Perfect Timing. Life Coaching Tools – Blog and Podcast
STAYING ALIVE: PART TWO – PERFECT TIMING.
There are two aspects to Perfect timing. There’s slowing down, and there’s developing your instinct for seizing the moment, appropriately, decisively and fast. Each aspect reinforces and supports the other.
Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes
For many years we taught traditional silent meditation retreats in addition to our work with NLP and hypnosis. Although we shifted our main focus, I still find myself teaching meditation to clients – both traditional sitting meditations, as well as other, less-familiar forms.
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The other day I taught a client about eating meditation. When people learn eating meditation for the first time, they often say things like:
“I have been in Over-Eaters Anonymous for years, and I’ve done countless diets and programs. Eating meditation has finally allowed me to have a relationship with food that’s not dysfunctional. I’ve stopped using food like a drug.” .. or, “I knew the kind of foods I should be eating, and I wanted to eat them, but somehow it was hard to change my old habits .. until now!”
I remember someone saying, “I never knew how awful fast-food tasted until I slowed down enough to really taste it.”
Eating Meditation
If you have never done eating meditation before, simply slow down, focus on your food, taste it, take your time. Get rid of distractions like reading, watching TV, or talking, and spend the meal in silence. Eat one meal a day as a meditation for a couple of weeks. You’ll probably change some of the food you eat; and you’ll also tune in to what your body needs – for most of us that means eating less. If this works for you, continue with eating meditation for one meal every day until it becomes a habit.
Walking Meditation as a Practice and a Metaphor
We also teach our clients to do walking meditation. When you first learned to walk you had to learn about perfect timing. Otherwise you could never have learned to balance on one foot while moving the other one forward. You would have kept on falling down just like you did in the beginning.
When you learn slow walking meditation for the first time, it may feel like learning to walk all over again. You may be a little wobbly. You have to find your balance again. You’ve learned to relying on speed to keep your equilibrium. Something powerful happens when you learn how to maintain your balance and equilibrium at any speed.
There’s something else that walking meditation teaches you. No matter how fast or slow you go, you’re always right here, wherever that may be. That may sound obvious; but how much time do we spend not accepting where we are, denying it, defying it, and trying to be somewhere else? Learning to be right here and now has enormous benefit – for healing, changing, learning, being receptive, and being fully alive!
Perfect Timing
Perfect timing is not just about learning to balance and slow down. It also teaches you that you will get there (at your destination) when you get there. But this doesn’t meant we’re suggesting you remain stuck in an eternal here and now. Perfect timing is also about your intuitive ability to know when you should seize the moment and move, appropriately, decisively, and fast.
This is connected to the first of the Five Qualities that bring out and nourish the spirit of being fully, absolutely and unashamedly alive – Click Here for article on Congruity. When you’re in essential agreement with yourself; when the inner and the outer, your conscious and you unconscious mind, are working together, you have natural perfect-timing.
Procrastination
Lots of people have a problem with procrastination. There are many possible reasons for it .. fear of failure, fear of success, resignation to your limiting beliefs, unresolved anger, or grief .. the list goes on.
One of the big problems with procrastination, aside from missing deadlines and feeling stagnant and bogged down, is that it contributes to further loss of your natural sense of perfect timing. You dull your intuitive capacity to know when it’s appropriate to seize the moment, and when it’s not.
Getting your timing right
Here are five things to help you kick the procrastination habit and develop perfect timing. Practice these five things and notice what changes (and let us know, write your comment below):
- Slow down. Begin your day, regardless of how busy you expect it to be, with something that slows you down. Do walking meditation for fifteen minutes (i.e. walk naturally as slowly as you can, focusing on your body’s movement), or ‘sit quietly, doing nothing’ (another exercise we give to all our clients). Eat breakfast as an eating meditation. Or simply do your own version of contemplation, or make music, sing, paint, draw etc.
- Eat the Frog. If the hardest thing you had to do today was to swallow a live frog, you would think about it all day until you finally swallowed it. After centering yourself with the things suggested in number 1, do the thing that you’re most likely to put off doing all day. Do it first. Your whole day will be a lot more pleasurable, and efficient, without you trying to not think about that ‘frog’.
- Be on-time. Set your internal clock, and your intention, to be punctual. Do you know someone who is almost always late? Maybe you’ve been like that yourself. It’s usually very stressful. Give yourself the time you need to be punctual. If there’s going to be traffic, take it into account.
- Plan. Schedule your day, week, and month so that what’s important gets done, and so you can do it with plenty of time to spare. There’s no need to schedule everything. Schedule the things that are important. The rest will fit in around them. If they don’t, then re-evaluate the plan.
- Play. Schedule time for play, fun, recreation, sport, friendship, romance, travel, whatever you need to nourish you spirit.
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Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes
Perfect Timing, Good timing, Life Coaching, Five changes, Mediation, NLP, spiritual practice, Neuro linguistic programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.