#ThursdayThoughts: 3 things I learned (about time) thru experiencing a DNOTS

3 Things I learned about time, and how it affects your health

Today’s #ThursdayThoughts lean into more philosophical esoteric musings.

Time is a construct

Day & night, and seasons are created by Gaia earth turning.

Whether you believe that earth was created as a Garden of Eden for human beings to experience; or that humans were created, in the image of god, as its custodian; or whether you believe that we, like fleas irritating a dog’s skin, are irritating the surface of earth or maybe you view human beings like parasitical bacteria growing out of control in a petri-dish. Whatever your contextual framework, you cannot argue against the fact that, we exist indisputably ‘here’ and ‘now’.

…and the earth turns

…and never does a winter not turn in to spring; and

…time has an affect on our health (mental & physical).

Let’s unpack the phrase: “time is a construct”

We only experience time because we are sentient beings existing within time & space. We experience the passing of time through our eyes: the day & night, the falling of autumn leaves, the analysis of ‘reading’ the changing visual data from a clock. TikTok. It’s ‘time’ to do this it’s ‘time’ to do that. We run around and time (or our perception of it) speeds up. When we run around anxiously we pump excess adrenalin around our physical bodies and this causes stress

…and stress makes us ill and speeds up our ageing process (potentially stealing years from our lives).

And that is just one way that time affects our mental & physical health.

Time, as Einstein, revealed, only exists in relation to material substance. The Theory Of Relativity explains how the earth’s gravitational pull affects force upon on material substance (e.g natural changes in weather, or growth patterns); and how the forces of gravity distort the relationship between space and time.

Before grasping that profound thought spirals you into anxiety, I offer you a positive assurance: that you can use this concept to support your own healing.

I’d like to share with you what I learned through suffering a DNOTS this time last year (Dark Night Of The Soul - August 23 to February 24). Chronic work stress and a toxic work environment (between spring 2022 to autumn 2023) lead my neurological system to close down my sensory system (in order to protect itself from further abuse). Any amount of light caused intense pain needing acute medical treatment. This also removed all pleasures of Christmas because I sat in a darkened room with no fire, candlelight, twinkling fairy lights or flickering TV. My sense of smell also disappeared, leaving me vulnerable to fire risk and infected foods for many months (6-9mths). I could not smell leaking gas (we had a gas leak during those months) .I could not smell if milk had ‘turned’ or if other foods had ‘gone off’. And I couldn’t take pleasure in my passions of perfume, aromatherapy & the composing of incense. In other words the impact of chronic work stress was that my capacity and quality of life had been reduced to zero because my body had shut down it’s senses (of sight, smell, taste, touch & hearing). Put simply, from a soul level, my presence on earth did not want to feel, controlled, belittled, or bullied or abused anymore. Put poetically: my body had reacted to external stressors like the exotic pea plant Mimosa Pudica, or Acacia, that responds to physical touch and other stimulation by rapidly closing its leaves and drooping. It’s a great analogy for the damage inflicted upon us by sensory overload inflicted externally within toxic controlled work environments and the controlling line managers who create them. If you are experiencing that and you are feeling it in your body, remember you are not at fault, they are.

I learned 3 important things about time and it’s effect on physical & mental health, and healing, during in this period when my sensory & physical body was shutting down, preparing to die.

1. The first: if you are experiencing chronic work stress or bullying from a narcissist psychopath leave before it impacts on you physically remember your mental health is your early warning system and the longer, in terms of linear time, that you stay in a toxic work environment, the deeper the negative impact will be on your physical health and your life. Also know that the function of life is to support life itself, and you are life and you will be supported.

2. The second thing I learned about time space, and how it affects your health, was through being forced into meditative stillness for 3 to 6 months (because if I moved my body or head I triggered an instant involuntary vomit reflex witnessed by my rheumatologist and my paid carers. The chronic stress had affected my vagus nerve, (that is my brain-heart-lung connection) and this impacted my trigemenal nerve (eye motor reflex & facial senses). If I stood up or looked around the room I suffered from such extreme vertigo a symptom of a permanent chronic hemiplegic migraine involving half body paralysis. Stress of any kind triggered stroke-likesymptoms not once but three times hospitalising me between August 2023 and October 2023. So I could not move, taste or smell, and I had half body paralysis needing to employ QCQ carers to look after me. The slightest register of a light or a sudden sound left me trembling, as if in ‘shell-shock’ My neurologist explained this. But what I could do was a lean into, and learn about, being in this state of physical nonsensory calm-stillness; lean into trusting that my existential bodily needs would be catered for within this state of calm-stillness; leaning into reclaiming ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ in life; leaning in to reclaiming ownership of my own time and agency as a human being.

During my enforced Dark Night Of The Soul, I existed in a space-time of non-sensory ‘now’-ness.

I listened to the soothing calm slow guided meditations of the wonderful spiritual guru Ekhart Tolle, who has been teaching us all “the power of now“ since the 1990s.

I have been practising the art of meditation, on and off, since the 1990s but my understanding of meditation, and in particular mindfulness meditation, deepened so much during this DNOTS period. Incidentally, I had applied mindfulness meditation as one of the tools, or resources, that I used in my recovery from fibromyalgia over 15 years before this experience.

Ekhart Tolle guides us through this ‘now’ meditation by inviting us to become aware, through using our innate extra-sensory perceptions, of our relationship with the space-time in which we exist.

Here’s an introduction to the healing benefits of meditation.

What I learnt through meditation was that being in the ‘now’ supports optimum health & healing. One of the work environment stressors damaging to my health, was the experience of having my time wasted and being continually forced to live either in the ‘future’ or the ‘past’. I will ‘unpack that in future blogs or videos. Being ‘unable’ to work in the present was damaging and toxic to my physical and mental health. In this clip Ekhart Tolle explains how living in the future and past causes anxiety. Respecting each other’s value in the egalitarian ‘now’ of each moment, with equity, equality and fairness supports wellness.

In this second learning I understood, experientially, how deep and affective meditation is as a healing technique, particularly mindfulness meditation. Learning to ‘live’, ’be’ and ‘do’ in the ‘now’ is an almost miraculous application of time. Time that is the past and time that is the future does not actually exist. As sentient beings on Earth we can only experience our now; we can only experience ourselves in the now; we cannot touch taste, hear or smell the past. We can remember what the past smelled or sounded like i.e. the impression of the memory of what it felt like can stay with us, but we can only imagine what the future might look or sound like. We can imagine what the future might feel like (which by the way is the secret of manifestation ) but we can only experience it in a ‘future’ present moment.

3. The third thing I learned to understand about non-sensory, non-linear space time and space was how the ‘now’ possesses within it the most profound unconditional love which is the fabric of life itself (God, if you like), and that this gift of God perceived as unconditional love can only exist in the essence of ‘now’. I also realised that the essence of ‘now’ always contains within it, the existence of unconditional love (life itself)

I would like to leave you with two profound thoughts:

The first: how evil it is when we inflict pain on others because that causes the past to be trapped in the future ‘now ‘ of their pain body, which causes anxiety about their future; and

the second: that our sentient bodies are conduit for God experiencing earth through our senses. There is no separation between universal unconditional love and the glimpses of it we remember through different experiences in our lives. There is no separation between experiential glimpses of this space-time and that experienced through collective consciousness.

…

Search This Blog