experience of our life we are.
This is ‘presence’ of course. Yoga sutra I.2 describes presence as Yogah citta vrtti nirodah - the activities of the mind are held within an envelope, which doesn’t allow things to come in or go out!
In yoga we say we need iccha (desire, positive intention) and sraddha (faith that this is the right thing for me) to be there, otherwise distraction from presence happens.
With iccha and sraddha (intention) in place, we can move more consciously through time perhaps.
Intention (know where your’e going).
Breath (have the energy to do it),
Move (Act). I-B-M.
Sound familiar? In every vinyasa we are attempting just that. Using our memory to guide us through intention and know what the right move is, garner the energy to do it via the breath, then move the body. And if we don’t manage it, there’s always the next breath to try again.
Days
This experience of a practice embodied like this can spill out into how we intentionally ‘manage' our minutes and our days here on earth. If you’re struggling somehow you may want time to speed up “I just want this day to end!", but if we can engender a spacious quality in our minds, maybe the suffering becomes more bearable and we refrain from wishing our life away.
Many of us would prefer time slow down. “That class went so quickly!”, says one. “Hasn’t the year gone fast!”, we tend to say (typically the older we get!). Yoga gives us a wonderful set of tools to work with, that often start simply by noticing the breath. We can even meditate on it! Like with this lovely verse from Paul Harvey:
Breath
A gift from the highest
A vehicle for awareness
A proof of existence
A source of life
Years
And what of the experience of a whole year, four seasons having completed their cycle, one time around the sun.
Do you feel like it’s still the middle of winter or do you feel like we’re edging towards spring? We are, after all seeing daffodils, wattle is starting to blossom, different creatures are emerging, different sounds, different light.
Does that mean we are leaving winter behind? How conscious are we to the shift in all parts of nature – that of course doesn’t get its cues by chronological time, but instead by the feeling of the air, the feeling of the soil, the feeling of the light.
The asana class in the recent philosophy workshop (read Fiona’s refection here) encouraged us to embody our practice beautifully like this.
We often remind you in class to keep the movement within the breath. Try approaching each vinyasa with the idea of I-B-M and notice whether the feeling of the hours themselves can then seem like they breathe, the length of a day like it is responding to nature’s rhythms, and maybe even the years might just not ‘fly' by.
Let us know how you go!