When you need a break but don’t have much time, take a 10 – 15 minute time lapse vacation! You’ll come back relaxed and ready to face the world. It’s guaranteed to refresh you and help you find your center. Let me tell you how!
1) Find a quiet place, even if it’s just in a parked car with the seat tipped back or the only room in your house with a lock on the door (the bathroom) has been used to good effect in necessity! You’re only going to need a few minutes, so it’s no problem.
2) Close your eyes and breathe into your belly and sink down into yourself, letting the outer world go for just a bit. From deep within ask yourself this question: Where would I like to be right now? The first thing that comes up usually works, although you may choose otherwise if you like.
3) Go to that place with all of your feelings and imagination. Taste it, smell it, see it, feel it, be there…
4) Ask yourself how long you need to be there in order to find your center of peace and balance within. You might need a week, or a month or three years…whatever!
5) Imagine the days and nights passing, with the rising and setting of the sun, with activities that you love, experience them as fully as your imagination allows. Let yourself feel the time passing and you will get more and more relaxed.
Your emotional/feeling self doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality and time is always right now, so you can spend a year and a half in your imagination while only spending 15 minutes in real time. Yet, you will relax deeply and feel refreshed as though much time had passed. Just tell yourself that you are spending lots of time by imagining it passing with the rising and setting of the sun, the light and the dark of day and night, sleeping and waking, eating and playing, sunbathing…whatever!
Really let yourself go into the experience but you don’t need to have all the details, your unconscious will fill those in or do fine without them. Definately don’t bother imagining the planning, packing bags, paying for anything…those you can leave out of your imagination. Just do the fun part!
Stay with this until you feel ready to come back to your life.
During one challenging period of my life, I felt like I needed 3 years off in a favorite place that is far away; I needed to be alone without working, without my child, just space for me. Since that wasn’t an option, I took two 15 min. time lapse vacations over two days. After the second one I felt like I could return to my life, fulfill my contracts here in Michigan and be at peace with that choice. I no longer needed to escape.
Since then I have taught this exercise to lots of other stressed out people and they have found it to be a wonderfully peaceful interlude that refreshed them and allowed them to find peace within selves, with the people they loved and the people they worked with. I hope you will find it beneficial too!