Apprenticeship to Love: September 14, 2025

• Today’s questions: Are you willing to notice the little discomforts that speak to you? Are you willing to stretch into them, to feel into them, to see them as the jewels they are, the lights that teach you about love…?
• Today's practice: Take three minutes and sit with these questions. Make this short time for you, yourself, and only yourself. Just three minutes of wondering and noticing...
• Then, click on this link join the group chat on Signal and tell me what it feels like, to be bigger than you imagine yourself to be.
  Rev. Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

Slow down. Seriously. Right now. Whatever you are doing —reading these words, checking your messages, drinking your coffee: slow down.

Just stop. For just a moment, stop everything. Take three deep breaths. Nothing fancy. Just three slow breaths.

…

There is a notion that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. The physicists and yogis may be right, that time is an illusion. But it's an illusion with a big impact on my life.

I’ve run myself into the ground several times chasing time. Working harder. Being more efficient. Reading more. Practicing more (writing more!). Squeezing more “doing” into the moments I have. Believing that somehow this squeezing will somehow give me peace.

But what peace is it? Do I ever experience the expanded sense of time that I'm chasing? And what will I do when I experience that? Do more? Try to squeeze even more into that illusory moment?

I do believe that my body and its experiences and my awareness of these, that this is my only true teacher. But too often I need others —the pain of others— to get me to pay attention to what this teacher is telling me.

…

Losing time. Think about that for a moment. It was a counterintuitive two words when I first read them. It is today, decades later. Many years of experiencing time and its illusion.

...

I was listening to my daughter the other day. She reminds me of a more successful version of myself. Hard working. Attracting and creating success. Because it seems so easy she is, as I did before her, adding more to her plate. Like me, propelled by the illusion called success?

She is just beginning to feel how the experience of “limited time” is chewing at the edges of how good it feels to succeed.

In recent years I’ve watched as she “lost time” raising her daughters. Not consciously. It was surprising to me, how easily and unconsciously she slipped into this mode. Maybe that is part of the maternal experience, from conception and through birth and beyond have a more elastic sense of what is important, and what time affords? Another surprise: she reminded me of myself when I had two young girls. Young lives with a very different sense of time. They helped me slow down. Without effort I felt life expand, and I enjoyed it as it unfolded. In their time, not mine.

...

The notion of “losing time” comes from Rousseau, by way of the educator and writer George Dennison. I read Dennison in my late 20s, before my first daughter was born. His words helped me as a father to relax into the time that was being created. I was often able to let go of the idea that, with young children, there was any way to “save time.” Not preoccupied with efficiency my time with them expanded. I was, as Guru Singh puts it, able to “compassionately experience the presence of time without measuring its passage” (emphasis mine).

…

I am sometimes with my granddaughters now. The best times are when I remember how they effortlessly slow my life.

It's harder on my own. I seem to need occasional crashes and crises to be reminded to “lose time” with myself. Slowed, I remember that losing time with myself, I am better able to lose time with those I love.

My latest thought: Perhaps it's also important for me to lose time with everyone I meet? It's one of the reasons I choose to spend time with one or two people, rather than in groups. I feel myself too hurried and too protective when even three or four are in conversation. I crave the slow.

…

There is a sense of time that comes from the beating of the heart, Guru Singh says. It’s a sense of time that we share with all creatures.

Sometimes, in the midst of the madness of “saving time” that was and is measured by money I would catch myself noticing my cat. He would be sitting in the garden. Doing nothing. And I would think: One day —one glorious day!— I will sit in the garden and do nothing but enjoy its always-changing stillness. I will, I dreamed to myself, be so quiet and so still that I will hear the flowers and leaves, and yes, the birds and the bees, singing their songs. One day…

How will I remember the lesson of my cat, today?

How will I choose to lose time, all of the time.

To sit and listen to the song my beloved sings with her silence and her solitude.

One day I will sit and listen and watch the dance of the feminine all around me as She nourishes me in all the ways I need nourishing.

One day.

Today.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Our prayer is that you're able to compassionately experience the presence of time without measuring its passage; that you're one of the great lovers within the history of this moment; that you have far more empathy in time than your need to measure it, and that through this empathic process, you gain the most from your life while having and sharing the time of your life. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀"The most useful rule of education is this: do not save time, but lose it." (Rousseau, in George Dennison, Lives of Children)

And we launched out immediately on the business of losing time. That is to say, we got to know the children really well, held long conversations with them, not on school topics, but on whatever occupied their minds: details of family life, neighbourhood events, personal worries and personal interests. (George Dennison, Lives of Children)

🌀You’re not like that anymore. (My beloved, my Oracle)

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group at https://signal.group/#CjQKIPbfC01rTfBN7f8peArlP_VtY3q8aK2uchw4kmlTLlZCEhDKe0nFRfMoRDapdf3hAB7V