Time Travel, Embodiment, & Magic

Recently, I have discovered I can speed time up or slow it down. My perception of time, that is. Not time itself…. But when you think about it that is kind of the same thing.

Prior to this reality-shattering breakthrough of awareness that I am not who I thought I was, I’d felt Time as an ever tightening loop of a lasso. Its snagging and binding grip was inevitable and soon, so it felt. The end was near. Fast and faster each second went, and the closer I looked at those moments the faster they seemed to move.

Turns out that feeling and my traumatized state are directly linked.

It’s been a strange process and often overwhelming to learn to “feel into” my body. That the body has feelings is some distant affirmative, accepted as fact, but never directly experienced. There were soft echos of in coarsest sense - simple “positive” or “negative”, basic binary, but nothing with any real nuance.

I couldn’t feel if I was angry or sad or wrathful or offended or grossed out. Nor if I was thrilled, excited, happy, or pleased. I couldn’t have told you those were different feelings with real locations in the body. I could use them correctly based on contextual, external environmental clues, but they were felt as blunted good / bad queues from the inner world. They still steered me well enough but only in the broadest terms, and I think much intuition filled the gap.

“Feeling into my body” has been an exercise in learning to feel and differentiate with ever-refining nuance. This has forced me to face sometimes extraordinary pain and recognize triggers, but also to begin to move closer and closer, bit by bit, to my own sense of personhood, and back into my body. Consciousness is reentering this material form.

Anyway, as I’ve learned to move back in, I’ve come to a deeper appreciation for the felt energies at each of the chakra, for example, - the heavy, weighted, stable, and grounded feeling in your hips as you lay against the ground - that’s the feeling / energy of safety.

I didn’t know how safety felt. I couldn’t find that feeling in my body until very recently, because some bridge into the body at a neurological level was not myelinated between that feeling in my body and the emotional state that it accompanied. Those two endpoints where not connected.

With that energetic connection at my Root Chakra never formed, none of the other energy centers were ever able to fully stabilize either, and all of the physical sensations and emotional valances never mapped in. The lack of toning is literally visible in my body, regardless of how much I work out. A base foundation was absent so nothing could really be built on top, like building on quick sand.

This exploration of physical sensation and feeling and their associated memories has been fascinating if painful. But I wouldn’t give it back. To learn to feel for the first time is a pretty incredible experience. There’s no cool videos, like when a kid can hear for the first time, but its a decent analogy - the wonder, happiness, and overwhelm. 

And now consider that this is our largest sensory organ - our very flesh.

Overwhelming, all consuming, holding so much pain, sometimes like drowning, but also …going in feel like slowing down… it feels like breathing room, it feels like a beautiful symphony, and sweet nutritious syrup in the veins. The minutes pass with a pleasurable, dripping honey -like slowness.

Meanwhile, when I get overwhelmed and my awareness rushes up into the head, disconnecting from those physical sensations, that time speeds WAAAAY up. This is useful during trauma, but not a way to live. Not a place from which to shape reality.

Like crossing over the event horizon of a black hole.

So if you, dear reader, find yourself grieving that time seems to only go faster and faster, maybe check in and see if you have lost touch with your body.

It seems a natural inclination that as we age we more and more identify with the outside community. We feel our own mortality and know “they are the future” and our concerns and focus shift. That not wrong, it can be quite an act of love. But neglecting this Body and Self, while we have it, is a shame and lost opportunity. It is dissociation, and if it’s our permeant location of awareness, a sort of pre-death state. Finding or developing expansiveness allows us to we see / feel ourselves both within and without.

But so how?

Well for one, I’ve noticed that The News and the like pulls all who pay it heed out of their own experience and into far away, way beyond the scope of what we can do much, if anything, about - preoccupying us with narratives and feeling that are not our own. Out there is where time moves the fastest. Out there is also where we are least powerful.

I think we can balance the needs and pain and personality of the community with our own, but it’s likely that the scope of the News (especially in its 24 hour cycle) is well beyond the tolerance of any CNS on earth. No one can hold all of that. So I try to titrate.

So I hypothesize that for even for those who had good bodily awareness at some point, spending more time in reconnecting with one’s own felt experience will both slow time down and make you a better person to be around, because you’re plain just paying more attention. It’s a natural consequence.

Meanwhile the News and perhaps especially in its current delivery mechanisms (backlit screens) are potent hypnotics. You stare into that light and fly right at extinction, unable to look away. And unable to act under your own volition, functionally disembodied. Being fed a horrifying reality.

I blame this for the loss of most of the Boomer generation, who seem particularly vulnerable to its glare. And I see a similar phenomenon underway with the younger generations who are hooked up to a fast drip of info-tainment. Where the lost Boomers are holding tight to a fear-based world view that is wildly out of sync with reality (time warping at its best), the youth seem to be suffering from a cold depression that can comes from when removed from a sense of Place, the need for a safe root.

Meanwhile, I find that when I feel into this Body and focus on what I find coming up here out of my own inner narratives of here and now, well, that’s something I can DO something about, which will always break the spell, and return me to a sense of peace and a spacious placed-ness as I take small appropriate actions for mySelf, in the most expansive way possible.

Oh and this practice makes it very clear to me who I should vote for, where I should shop, how I should use what resources are available to me, and with whom I should share time.

Try slowing down time. It is real magic. We could all use a lot more of both.

Let me know how it goes.