Orbits - not Excuses

Lately I keep experiencing myself as being in different orbits. Not at the same time, but within moments I could be in one space and then poof I'm in another. One could say I'm having a mental breakdown, but chances are, that's not it.

So I go into habitual mind patterns, replaying things that happened in the past, getting myself all wound up, and then something happens to knock me out of that orbit and the next thing I know, I'm saying hi to Gurubelle or some other Witness-type Consciousness thing. I go from being a victim of my circumstances to being the observer of my life having a chuckle.

My watch is set for 15 minutes today. That's something I started back when I was working at Omega 15 years ago. I would write up little post-its to myself to remember to breathe or something simple and then my eyesight would go bad so I'd never see the post-it on the monitor again. At the time I had cool Iron-Man watch. I remember picking it out at the K-Mart in Kingston, NY. I read through the extensive instructions and figured out how to set it, and I set the timer to go off every 15 minutes. When it would go off, I'd take a deeper breath, look around, see what was happening and then get back to work or whatever I was up to. What started happening is time evened out. See, sometimes I'd hear the watch go off, and it seemed like it was going off every 5 minutes. That's when I was having a good time. Other times, the watch would take like half an hour to go off and I wondered if I'd even had the thing turned on. Those were more stressful times. After awhile, 15 minutes just felt like 15 minutes. I learned a lot from that. A few years ago I would use it and in addition to taking a breath and noticing where I was and being present, I would consider how I was being and what it might be like to be around me.

I haven't done it much in the past few years - I stopped wearing a watch and I just didn't do it - but lately it's back on. The first thing I noticed is how quickly the time went by when I was hanging out at Kat's place eating cupcakes, and then I was later on wondering if the timer was even set it was taking so long to go off. I had become out of practice and I've been living in the world of my circumstances.

So it's back on and it's helping me to get out of the orbit I'm in if I notice I'm not in one that's resonating with peace and health. But sometimes it takes something bigger to knock me out of something with a lot of gravity. Today it was something posted to my wall on Facebook. I went to Gangaji's website and read this page and bawled my eyes out. I'm out of that low orbiting place and I'm in a lighter, freer orbit. Thanks.