Two months ago, I started doing a bullet journal. For those who do not know, it is a planner; a slightly more elaborate agenda where you can not only place your appointments, but also follow the success of your habits, write down books you want to read, reasons why to be grateful – you personalize the book and put creativity into practice at the same time.
By following my habits, I noticed how much time I dedicate to my self-knowledge and spiritual and emotional balance practices: I currently do a daily chakra harmonization exercise, a guided meditation by Deepak Chopra that lasts for 21 days, I am always reading a book, and I make some Access Bars® questions to help me manifest the life I want. I also do a weekly session of therapy for the mind and one through the body (dance), I exchange with friends, discuss the themes as they arise. Each week, my therapist indicates to me documentaries and videos to watch, and I consider the texts that I also write as part of this work on myself.
Other than that, of course, I have to take care of my studies in college, the house, my relationship, my work.
I know people who do much more: another day I read about a person who works with healing and who mentioned investing two hours a day in actions to clean her channel as a therapist.
The fact is that self-knowledge takes time; there is no way. We live in a world where immediate results are expected: do you remember dial-up internet, when you had to wait a long time for a connection, and it would fail all the time? Now if the internet connection breaks for two seconds, we are already frustrated.
The holiday trip that used to take days, now can be done in two hours, in the comfort of an airplane. If we hear the plane is a half an hour late, we get frustrated.
We just brought this to our development: we want immediate results. We want to do a meditation for three days and change a state of dissatisfaction that we fed for a lifetime. We want to go to a weekend retreat and get out of there enlightened. If this result does not come quickly, we give up.
This became very clear to me in relation to my job: few people are able to do a 10-week Coaching process, where we say: “The responsibility is all yours: the result will depend on whether you have done the actions during the week.”
My healing work is much more accepted: one does not have to do anything; I am the one who during the week works in the purification of my channel, I prepare the environment and I sit for 50 minutes to do the work. It is rare when someone asks me: “Dulci, besides this session what else can I do to achieve the result?” These are the most successful cures.
Alan Watts said in a Ted Talk on the Universe of Emotions that most people are stuck in the nine-year-old child. You can have your job, your family, but you’re still a nine-year-old with all those wants and dissatisfactions. And what does a nine-year-old want? A magic wand!
There are those who will say, “I do not have time – I have a 9-5 job, I have children, etc.” I can think of two other possibilities – in one you turn off Netflix and Whatsapp and start with five minutes a day where you simply listen, nothing else. You breathe a little and ask yourself, “What am I feeling?” That simple.
Then you can evolve to: “Why am I feeling this?” or “What triggered this feeling?” Gradually this practice will become natural; you will find yourself doing this without having to sit down. Just this will already make a big difference in your life, because it will put you in a state of presence and awareness, not living as if things simply happened without you having control (or responsibility) over them.
The other possibility that I can see is: do you really want to live a life where you do not have time to know yourself? Do you want to look back one day and say, “I could not work on my self-knowledge. I was too busy paying my mortgage”? If not, just open up for the possibility of another way.
You can simply drop this question to the Universe every morning: “How can I live a life in which I have plenty of resources and time?”
Deepak Chopra says, “Time is flexible and expandable.” There’s your magic wand. Start with this, and then use the time you earn to do the work necessary for your evolution.