In my last post, I invited you to look at your relationship with time and begin to shift that relationship into a more loving, friendly one. Bringing awareness to anything we wish to transform is always the first step.

Now, let’s dive deeper.

How can you actively cultivate a healthy relationship with time?

Begin by questioning the lie that you don’t have enough time. 

That feeling of “not enoughness,” scarcity around time, is at the heart of your difficulties with time. And while that perception does have to do with how you spend your time, it has at least as much to do with how you think about, and relate to, time.

In contemporary society, we often harbor a chronic feeling that we don’t have enough time. When we are inside the feeling of not having enough time, we feel persistently busy, stressed, pressured, and overcommitted. We find ourselves frequently rushing and too rarely getting to what we long to do. 

You have a choice

I invite you to start by questioning this idea that you don’t have enough time. It is a habit, a belief, a way of being that you’ve practiced and that the culture promotes. To believe you don’t have enough time is a choice, not a reality. You can make a different choice and change the quality of your life enormously.

When we are living inside of this pattern of not enough time, we habitually try to do more. We overload our schedules, make poor choices and beat ourselves up. We complain that we never get enough done, and feel bad at the end of each day, week, month, and year. We don’t allow for downtime and self-renewal, and then we burn out and get depleted.

Does any of this sound familiar? There is a better way.

When you question the pattern of “not enough time” and bring it to the light of awareness, you can make a choice to begin living differently. Space opens to feel the essential enoughness, the innate sense of plenty at the heart of all things. Time begins to expand, almost magically. You can live in a more relaxed manner, make realistic plans, and know that you don’t have to do everything now. You can also choose to spend more time on what brings you joy or fulfills you.

And, you can reward yourself for what you’ve done with your day, and enjoy the moments of your life much more fully. 

Question the lie of “not enough” and celebrate what you get done

I invite you to begin questioning the feeling that you don’t have enough time and that you haven’t done enough in any day or week or month or year. Watch out for times that you are affirming this and make a conscious choice to choose a different thought or feeling. 

For instance, if at the end of the day, you feel like “I didn’t get this and this and this done, I didn’t get enough done,” take a moment right then to celebrate instead what you did do in that day. List everything you can. Notice how much happened and the value of what you did do, even if it was to take a day of rest, or it wasn’t what you planned. Celebrate yourself and your life.

This will also bring awareness to how you spend your time, and perhaps you’ll choose to make some changes. But most of all, I encourage you to practice the art of self-acknowledgment. I like to do this in my journal, celebrating what I did the day before. Then, once a week, I make a bulleted list in my day planner to appreciate all the good things that happened in my week, not only those that I accomplished but blessings that came to me and things I learned. 

In my next post, I’ll give you two more practices to help you shift your relationship with time, including my favorite and most magical practice around time. Stay tuned!