Ever feel like you're on a never-ending treadmill of busyness, trying to outrun time? Well, darling, step off and breathe! Today, we’re diving into the chaotic whirlpool that is 'time' and surfacing with a sparkling gem: the power of going slow. We'll even add some color to your calendar and mix it up with the rhythm of your energy! 🌈✨ 

 🌈 Bullet points + chapter markers 

• [00:00:00] Intro 
• [00:01:44] Exercise to Optimize 
• [00:05:23] Activities That Nourish You 
• [00:06:08] Balancing Activities Based on Your Energy 
• [00:09:04] Being Present in Time 
• [00:10:43] Don't go Fast; Go Slow 
• [00:15:44] Ground Yourself, Literally 
• [00:17:23] Why Slow Down? 

🌈 Episode Highlights 

Master the Art of Slowing Down  

Struggling with a task? Maybe it's time to go slow to go fast! Find out how a 15-minute meditation transformed a stressful Excel sheet ordeal into a piece of cake. Slow and steady wins the race! 

Get Grounded, Get Happy 

Need an instant mood lifter? We've got the perfect, free, eBook just for you! Discover the power of grounding to elevate your spirit and declutter your mind. Your best self is just a click away! https://artoflifecenter.com/grounding/ 

Why Slowing Down is the New Speeding Up? 

Think being in the moment is a waste of time? Think again! Learn how taking time to ground yourself can actually make you more productive. When you’re present, the universe can support you with all the help you need! 

🎉 Special Announcement 🎉 

New Year, New You! Get ready for Life Makeover, our flagship art therapy meditation program ro reset your life and make it your way. Waitlist now open at https://artoflifecenter.com/art Be there or be square, 

🌈  Links From This Episode  

🌟 Zen in a Ziffy: Your Ultimate Guide to Grounding and Kicking Stress 

https://artoflifecenter.com/grounding/ 

🌟️ Register today for a full-on Life Makeover – a super easy, gentle and fun way to heal every aspect of your life with Art Therapy Meditations 

https://artoflifecenter.com/art 

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Welcome to the Art of Life podcast.

I'm Kanika.

I'm your host, and I welcome you to a podcast that is

around improving your life.

Every week we talk about certain topics and discuss some mindset changes,

discuss some questions, discuss some ways in which we can get better and we

can really improve and heal our lives.

So you are in for a treat.

Today's topic we have is what's the rush?

Don't go fast.

Go slow

Well, this topic really came about because I was feeling a whole lot rushed

and I thought, well, wait a minute.

I gotta slow down.

Now, our day-to-day lives can feel really rushed.

We have our jobs, whatever we are doing.

And then there's a whole other heap of activities to do as well.

Sometimes I have friends and families wanting our attention.

Sometimes there's other stuff that's wanting our attention.

Like maybe something broke down.

We've got to fix a car.

We've got to fix the roof.

There's a whole lot of demand on time and time always seems to be slipping away.

So I thought we could do this topic today, which is around time,

getting our balance back with time.

It's around work life balance.

To me, it's also a whole lot around fulfilling me and becoming more of

me, giving me the space to be me and not running life on autopilot.

So hopefully you'll find this useful.

So first up, I have an exercise for you.

When you can, sit down and look at your day activities.

Like write down what are the main activities that you do during

the day, during a week, perhaps.

So write down things that you have to do to live.

That would be, for example, your job.

Meeting your clients or the chores that you have to do, those sorts of things,

like things that you literally have to do to live and give that a color, right?

So we will color code everything in the end, but for now, write down

the activities that you do to live.

Now, the second bucket, write down activities that you do for others.

So maybe you do activities such as going to a party or a drink or meeting someone.

Helping out some other friend, errands that you run for someone else, you can

probably put those into another bucket and call those the activities for others.

Give that another color.

Let's say you give the first one blue.

I'm making a guess here.

And let's say activities for others is a green color.

The last bit I want you to do is write down activities for yourself.

Activities for yourself that you do.

Now these activities are activities that nourish you.

So these are activities that you really enjoy.

So maybe that is spending time with your kids.

Maybe that's spending time with your partner.

Maybe that is meditating.

Maybe that is Gardening or painting or pole dancing,

whatever, you, it's that stuff.

Write down those activities and color this one as well.

Again, pick up a color that you like.

Let's assume for this one that you have picked up the color yellow.

Now look at this visual calendar in front of you.

Look at the greens, the blues and the yellows.

And see from a distance, which one is making more space, which one

is filling up most of your time.

Now you see the activities for yourself, they're the ones that are nourishing you.

They're the ones that are nourishing your soul, the activities that you do to

live, they're literally a surviving one.

So you probably need those very much.

They are giving you what you need to survive, but they're not nourishing you.

So you might find some ways here.

You might think of certain things where you can probably reduce your time.

So for example, if you're spending some time doing chores such as

cleaning and you don't really enjoy it, you could think around outsourcing

that at least once in a while.

And that's an example.

Then there are activities that you do for others.

Maybe you were spending time with a family member, but when you come out from

the event, you are really feeling too drained, or you feel like somebody's been

questioning you, invalidating you, so you don't feel the best about yourself.

And maybe those are the activities and you go, well, how can I

spend less and less time on that?

So this is a colorful way to look at your life every day or a week at a

time and see how can you start shifting time for yourself and make more

time for things that align with you, activities that fill you up inside.

Because the beauty of all of this is that the activities that

fill you up inside, they actually give you a whole lot of energy.

When you spend time with these ones, you have a whole lot more energy to give.

There are other energies, which really sap you, they drain you of your energy.

And then even if you have the other time planned for something that

you really enjoy, maybe baking or watching a movie, you probably feel

too drained and it doesn't fill you as much as it would otherwise.

So see if you can limit those in some sense and you can give

more and more time to activities that really boost your energy,

activities that really nourish you.

Time and energy go really hand in hand.

And this is another concept that I want you to have a think about as well.

We can often think of time as finite, and then energy can be really finite as well,

but energy is a little bit different.

You might have a different body clock.

You might be the most energetic in the morning, or you might be the most

energetic during the evening, maybe that's your most productive time.

But see if you can do activities, you can shift them around to

suit how your energy levels are.

Personally, for myself, I noticed that there are days where I am really good

with meeting a whole lot of people.

And then there are other days where I want to tuck myself away and get

a whole lot of productive work done.

Because I know that if I schedule something during the day in the

middle of the day, it takes a whole lot of that productive

focus I would have had otherwise.

So I'd rather do the social events and the social gatherings,

chunk them all together.

And I'd rather chunk all my productive stuff that I want

to do all together as well.

And even with the productive work that I do I will fill it

in with bits that nourish me.

So I might do something that takes a whole lot of energy and focus

and then I might do certain things which are really enjoyable for me.

So it boosts my own energy levels up as well.

The other thing I'd like to talk about here is also sometimes, and I'm guilty

of that as well, we can procrastinate.

So there are things that we really need to do.

So maybe you need to file your taxes, maybe you need to do some

calls and you're really putting them away, but it's stressing you out.

All those stress sort of things, pick the time that works best for you and do them.

I often feel that when I've got stuff that I'm not doing, it sort of weighs me down.

I might try and do other things, but the stuff that I don't like doing it, it still

lingers in the background like I feel there is this weight on my shoulders.

So you could always go ahead and finish the task as it is.

I often will start my morning with something that is probably

going to be a little bit draining and get it out of the way.

That's what works for me.

Maybe it's getting it right away on the day in the beginning itself.

For you, it might be something else for you.

It might be okay doing it, during midday, whatever that time is, wherever

you feel that you can fit it, but definitely work it around your style.

The activities that you procrastinate, you've got to have a handle on them.

Now, as you look at time, what you want to keep in mind is,

are you prioritizing your time?

Are you prioritizing your energy for the right things?

So you might feel that, Hey, for me, my kids, my partner, they're

the most important or my loved one is the most important and

they're the most cherished ones.

What you want to do is really preserve that time in the sense that

when you are with them, you don't want to be present and not present.

So when your child's saying something, you do actually want to be present.

So that's the time if you feel that's worthwhile, keep your phone away,

or at least don't check it as much.

But take the time to be there and if the habit is really new

for you, that's okay as well, but start one small step at a time.

Activities that you feel nourish you, activities that you feel

are really important for you, do give them your full time.

We know we have the saying like, why are you not doing something

like, go ahead and do something.

The more I have meditated, I've personally found that for me,

what works is the exact opposite.

It is about not going fast, it's about going slow.

It's the exact moment when I feel like, Oh my God, everything's like overwhelming or

so on, that's the time I feel it's best to , stop, take a moment, take a breath, relax,

breathe, and then go on with the day.

So I'll give you certain examples as well.

There was a time when I had a timeline for an Excel sheet that I had to do.

It was a project plan with a couple of dependencies on a new online version

that I was super struggling with.

I would enter one date, it would change something else.

And I wouldn't understand why my plan was now not finishing

at the right dates and so on.

So it was stressful.

I spent, probably two, three hours the first day and I went

like, well, I will get it finished and I will get it finished.

It did not work.

The next day I looked at it again, and this is the day when it had

to be submitted by 12 o'clock.

And I'm like, look, you know what?

I made a mistake yesterday.

What I'm going to do today is let me sit down, let me meditate.

So I sat down, I meditated, calmed myself and I got back to the sheet,

did it like probably in 15 minutes.

It happened super, super quickly.

Now, your style might not be meditating, your style might be something else,

but when you're feeling overwhelmed is the exact moment when you can

probably consider sitting down, having a cup of tea, putting your feet on

the ground, whatever works for you.

Maybe having a very deep conscious breaths or a few more, but whatever

tricks work for you to get yourself in present time doing that.

When you're feeling overwhelmed, that's the exact time to do it.

And of course we all make mistakes.

Like I mentioned, I do too, but you can always get better.

You can always do it a better way next time.

So when you feel like you're really losing it in the traffic jam and you feel

like, Oh my God, it's not going my way.

I've got to do this.

Take a moment, settle, listen to your breath.

Just align, connect with the earth, connect with the cosmic energy,

connect with your higher self and tune in, tune in to yourself.

Day to day what you want to think about is how much are you nurturing yourself?

That's the real game, isn't it?

Like if you looked at yourself as a spirit, you're capable of everything.

The whole reason why you came on earth is so that you can have all of that on

earth, so that you can manifest all your capabilities, all your dreams on earth.

You already have all of that as a spirit.

So the real game then is to come back to yourself right when you feel like

it's not working for me, right that very minute, or maybe two minutes after that,

or 10 minutes after that, whenever you can get in that space, sit down, take a

little breath and check in with yourself.

It's all okay.

So go slow, go slow.

I'll give you another example around going slow because we are so wired

around how everything has to be fast and how we have to keep doing.

My mantra actually is, when things are not working, it's not about do something.

If things aren't working, why don't you do nothing?

We really underestimate the importance of doing nothing.

There's a whole lot of stuff.

There's a whole lot of connection.

There's a whole lot of the upper intelligence, the higher intelligence that

comes, that flows when you do nothing.

When you slow down, when you take a breath in that moment,

there's a whole lot that happens.

Think of a baby.

So nine months.

almost it takes for the baby to conceive.

And yet the baby is not doing much.

The baby is in the womb.

It's rolling around.

It's having its food and most of the time it's sleeping.

So that's what I want you to look at as well.

It's not done much, but when it's come out, the baby is fully formed.

It's got hands, legs, even eyelashes, a heart.

Everything in that body is formed, tiny little hands, tiny little feet,

tiny little lungs, all the bits of the baby are formed while it's sleeping.

And yet, we, all knowing human beings, we tend to think that if we

slow down, we are losing something.

I'm asking you to question that for a minute.

Are you really losing things when you slow down?

Think of the times when you've had flashbacks because you've slowed down.

Think of the times when things have worked, you were having an argument

maybe and then you slowed down and something made more sense and the

conversation settled down a little bit.

I've actually written a book, ebook on grounding that's absolutely free for you.

It's available at artoflifecenter.com/grounding.

Grounding is an easy way to connect with yourself to be in the present

time, to breathe in the present time.

And it's not complicated.

All you do is imagine that you've got a connection with the earth and you breathe,

you let that connection, you let the earth release the stress and anxiety for you.

You let earth get you back into present moment.

You can do it anywhere.

You can do it while you are in a grocery store.

You can ground when you are in the middle of an argument, or when you remember

after the argument that, okay, now I'm not feeling too great, now I need to do that.

You can ground then, but I definitely encourage you to checking the book

out ArtofLifeCenter.com/grounding.

It's free for you to download, but it's a beautiful way of getting present

with yourself, of owning the space of being okay when it doesn't feel okay.

And when you ground or when you are in the present moment, that's when

a whole lot of the ideas come in.

Everything sort of makes sense.

It's like the universe.

has your back.

The universe always has your back.

But when you are not vibrating in that vibration, when you are not

grounded, it's not possible for the universe to help you as much because

it's not energetically aligned.

When you are settled, when you are grounded, then the universe can help you.

So you will often find that when you can take moments to ground,

when you can take moments to be present, then life slows down.

And as illogical as it might sound life slows down, but whatever you are doing,

that gets done a whole lot quicker.

Like in my example, the Excel sheet got done a whole lot quicker.

I was done with it in 15 minutes when I'd been trying to do that before.

You'd also find that when you can slow down people, you were supposed to call,

they'll automatically start calling you.

Like things will align.

You will feel, Oh, okay.

That's what being in the moment meant.

So when you are in the moment, then things magically start aligning for you.

When you are in the moment, when you are grounded, when you are

settled, the universe can reach you.

The universe can help you.

Things will automatically start flowing for you.

You will find that if you were supposed to make calls or go and meet someone,

coincidences will happen that you will see them, they will call you, you will bump

into them, you might be wanting to write an email, but the email will happen and

gives you all the information and so on.

Oftentimes, a whole lot of things will start happening.

Things will get a whole lot easier in the flow, like all the bumps that made

it wasteful that all decreases the more and more you are in your flow.

So the way to do that is to ground and One of the ways was to download the

grounding book, or whatever is for you.

If it's hiking, whatever gets you back to you, whatever connects to you, it's doing

all of those activities for yourself.

That could be as simple as taking a long shower, taking a hot bath, anything

that really connects you to you.

I urge you to have more of those times.

Okay.

So thank you so much for listening to this Art of life podcast.

I have a life makeover program that I'm going to launch in the new year.

This is all around art therapy meditation for reframing your

energy with literally anything.

Reframing your energy with time, with money, with relationships, healing your

past, manifesting every damn thing.

It's all packed into this beautiful art therapy meditation program.

It's called Life Makeover.

Artoflifecenter.com/art.

There is a wait list that is open now so I'm really excited for you to join that.

But till then, thank you for tuning in to the Art of Life podcast.

Please leave a review or share this with your friends.

I will see you next time, next week.