The kingdom of God is like nothing we expect;it has no yesterday and no day after
tomorrow; it does nor come in 'a thousand years' - it is something experienced in the
heart; it is everywhere and nowhere . . .

- Friedrich Nietzsche

" Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all

the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

Yesterday's quote from The Course In Miracles has been playing on my mind. It feels so true to my experience. Fear has been a big barrier in my life (often unconscious fear) that I only realized was there when I did some work to notice who or what I was keeping out or defending myself against.

The " Work " of Byron Katie has been a huge help to me in this regard. I have a close friend Margaret ( I think John O Donoghue would call her an 'Ainm Cara ' or soul friend ), whenever there is a stressful thought bothering me I write one of Katie's work sheets on the thought and we work through my beliefs as written on the paper. I am usually amazed by the insights uncovered in working through the questions, amazed by the faulty beliefs which were keeping me stuck and keeping love out.

http://www.thework.com It is a great tool for opening the mind.

       Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all

        the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.   

              -A Course in Miracles

Untitled from ann on Vimeo.

Here is the beginning section of the Tai Chi Short Form
from our morning in Fitzgerald's Park.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
- Saint Augustine

Time is still on my mind today so here are some more reflections -

Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

We live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (for more on this topic check out Tor Norretranders The User Illusion ).

Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. ( If you want to ease the stress caused by old negative memories replaying consciously or unconsciously check out the meditation exercise I posted on Tuesday 26'th July it has worked well for me.)

Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue.


A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least until we master the 'aging reversal' discussed above.

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
- Lewis Carroll
For years now I've been studying theories about beliefs, where they come from, how to change or delete limiting ones, sometimes I despair that this will never end . When it looks like an up hill journey it's time to stop and reflect. See where all this study has brought me.
Think back to when I was working all hours of the day believing that a 'permanent'job was my security. Working through my beliefs allowed me to take time out from the job and see if I could make life work for me outside of that career. Sixteen years on I have never regretted the change. I've had time to be with my daughters as they grew up. Had the time to devote to Tai Chi, the time to discover that I love to write , to photograph, and yes that I love to read and reflect. I have realized that for me time is very valuable , time to be fully in this life.
I think that taking the time to reflect on how you are spending your time, is time well spent !

           All paths lead to me.

                 Krishna from the Bhagvad Gita



           The roads are different the path is one. . . When

           people come there,all quarrels or differences or

           disputes that happened along the road are resolved.

           Those who shouted at each other along the road " You 

           are wrong" or "You are an unbeliever" forget their

           differences when they come here because there, all

           hearts are in unison.

                  Rumi



          Why are we here? To become ourselves in You.

                  Kabir