Ten Things You Can Do to Slow Down Today!

1. Savor your "waiting time." Take deep breaths while waiting for the elevator or a phone call. Don't just fill the time with something busy.

2. Try a TV-free night each week. Listen to music instead. The Kiplinger Washington Letter reports that most Americans watch four hours of television a day. Consider how forgettable many of those TV nights are. Do you really want to spend your time that way?

3. Take off your "work hat" when yo come home. Sitting down to pet your cat, take a shower, walk your dog, or meditating briefly can all help you shift into a different pace so you can enjoy your time at home.

4. A few times each day, sit back, close your eyes and breathe. Notice your breathing and how your body feels.

5. Have a bell at your office. Every so often, ring it to break up the office rhythm, and notice your body and your breathing.

6. Take a full lunch break. Try eating outside, or in a different place. Or, take a walk to experience your world, rather than just to burn calories.

7. Take the time to forgive. This suggestion is from Inner Simplicity by Elaine St. James. If you find yourself carrying around a grudge, stop and visualize yourself forgiving that person and letting it go. The ongoing stress and drain on your energy is often much worse than the original event.

8. Take some time each week to enjoy nature. Simply go for a walk through a park and notice the leaves on the trees, the flowers, the grass. Touch the pine cones, or the leaves, and feel their texture. Breathe deeply and notice how much your body savors the clean air.

9. Don't read in bed, suggests Inner Simplicity. The rationale behind this one is that you don't want to go to sleep with the thoughts of someone else rattling around in your head. Try it-it works!

10. Sit quietly for fifteen minutes or so, in a comfortable chair with your feet on the floor and your hands at your sides, before bed each evening. Just relax or do a light meditation if you have a technique you like. This one is very refreshing and will help you sleep soundly.

"Contemporary humans are exposed to more facts in a single day than medieval people faced in a lifetime."

Diana Hunt, Ph.D. and Pam Hait in The Tao of Time

Do you feel as though life is escaping you? That no matter how much you do in a day, you can't keep up with the demands of work, family life, and social obligations?

The busier you are, the more work you seem to attract. For many people, life can be a never-ending cycle that is only partially relieved by weekends or short yearly vacations. There is never enough time. If you have ever wanted to stop and "get off the merry-go-round," you are not alone. For decades, millions of people have attended time management workshops to get a handle on their busy lives. Cramming more tasks into 24 hours is big business. Companies like Franklin Covey do nothing but sell time management products, such as day planners and computer software.

Life has not always been scheduled around a clock. "Keeping precise time is a social invention, and only about a hundred years old." says Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D., founder of the Omega Institute in New York and author of Time Shifting: Creating More Time To Enjoy Your Life. "For all the aeons of human existence before that, time was generous with us, and we lived in time freedom."

What is Time Freedom?

Time freedom? A world without clocks? It seems impossible to imagine, yet our ancestors lived this way. "There were no such things as clocks in the Middle Ages. Even the hourglass...wasn't in use until the late thirteenth century," says Rechtschaffen. Just two hundred years ago, our ancestors made their own schedules. In 1750 colonial America, holiday celebrations often continued for a week! Weddings lasted five days. While they worked hard to survive, these people never punched a time clock or worried about being a few minutes late to work.

Our ancestors lived according to the cycles and rhythms of the earth. Their lives were marked by longer time periods-the seasons, planting and harvest time, birth and death. They did not live on an external schedule imposed by a ticking clock. This is time freedom.

In contrast, we live our lives timed by the hour, the minute, even seconds. The rhythm of our lives is light-years faster than our ancestors', and moving more rapidly every year. This is most evident in the media, says Dr. Rechtschaffen. If you watch older shows back-to-back with new ones, you will notice that the speed of the action is much faster in current movies and television shows. Dramatic events are often compressed tightly together, providing one thrill after another. By contrast, older movies may take a half-hour to show what a new movie would condense into sixty seconds. Unconsciously, we try to make our lives match the impossible pace we see on television-we have less patience with slower people and processes that take "too much" time. That impatience can create tremendous stress in our lives.

How Did We Get Going So Fast?

Blame it on Descartes--a man who changed our entire concept of time. "In the organic world, time is an indigenous element," say Diana Hunt and Pam Hait, in The Tao of Time. "Because natural events such as the phases of the tides and the seasons are part of the ebb and flow of life, time is not sensed as an outside presence. Instead, it is part of the whole." But Descartes believed that nature was a machine, ruled by mathematics and logic. For him, time was not an internal part of life: rather it was an external force that influences us. The difference may not seem important, but it profoundly changed the rhythm of our lives. Instead of matching the cycles of the seasons and being one with them, we are now controlled and stimulated by an external force: the clock. Clock-making was perfected at about the same time Descartes advanced his ideas. The combination of this innovative and expensive new gadget with Descartes' philosophy cemented a new way of being. A milestone in this process was the development of the wind-up alarm clock in 1876, by the Seth Thomas Clock Company--changing forever the way we wake up in the morning. Few Americans today rise with the sun as our ancestors did. Instead, we are awakened by buzzing alarm clocks, no matter how dark it is outside.

Technology has made time run even faster. We can now do more things at once than ever before. Those "time-saving" appliances like dishwashers, microwaves, computers and fax machines give us more time. But because our lives are based on the "do more in less time" mentality, we do not take that extra time to simply be present and enjoy the moment, as our ancestors did. Instead, we fill those extra moments we have gained with more tasks.

This faster pace creates tremendous stress for most of us. According to Dr. Rechtschaffen, "95 % of the stress in our lives relates to our feelings of time poverty; it's the feeling that we cannot possibly accomplish all that we have to do." We rarely take the time to stop and sit, to think, to meditate, or to simply feel. He tells of watching an incredible island view at sunset: "I sat quietly on a stone wall off the road, drinking in the magic of the sight. Soon, a couple drove up in a car. She jumped out to get a quick picture, while he stayed in the car with the motor running-- they were gone in a flash. She would show (the photo) to her friends back home, tell them of the beautiful spot they had visited. But I wondered whether they had taken the time themselves to see or feel the beauty before them."

Why We Can't Slow Down

How many sunsets have you enjoyed on the fly? How many roses have you passed quickly, in a hurry to get somewhere else ? Most of us do not take time during the day to simply be: to reflect, watch a hummingbird gather nectar, or enjoy the sensation of wiggling our toes in the sand. We hurry through each day, trying to get everything done. Being busy means that we don't have to feel, or take time to examine our lives. It is as though we're afraid there is a monster under the bed, ready to gobble us alive if we peek into that inner darkness. The irony is that being present with our feelings, no matter how intense or painful they are, helps us to decharge them. Those feelings and memories then lose their power to haunt us. In other words, the monster within loses its bite when we spend a little time with it.

Instead of considering an idle moment as a waste of time, think of it as a rich experience to be savored. Idle moments actually create time. Experiences become richer and deeper: each moment carries more meaning. Relationships become stronger and more intimate. Health can improve not only because of reduced stress, but also because you take the time to notice what is happening with your body--catching potential problems early. Being present in the moment also reduces errors since you are focusing on one thing at a time. Taking a little extra time can actually save you time in the long run!

The slower pace takes some conscious effort to achieve, yet the reward is a more fulfilling life. Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh once said: "If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment."

Adapted from an article in HeartDance Magazine. Copyright by Jennifer Baltz, all rights reserved.  To get permission to use all or part of this article, click here:

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