Time-boxes??

Observations of subtle conditioning within myself

I keep discovering more and more (subtle?!) ways in which I have been conditioned.

Conditioning.

Box.

Straight jacket.

A hard cast surrounding the body.

Iron mask.

Petrified image.

It all feels synonymous… different ways to put words to the same idea.

And ps- when I say “I keep discovering” I don’t mean in a mental way. I mean that I am seeing it play out and going, “Ooooooohhhhh shit. There it is!!!” 🙀 It’s an experiential connection and understanding.

This is what happened…

I forgot my phone at work yesterday.

Realized it only when I got home, and I had NOOOOO desire to leave the house again to get it. It’s not far- a 10/15 minute drive- but it was just not something I had the energy for at that time, so I decided to just “tough it out” through the night and get my phone in the morning.

It was quite interesting to experience how much and how often I wanted to reach for my phone. It’s crazy how much it’s embedded in my life.

Now, I’m not someone to go off on how bad it is that we are so reliant on technology and how it’s ruining our world or whatever else people tend to say in these contexts. I don’t think that at all. I am very much a lover of technology and what it can do for us. I think that, yes, it can be used in… unhealthy and harmful ways… but that solely has to do with the user and not the technology itself.

The how not the what.

The tech is what it is.

My phone can be an amazingly effective and helpful tool to enhance my life.

-OR-

I can make it my master.

👉 I 👈 choose.

Of course, it takes self-awareness- like everything in this life, it’s all about self-awareness.

Our tech gives us vast and varied ways in which we can distract and numb ourselves, and, thus, settle more and more deeply into our conditioning. Make it more comfortable. Therein lies the “danger” - and WHY self-awareness is important.

But this writing is NOT about the benefits vs the perils of technology, so let me not get lost in that sidetrack…

The most interesting thing I noticed in this experience of being without my phone is connected to my relationship to time.

I do kind of love how our phones have become these versatile, mini, hand-held computers that can do so much and have replaced so many different devices— I always giggle at the meme I see sometimes about 90s teachers and calculators…

In my home, our phones have greatly minimized the number of clocks watches we have around the house - a fact of which I became keenly aware of last night.

That was probably the weirder part of the experience.

There was a sense of being almost ungrounded. Apparently, I often check the time without realizing it… keeping an unconscious constant contact with it.

Being without my phone and being unable to always know what time it was brought this fact keenly to my awareness.

Waking up in the morning was also interesting…

I don’t set an alarm anymore these days, so at least I wasn’t without my alarm clock lol. My body is on a natural rhythm, and it is quite lovely… granted, it’s not a rhythm that jives all that well with modern life as I go to bed around 9/10 pm and wake up at 5 am and way too much of modern life happens after 8/9 pm 😅 but it is what it is.

Where the conditioning comes in…

This rhythm and schedule did not become a thing for me because my mind told me I should keep these hours, it just arose naturally when I started my job earlier this year. And because of how organically it came to be, I was somewhat blinded to a deeper level within myself that is coming from conditioning.

Ok, so, bear with me here. I am getting into something that I have not yet really put into words for myself, in my mind yet… I am basically doing that here, as I write it out, so please forgive me if it gets messy and/or goes all over the place (lol, more so than my writing usually does!)

Time.

Time, schedules, routines, timing…

I have a tendency to easily lose myself to and be conditioned by schedules and “when [this or that] should be happening,” if that makes sense. But on the other hand, I do have a natural need for routines- which certainly explains why I get easily conditioned by schedules and timing.

And it happens in ever-so-subtle ways, even as I seek to live the truth of who I am and let go of who I am not.

I mean, I guess that is simply the nature of deconditioning/ shadow work/ inner work/ whatever-you-want-call-it… the nature of being committed to self-awareness and inner truth above all else as a complex and imperfect human. It gets deep and subtle. But anyway…

This morning, I woke up at 4 am

Well, actually, I think I probably woke up earlier and dozed in and out for a little bit before I got out of bed. So, I may have woken up at 3:30. Hard to say as I had not clock in the room with me!! lol

I woke up from a weird dream and just laid there for a bit. There was a part of me that felt pretty sure it was time to get up, but I did not hear my husband in the kitchen or his alarm going off in the other room.

(We sleep in separate rooms- which is a whole other story to tell some other time. Suffice to say for now: our relationship is fine; this arrangement arose organically because he snores, and I sleep so much better when I am not being woken up all night by his snoring and he sleeps much better when I’m not endlessly elbowing him throughout the night to make him roll over and stop snoring. It also did not come about because of what HD says about sleeping alone… although I am beginning to see the merit in that. But, again, that’s a story for another day; let’s get back to the story at hand…)

I laid in bed for a bit, dozing on and off, waiting to hear him come out and get his morning started so that I would know it was the correct time to start my day.

Pepper, one of my cats, jumped up on the bed with me and I thought for sure that meant it was time, and my husband maybe forgot to set his alarm or something. She usually comes to me around wake-up time. My body also seemed to think it was time to get up, so I figured it must be 5.

Welp, it was 4.

I stood in the kitchen for a few seconds after seeing the time, considering whether I should go back to sleep for an hour or not.

That was when this whole conditioning around time and schedules really struck me deeply.

Not that I had not seen this tendency in myself before. I have been aware of it for many years at this point.

But I felt it on a deeper level this morning.

How I am always trying to fit myself and my body’s functioning into time boxes.

Yep, time boxes.

I checked in with my body and decided that choosing to go back to sleep would be a mental choice rather than a bodily need. So I didn’t.

As I went about my normal morning business, I reflected on my thought process and how much my actions are guided by what time it is and what needs to get done within this or that time frame. **Ahem… time box!?!**

It almost felt a little horrifying to really take stock of how much I have learned to fit myself and body into these little time boxes. And there’s this kind of insane loop to how it goes too:

I want to wake up at the very least two hours before I have to leave the house so that I have enough time to slowly wake up and relax with my coffee. I want to be at work by 8ish so that I can get 7ish hours in and still be home before 4… so that I can take a shower before eating, because once I get done eating, I need enough time to relax before bed, so I can’t take a shower AFTER eating… and I need to be relaxing long enough so that I’m not feeling the need to stay up when I really should be getting to sleep. And I need to get to sleep by 10ish because I need to wake up by 5ish so that I can be at work by 8ish so that I can… [you can loop right back up to the beginning of the paragraph and just keep going around and around, over and over if you wanted to!! 😵‍💫]

And anything else that I do must fit within the confines of those times or else I start to get anxious. If one thing is late, it messes up the flow of the rest and that is not acceptable.

I have had many different iterations of my normal daily routine- ok, but I am actually kind of loving calling it a time-box instead of a routine, so I may just stick with that lol! Although maybe I should clarify that what I’m meaning by “time-box” is that it’s a schedule/ routine/ blocks of timing that I try to fit myself into, like a box and the walls are the times in which things need to stay within.

At different times in my life, I have adapted myself to different time boxes.

Or said another way, I have conditioned myself to functioning within them.

Interestingly, this is both a mental and a body thing.

My body actually does have a need and pull toward routines and schedules. I think I’ve seen this reflected in different placements in my chart too, although I cannot remember specifically where.

I get hungry and tired at pretty much the same every day. It doesn’t even take too long to adapt to a new schedule and that is not a big deal to my body either… as long as there is consistency. What IS a big deal is needing to deal with different times too frequently or too often… ESPECIALLY if it’s unpredictable. It sends my body into chaos.

In a sense, I suppose that explains why my mind can tend to latch onto routines and create my so-called time-boxes; to keep my body from going all out of whack. There is a lot of self-preservation that is behind the force of this conditioning for me. I can see that.

I have shed a lot of my old sense of needing to fit myself into time boxes that revolved around other people though, and THAT has been liberating as hell.

At least I’m keeping myself beholden to what feels like my own needs now. Cuz, I tell you what, it really sucked to try to ignore my hunger because other people were not ready to eat yet… I totally ended up eating way more than I needed because of that. Snacking to get by. It was hard to stop having a nightly beer or glass of wine because it would also help to keep the hunger at bay in order to make it to “regular” dinnertime.

Which is actually really bad for me, as I am a consecutive appetite person… designed to be healthiest when I eat when I’m hungry. 😒 It’s been such a relief to decouple social bonding from eating in my experiment. Don’t get me wrong, I still engage in social bonding meals, but not as my normal way of eating. Most of the time, I’m eating dinner way too early for anyone else 🤭 and boy, has it been oh-so-satisfying!

And yet, I still do hold myself to shoulds. They are just more subtle and harder to spot sometimes because they are shoulds that based on truths that come straight from my body. But anything that becomes a should ends up being held in unnaturalness at some point. It’s quite wild to witness.

I suddenly had this sense of a question well up inside of me…

What would happen if I just stopped thinking about time and simply allowed the rhythm of my body to guide me??? Truly and completely letting go of any and all time-boxes???

It was kind of terrifying to consider, if I am being honest lol.

I might not be ready in time!

I may not be able to get done what I need to get done!

Things could fall apart!?!?!??!?!?!

Chaos would certainly ensue!!!

I might not get enough sleep and have to function way too tired and not be able to honor my need to sleep!!

Certainly that is not something I could do while having a regular job!!

🙀

Oh, how my mind did protest and recoil in fear!

I don’t know that I am ready for that yet

But it is something that is now in my awareness and the question HAS been posed to my body.

The theory of Human Design does indeed tell me that this is the way… and my mind takes some comfort in the concept within HD that says that by allowing the body to guide me, I WILL be protected, and all will work out in the most correct way possible.

My dear mind is not quite ready for giving up my time-box yet… but I can feel the draw to such a letting go, even for my mind!

We will get there when the time is right, I’m sure.