I am definitely someone who has felt imprisoned by the concept of time over my lifetime and the seeming lack of it.
“Not enough time” has been an invasive and limiting mantra that rooted like a weed around the time I entered college and it hasn’t yet been fully eradicated.
I’ve been working on it, though, for quite a while actually, here and there — and then lately — A LOT. I’m just tired of it; it’s so old and worn out for me and when I relax into a more flexible nature with time, everything seems to work out just fine.
(Side note: I just learned that there’s a word for that feeling of being heavy and bored with old programming — altschmerz, as in: I’m experiencing some serious effing altschmerz with this old belief that time is finite.”)
I mean, first of all, time doesn’t even really exist. I and my clients experience this a lot during energy work — sometimes an hour seems to span ages and sometimes it feels like a snap of the fingers.
Time expands and contracts in ways that don’t make sense to our calendar oriented minds, but that does make sense when you’re hanging out in the quantum field.And waaaaay back when, during the era of the goddess, which lasted from essentially the birth of man to about 3,000 BCE, time was perceived as cyclical, with no finite beginning or end.
Time was a rhythmic balance of energies that flowed from one into another on endless repeat, whether it was the cycle of a day from dawn to noon to night; that of a month from new waxing moon to full to waning dark; the seasons of Spring to Summer to Fall/Winter; or a lifetime from birth to life to death to rebirth… In this rhythm, there was trust.
All things were born, all things grew, all things transitioned. This passage of time was honored, and there were priestesses and crones who supported others through these cycles and transitions. With the rise of the patriarchy, fear needed to be instilled.
The cyclical nature of the goddess was eradicated (along with everything matriarchal) so that the fear of death — the arena that men had learned to excel in with the development of weapons — could subjugate others. The death cycle was vilified, the wise crone became the demonized witch, and all that related to darkness — the dark of the moon, night, the Underworld, shadow, death — became something to be feared. They became the realm of black magic, sorcery, demons, tragedy. In this, time became less flexible, less flowing. It became rigid and structured. Emphasis was placed on certain aspects of time over others, with the productive spring, summer, and harvest times being honored at the expense of the transition time. Instead of the moon cycle, which measured time over rhythms and energy flows, days were created, cut into segments of time that were quantified over the course of 24 hours, 16 of which held precedence over the 8 spent in darkness. The 16 “productive” hours needed to be filled to overflowing, and the amount of high level energy that could be stuffed into them began to determine the worth of the individual. The time for restoration — the dark hours, the new moon days, the winter — were infringed upon by a society hell-bent on producing more and more and more at the expense of its health (and that of our precious Gaia). In my personal story, this has showed up as tying my worth to my productivity, which has then created a need for more productive hours over restorative hours. As I shift my beliefs around the limitations of time, I’m finding that this cyclical understanding of nature is serving me well. When I can relax into trust and allow for “time” to unfold, it’s all taken care of. When I create space for the restoration, I’m more energized and aligned in my actions, and time feels more spacious. It opens and flows and contorts as needed.
For the time being, we all live in a world that still measures time by the Gregorian calendar and it’s still highly patriarchal (though the goddess is doing more than just creeping in these days and I’m grateful to be a part of that!), BUT: one small act of resistance for me is to negate the idea that I need to be ruled by this timeline.
Sometimes smashing the patriarchy simply means reclaiming a way of being that feels more aligned with your goddess nature. I’m reclaiming the cyclical, spiral, expansive nature of time. How will you smash the patriarchy today? Leave a comment and let me know; I’d love to hear from you. (And this goes for you guys out there too; we all have both the masculine and feminine essences within us.)
Lots of love,
Janet
