Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. – Jerry Spinelli
It’s Day 11 and that brings us right smack in the middle of this journey! The focus of today’s meditation is growing and strengthening our personal relationships, which goes hand in hand with our centering thought: I give my relationships quality time. We can do that by practicing mindful presence. It is touched upon that all too often our beliefs about time put up barriers and restrictions to the free flow of emotions in our personal relationships. We are reminded that when we ask clarifying questions about our relationships we are able to receive clear answers in return.
Deepak encourages us to look at time as an avenue to exploring and deepening our relationships vs. viewing it as something that is definitive and rigid. He spoke on something that I myself have been prone to in the past, and that was setting time limits on the things that I wanted to accomplish in life: married by 26, house and steady career by 28, kids by 30, etc. I found that these “goals” always felt more like things I had to do vs. things I really wanted to do. Along with that, they seemed to cause me restlessness and anxiety. I would draw near to the time limits I set and seemingly wouldn’t be any closer to achieving these things and feel un-accomplished, disappointed and frustrated. These feelings were the complete opposite of what I wanted to be feeling while working to achieve the future, or even present, that I said I wanted!
In my late 20’s I had a serious wake up call and huge health life event that provided me an opportunity to throw all of those limiting goals and beliefs out the window. It wasn’t that I wanted to, I realized that I needed to. My perspective on time did shift, and thankfully along with that, so did my relationship with myself and those that I loved. I wanted to have more than just drive-by interactions with my friends and family. Time became a huge commodity, more precious than anything I could ever buy for myself or anyone else. I was so engrossed in reaching my “goals” that I wasn’t paying enough mind to what was most important to me. Deepak made an impact on me today when he said that often times the degrading of relationships isn’t always instantaneous. It is something that tends to happen over time when we are not showering time and attention on them and they become strained, withered and unable to withstand the lack of nurturing. I have made it a priority to spend time with those that are most precious to me and to be fully involved in whatever time we’re able to spend together. I’ve found that in doing so, inevitably all the goals that I aim to achieve, are.
Please let us hear from you – leave us a comment and tell us what you think of today’s post as well the overall experience so far! This is the last meditation experience of 2017 hosted by Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey via the Chopra Center Meditation organization. It began on October 30th and we’re really excited with the theme: Making Every Moment Matter.
