Why you’re always right on time

[00:00:45] Hello hello, lovely listener. It’s good to have you back here with me and I hope that you’ve landed fairly well in this new year of 2023. Astrology-wise it is supposed to be a slow start, at least for two thirds of January, so in case you are feeling the slowness, the heaviness, the not wanting to get out of hibernation, just know that it’s completely normal. And this is also what inspired this episode today. Combined with the fact that I pulled another very timely oracle card during my Twelve Holy Nights course for my month of January, and I thought that message was so important and timely, that I wanted to share it with you. And the message is actually about time and when I read it, I had a lot of thoughts that I wanted to share and just remind you that you are, right where you are right now, you are right on time. Because there is no such thing as “behind”, that’s a patriarchal concept, and I will talk all about that and what I mean by that in a bit.

[00:02:12] But first things first, I wanted to share another cycle check-in because I am today on my day 20, which is for me this cusp from my inner summer, ovulation time, over into my inner autumn, and I know that for many people this can be a really hard shift, a hard transition. Certainly for people who experience severe PMS symptoms or PMDD, this is usually a time where they might feel even like hit by a truck and coming to this hard stop. And I personally also, even though I don’t experience PMS, I can feel a lot of anxiety in this time. And when I’m mindful and check the day I’m on, then I know, “oh yeah, it’s this time of the month, anyway. So it’s okay that all these fears and everything is coming up.” But it’s this, these two, maybe polarities, there is a clash between this doing, outward, motivated energy of summer, inner summer, and then comes the slowly turning inwards phase of inner autumn, where we start to attune back to ourselves, to our own truth and where we might realise the areas in our lives where we are not living in line with our deepest truth. And so there is this transition that’s almost like a clash sometimes, and I can certainly feel a lot of anxiety in this time. That happened this month as well, so the past couple of days I experienced that severely and it also had a lot to do with time, so I thought it would be just the perfect opportunity to speak a little about this here.

[00:04:21] The message that I pulled, or the card that I pulled is the Celtic goddess of Time, and I hope I’m pronouncing her correctly, I tried to look up the pronunciation, but she’s called Arianrhod and she’s the goddess of time and she has got messages for us that I would like to share with you. Which is, and as I say, the message came “timely” to me, certainly: “Right now, you have all the time in the world to reach the fullest potential of your intentions and desires.” and that alone sometimes helps me to calm down, “oh, I’ve got an abundance of time, there is no rush, I don’t need to hurry to get somewhere.”

[00:05:15] I have felt into who I want to become this year and I think that’s the whole point of intentions, is feeling and connecting to that version of us that we want to become. And the question is not “what do I want to accomplish?”, but more so “who do I want to become in the process?” And this message reminds me, at least, that I have all the time in the world to become that person and also that person is already within me, and I just have to peel away the layers to excavate her in me.

[00:05:59] And the message goes on: “the Celtic goddess of time is your ally, and she will ensure your timing is perfect. The hours will expand to gift you with the space you need to complete anything that you started today. Recognize that no matter what is in front of you, time is your friend. Consider that everything you intend and desire has also its own relationship to time, and all will come to you in the perfect form and in the perfect moment. Patience, dedication and quiet anticipation are delicate, yet potent allies now. Arianrhod is your champion and your timing is perfect.”

[00:06:46] And especially for me, who in these past few days has experienced this anxiety around time, “there is not enough time, I have to start doing things immediately, right now.”, this is such a relieving message, also, and I am trying to remind myself of that all the time, is that here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are still in the middle of winter. Spring will come in March, so we are more in winter than we are towards spring, and winter is a time to hibernate, to dream, to vision, similar to menstruation, our inner winter, or the dark moon phase, which all hold the same quality of energy. This is not a time for doing. And in my thoughts, I have been carried away already by “now is the new year, I need to start new things.” and all this narrative that society tells us. “Now is the time to set intentions and to turn them into reality, et cetera, et cetera”.

[00:08:00] And right now is NOT that time. Right now, it’s still time for allowing the composting to happen that I talked about in one of the previous episodes. Right now, there is still a lot happening underground while above ground we don’t see much happening in nature. And there is so much wisdom in that because everything has its own time. That’s what was also shared in this message, everything has its own relationship to time, and so it’s not even us who can control any of these. Some things need their time and we, as much as we dislike it, can’t do anything about it to push it, to pull the grass, to make it grow faster, so to speak. And so I try to heed nature’s advice and relax back into the fact that it’s only the beginning of January and I have a whole year in front of me. A whole year with 365 days of possibility. And I remember yesterday a friend of mine, she said that, we’ve got a whole year with 365 blank pages that we can create on whatever we want to create, and that felt so nourishing to even just think about it.

[00:09:38] And then the message from the goddess of time goes on: “do you worry there is not enough time or that you might be running out of it? Do you feel that you are too late, too stressed, or too overwhelmed to get where you need to go? This attitude is fuelled by fear, which has a strange and unusual power to contract time.” And that is very true because when our thoughts go into this fear direction and tell us all these things about how we are too late, we are behind. I mean, our brain just wants to help us survive, to spur us on, yet it often leads to this sense or sensations of constriction, of being choked in my case, or having your stomach contracted. There can be other sensations coming up for you when you think of that, of this having not enough time.

[00:10:44] And also it creates this tunnel vision. When our system is afraid, we get tunnel vision because what’s needed for our survival is to focus on the survival immediately in front of us. So, for example, running away from the threat or freezing or fawning, these typical responses that you might have heard about. And this means with this tunnel vision time gets even more constricted because we can’t open up and relax into the abundance of time that’s actually present. And what’s needed first and foremost, of course, is to find ways to release this fear, to process the fear, because as long as this fear reaction is happening in our body, we will not be able to relax back into the time and into this spaciousness.

[00:11:43] And the message of the card gives us an anchor, a help, a support: “Arianrhod the goddess of time has an alignment task for you: breathe deeply and trust the process.” And even though when we are in this fear-based state, breathing deeply can feel hard to accomplish and be the last thing you want to do, it’s actually exactly what activates our relaxation response in the body, because breathing deeply, and I’m talking about this belly breathing, when you use the whole of your diaphragm and you have your belly extend outwards, that massages the organs in your body and activates the vagus nerve, which is the most important nerve for a relaxation response of our in our body. And it goes from the brain all the way down into your gut. And if you are a woman or a menstruator, even down into your cervix, and so breathing deeply into your belly will activate this nerve that will activate a relaxation response in your whole body.

[00:13:09] That’s why breathing is actually the task to do, even though it might sound counterintuitive or counterproductive in that moment of stress, breathing deeply can help your body start relaxing so that subsequently your mind will start to relax as well, the mind follows suit. And that in turn will allow your system, your mind to open this tunnel vision and be available again to more information than just the fear-based thoughts it was focused on earlier, this immediate threat it perceived.

[00:13:55] So the message goes on: “know that even if you are temporarily struggling, you will always have enough time to choose how you experience your reality.” and that’s something very, very powerful. You choose. It reminds us of this power that we have in every moment to create our reality because we, our thoughts, our beliefs, create our own reality. We believe something and then our brain looks for evidence of that something, whatever it is we believe, and thus we create our reality and we attract different circumstances, different situations, different people than if we had a different thought. Actually, let me say if we had a different belief, because of course it’s not decided by one single thought alone. We think 60,000 thoughts every day. But these deep-seated beliefs that we have inside about the world, about ourselves, about the people, those inform our brain what evidence to look out for.

[00:15:13] And so it’s about going to this deep level of believing the things we want to believe, in order for us to become the person we want to become. So thinking about “who do I want to become and what are a few of the beliefs this person has that I want to become?” and then shifting, releasing your own beliefs that might come from past experiences, traumatic experiences you’ve lived through. Befriending the wounding and the fear, and shifting that around into a new set of beliefs that will allow you to move forward into the direction you would like to move forward in.

[00:16:04] And to come back to the beginning, maybe you remember I said, you are always right on time and I’m challenging you, and I’m certainly also challenging myself at the moment, what if that was your belief? You are always right on time, no matter where you are at, no matter how much or how little you have done or accomplished or achieved by whoever’s standards, but what if you are always right on time and right where you need to be? And when we believe that kind of thought, we can probably be okay with just hibernating a little while longer in this wintertime.

[00:16:54] And I was also reminded through this message of a concept I learned about, that comes from the ancient Greeks, that there is a difference between Chronos and Kairos, they are both a quality of time, but where Chronos is the linear time, the one that can be measured, the one that we use to measure our calendar, to measure time by, there is also a concept of time or a quality that’s called Kairos. And Kairos is the cyclical nature of time, because as much as our brain and our society and everything wants us to believe that time is linear, it’s actually not, it’s cyclical.

[00:17:50] And you might have experienced that yourself that, and Einstein said that as well, that time is relative, right? That there are moments where you feel like an eternity has passed and then it was just 10 minutes or the other way around, and we experience time differently. For example, when we are in a flow state, we don’t even have a sense of time. It’s like we are out of time. And also, as I don’t get tired of saying, is that healing and all of that is cyclical as well. Life is cyclical, so why should time be different.

[00:18:36] You know, over the course of our life we experienced so many ups and downs, so many challenges and setbacks, but also moments of intense joy where everything seems to align perfectly. And when we observe that over some time, we find that there are patterns to it, it’s a rhythm. It’s a repeating of similar patterns all the time, and this cyclical heartbeat that applies to all of nature. So especially Kairos teaches us that it’s about our subjective experience of time, the quality of time, how present we are in a certain moment, if our whole being is focused. If you watch children or if you’ve been in a flow state yourself, it’s this moment where all of your attention, all of your presence, all of your focus is right here. And right here, the present moment, is the only place we can live anyway. We don’t live in the past. We don’t live in the future. We live right here in the present moment.

[00:19:52] And that’s also why I say you can’t be behind. And I’ve written an article about that that I will link to below this episode, but that too, the sheer thought that we could be behind is a manmade concept. And I say that very intentionally because it probably was some man who devised this concept of how we can measure time.

[00:20:24] I have even had an interview, I think a year ago or so, with a lady called Ixchel Lunar, and she is all about decolonising time. That was also the title of our interview, which I will also link to below this episode because it’s really worthwhile to watch. And she is trying to help us see that we have made time a commodity as well. A commodity that can be capitalized on, that can be extracted. A commodity, we “run out of time”, we “never have enough time”, as if it were a thing that we could buy, a thing that can be controlled, that we can somehow buy more of or lose, and that’s simply not true.

[00:21:19] Time is more an experience. And so the real question we need to ask ourselves is how do we want to spend our time? Does it serve us to spend the time worrying about the future or regretting our past? Or isn’t the time better spent by being in the present moment, with the people we want to be with, doing things we enjoy. I mean, of course, not all the time, but in general we do more things that we actually enjoy versus doing things that we have to do or think we have to do. If you deeply believed that you will always right on time, what would you do? How would you spend your days? What would you do differently compared to how you’re doing things now? Who would you choose to spend time with? Who would you maybe not choose to spend time with?

[00:22:28] And these are all questions I’ve been considering myself these past few days because of course I’m also leading myself through that kind of process, when the fear is coming up. I process the fear, I look at my thoughts, I journal my thoughts, I observe my thoughts and beliefs, and I ask myself these questions of, if I’m always right on time and I can’t ever be behind because there is no such thing as behind, what do I want to do right now? What do I feel called to do right now? What do I want to share? What does my body need right now?

[00:23:18] So this is just a little invitation to explore your relationship with time, because that’s what it all amounts to in the end, it’s a relationship, like everything. The relationship with your body, the relationship with other people, the relationship with time, and you are an active part in this relationship as in every relationship. And you have the power of choice to choose how you would like to design this relationship and what you would like to keep and what you would like to maybe change.

[00:23:57] Yeah, so I hope this little exploration on time, on Chronos time, on Kairos time, has been an interesting one for you. I would love to hear your thoughts, your insights, what you take away from anything that I’ve shared. Please reach out, let me know. And if not, I wish you a beautiful week and speak to you next time. Bye.