How Meditation Will Transform The Way You Manage Your Time

Here’s how a regular practice of meditation helped me shift the way I see and feel time.

Meditation is sometimes described as a “grounding” practice. It grounds your mind at presence and prevents it from wandering somewhere in the future (planning and projecting) or in the past (holding on to scars, old stories). Even though you live in a society organized according to a linear idea of time, you can’t change the past and you can’t be in the future. The only place you can live is actually—right now. Right now everything is happening; right now is the only moment when you can decide what to do, how to feel, what to think. Isn’t that actually empowering?

Once you fully understand and feel that the only moment of living is here and now, you will no longer worry about the future. That’s because you redirect your attention from a constant, endless worry and anxiety about the future to you living here and now. Instead of projecting less or more possible scenarios of future events, you fully concentrate on enjoying that one moment in your life, which is now.

I used to hold on to my past stories a lot. I felt miserable about a few broken relationships, was angry and disappointed with a couple of situations. But the more you live at presence and the more you are conscious of you being here and now, the more unimportant and blurred becomes the past. After all, what is the point of wasting your energy on something you can’t change? If you want to change something you are unhappy with, this is the only right time to do it—now.

This one can be hard to believe in, but honestly (with a hand on my heart), there’s time for everything that truly matters to you. Yes, I know that “not enough time” has become one of most repeated mantras in the XXI Century. But doesn’t it sound like an excuse? We often become so focus and concentrated on planning the future, that we miss important moments happening right now. Have you ever missed in your life something that was really (I mean really, really) important to you? You may have thought you wouldn’t make it, but you haven’t missed it. You can’t be too late in your life, so take a few deep breaths and relax. It’s going to be all right.