Becoming Free of Time Binds

The somatics of inviting (and receiving) more Kairos into our lives.

For months, a vivid dream kept me breathing and taking one step in front of the other. A dream of flowing through each day—without deadlines, the ping of digital demands, wall-to-wall meetings, or time binds imposed by other people’s priorities. This dream was a dim and distant light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. It kept me going.

‘Soon I’ll be on my own timeline’ became a mantra recited on repeat in my mind. My description of the motivation to leap without an obvious next step, whenever someone asked.

Do you remember a time, when you were a kid and adults would commentate the pace of their lives, how fast the years flew by? Me too. I remember taking note of this, because in contrast, the years of having single-digit candles on my birthday cake felt like they lasted an eternity.

Birthdays in the late 70s/early 80s were their own vibe.

I couldn’t understand how these adults experienced time so differently. They’d urge me to enjoy my youth. “These are the best years of your life”, they’d say. Meanwhile, ignoring them, I poured my energy into wishing away the school years that felt interminable and longing to be an adult so I could make my own decisions.¹ This is probably why my parents felt they needed to explain my sassy personality to their friends, “she’s 8 going on 18,” they’d say.

Somewhere around the time of double-digit birthdays, the pace of chronos time (or, more accurately, my perception of it) began to slowly weave its binds around me—imperceptibly tightening as the years ticked by.

Chronos refers to measured, ticking, quantitative time, such as seconds, minutes, hours, and years. Chronos time is how we measure our days and our lives quantitatively.

At first, chronos time was a motivating force that propelled me to achieve and strive for my potential. Time is money. Make every second count. Don’t waste the day. We all recognize the sayings that condition us to treat that ticking clock as a measure of our lives. Like anything quantifiable, we quickly jump to worrying about whether we have enough of it.

By my early-30s, chronos time had become an invisible force suffocating the freedom and flow felt in the day-to-day of life. In response, I made every attempt to control it with productivity and ‘time management’ hacks that promised to open a portal for ‘me time’ and the freedom I craved. Perhaps the most egregious illustration of my chronos conditioning was when I made huge life decisions based on societal age pressures (such as ‘shouldn’t you be married by now?’—sigh) rather than what I felt in my heart.

Noticing Kairos

Amid all the tick-tock, there have been glimpses of kairos time—playing my clarinet as a young girl, writing in my journal, the first months of falling in love, while travelling to experience a new culture, dancing a night away without care for tomorrow. The moments when time seems to stretch, slow, or sometimes even stop. My creativity flows more easily. I feel more full and alive.

Translated as “the right time” from Ancient Greek, kairos refers to qualitative, in-the-moment time, signifying the opportune moment for action. Kairos has a sense of permanence, of weight and importance beyond the mere measure of a second hand ticking on a clock.

c/o Matt Haig

After leaving my C-Suite job in New York City to live amongst the trees in Oregon, there was a period of four months where it was illegal for me to work while I waited for my new work visa to be processed. Nothing quite like the threat of being deported to halt behaviours and open a window for something new to unfold.

Every day became kairos time. At first, I felt aimless and lost. What to do with myself today? I was anxious and twitchy without any demands or deadlines. Besides completing my 12-week certification as a meditation instructor, the rest of my days were w i d e o p e n.

It was a deprogramming. That four month sabbatical was a gift that rewired my nervous system. At the time, I’d label it as a deprogramming, but didn’t understand the nervous system as well as I do now. I didn’t know why it felt so good to stand barefoot on the grass near my mailbox, or why I felt drawn to dwell there for much longer than it takes to collect mail. My daily walking meditation in the woodlands around my home felt like medicine, so I kept going back for more, without understanding why it was more healing than my daily seated meditation at home. I followed my bliss and it guided me to heart-centered experiences and soul-nourishing friendships that I cherish deeply to this day.

The profound lightness of dwelling in kairos time for four months has never left me since. My 12.31.23 declaration that it was time to once again ‘be on my own timeline’ was definitely infused with the memories and longing to embody this feeling once again.

Reality Stings

It’s now four and a half weeks since I left my corporate job (for good this time!) and I’ve been plunged back into that anxious, twitchy liminal space.

On the most recent full moon, February 24, I had big plans and no energy to do them. I usually wake bright as a button, so the onset of morning exhaustion was inexplicable. Enough sleep, check. Eating well, check. Daily vitamins and minerals, electrolytes, check, check, check.

Laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, I observed the ping-pong happening in my mind. ‘I should get up and do my morning rituals. And my full moon rituals, this is the perfect time. And what an amazing date—24 - 2 - 24—I should look up the numerology of this date, I am sure it’s significant. Is it a good date to launch something? It’s a full moon, of course it is. Maybe I should publish my first story for

Gutsy by Design

today. Ugh, I’ve fallen off the wagon with my daily meditations. I should do one now while I lay here. It’s almost 7am, I have to get up and make something of this day. I need to get through the first two modules of my GI Mapping course.’

This radio chatter and barrage of ‘shoulds’ was interrupted by the loud and stark realization that I’d replaced all the old demands of my corporate life with my own set of time binds.

Moments later, with a long exhale, I let all of these false time pressures go. I crawled back into bed and went back to sleep. My weekly Bloomed letters have been delayed, not for want of ideas or space and time. Rather, I’ve been inviting kairos to envelope me and making space for receiving it.

As I left corporate work behind, I mistakenly thought I could just slip back into that yummy kairos time, because I had somatic memory of it from those four months in Oregon. What I hadn’t accounted for is the rewiring goes both ways. After two years of chronic stress, lack of restorative sleep, losing touch with my cycle-syncing, my nervous system has been rewired to operate with chaos as its baseline. Every day, I’ve woken up with that anxious twitch, as if I’m preparing for the onslaught of stressors.

It’s time to deprogram again and regulate my nervous system to a new baseline. For good, this time.

The Somatics of Kairos

The qualitative nature of kairos leads me to the conclusion that this isn’t time that the mind can rationalize. It’s the felt sense of the body that experiences kairos time. To invite more kairos and be able to receive it, we must be more present in our bodies, exploring the world through felt senses, and in connection with the cycles and seasons of Mother Nature.

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Here are 5 simple ways to invite more kairos into your life:

1. Dance. Needle drop those tunes that move you… literally. Choose beats and rhythms that are impossible to just sit and listen. Borrow my dance break playlists, if you like.

2. Get your bare feet on the earth. Leave your phone indoors. The physiological impacts of connecting our skin with the earth—a.k.a. grounding or earthing—have long been documented by ancient civilizations and are starting to be taken seriously by modern science.
   
   Get outside. Notice the feelings in your body as you drink in the scenes around you through your five senses; smell and taste the air, feel the earth under your toes, hear the most distant sound, notice the scenes of nature around you… feel anything shift in your cells?
   

3. Take yourself on an Artist Date. Need inspiration? Scope out this post from Stephanie Scott, or the prompts in my new guided journal: Source Material. Leave your phone and watch at home. Allow yourself to lose track of time.

The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic”– think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy.
—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

4. Sing at the top of your lungs. Bonus (nervous system) points for doing it with others! I won’t dive deep into the polyvagal theory of this², but there are physiological benefits to singing which increases vagal tone, along with humming, chanting and even gargling.
   
   Combine #1 and #4 with this playlist from my collection. Give it all you’ve got and let me know how you feel after, the comments are open!

5. Give yourself permission to decide in the moment. Rather than planning out your week and calendaring all your to-dos (or whatever your go-to productivity hack of choice might be)… try choosing your next step based on what feels good in the moment.
   
   The tight binds of time management can kill the joy we feel for our creative projects, our artistic process, or our purpose-driven work. I have a spectacularly long list of projects that I am enthusiastically pursuing this year, including these regular letters of self-discovery. I noticed that when I had a (self-imposed) rigid day each week for publishing a letter, it quickly became a chore. The stress would rise in my chest if the creativity wasn’t flowing. When I let go of the time bind, I’d write whenever I felt the bolt of inspiration hit. As a result, I quickly returned to the feelings of ideas flowing freely and from the heart. Writing this letter to you is sparking the heart-bursting joy that I love.

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What would you add to this list? How do you invite more kairos and allow yourself to be less beholden to the chains of chronos time?

1. And yes, as an adult, I repeated this cycle by telling my son to enjoy his youth and these would be the best and more carefree years of his life. Some of it must’ve sunk in, because he felt an enormous degree of dread as he approach adulthood and the responsibilities that go with it!

2. But if you’re interested, Google “neuroception” and the role of the vagus nerve in how we respond to even the subtlest cues in our environment. This article does a decent job of explaining it in simple terms and this piece covers the hidden benefits of the vagus nerve.