Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
Our featured self-study retreat this month is Sacred Time, the companion retreat to my book of the same title.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the book:
We live in a breathless world.
Everything around us seems to move at faster and faster speeds, summoning us to keep up. We multitask, we organize, we simplify, we do all we can to keep on top of the many demands on our time. We yearn for a day with more hours in it so we can complete all we long to do.
We often talk about wasted time, or time spent like money, or time fleeting. This rushed and frenzied existence is not sacred time.
Sacred time is time governed by the rhythms of creation, rhythms that incorporate times of rest as essential to our own unfolding. Sacred time is being present to the moments of eternity available to us at any time we choose to pause and breathe.
In sacred time, we step out of the madness of our lives and choose to reflect, to linger, to savor, to slow down. We gain new perspective here. We have all had those moments of time outside of time, when we felt like we were touching eternity, bathed in a different kind of rhythm. Touching eternity brings a cohesion to our lives and reminds us of the goodness and surplus of living because it honors the rhythms of the soul.
The clock with its forced march is not the only marker of time. Our calendars with their five and ten year strategic plans rob us of our future as we desperately try to cram things in. Each slow mindful breath, the rising and setting of the sun, the expansion and contraction of the moon, the ripening and releasing of the seasons, these all mark a different quality of time and invite us into a deepened and renewed way of being.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively about our “flow state,”[1] that experience of moving beyond consciousness of time’s ticking and into a place of timelessness. Wisdom traditions tell us that reaching these states of spaciousness and ease takes time, but that is the one thing that feels most scarce, and so we seek quick and easy fixes to our time anxiety. Often this includes rushing more, sleeping less, and being distracted by multiple demands on our attention.
Our clocks and calendars were created as tools to serve us, but the roles have reversed and now we serve them in their perpetual drive forward. They measure time horizontally, in a linear way, always ticking off the missed moments. For some, the calculations are literal with productivity expectations rising, and the need to produce more and more widgets in the same amount of time. Our schedules are so packed full of appointments and commitments that there is no time to lose ourselves in dreaming, wandering, playing, or in the eternal now.
It is only when we move more slowly and with intention that we can touch the vertical modes of experiencing time. The slow witness of the natural world and rhythms offer us a portal into another experience of time and offer ways to begin practicing this alternate way of being.
When we look at the world around us, of nature and creation, we find exquisite examples of sacred timing: I’ve experienced the monarch butterflies resting in Cape May, NJ in the midst of their migration, cherry trees blossoming each April in Seattle around the building where I lived, the salmon festival in the Pacific Northwest celebrating their return each autumn, and now living in Ireland, welcoming them home to Lough Corrib after crossing the Atlantic to return to the place of their origins to spawn and die. I’ve been in the arctic circle in Norway just before their two months of polar darkness began, and what I found most surprising and refreshing was how the restaurants and cafes didn’t have bright lights trying to dispel the darkness. Instead everything was lit with candles, there was a sense of welcoming in winter’s gifts.
This online program helps support your journey through the book which has chapters on the rhythms of breath, hours of the day, sabbath, lunar cycles, seasonal rhythms, the seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time. If you are longing for a more nourishing relationship to time, use code SACREDTIME20 for 20% off the self-study retreat.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Image paid license with Canva
[1] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row: 1990), p. 75.
