TIME TRAVEL: A 10-Minute Exercise
Move Beyond the Pain of Politics and Prejudice
If you are feeling upset about the morality of some politicians or the prejudices within society, there is something you can do that can make a difference to your state of mind and to your effectiveness in creating change. It involves focusing your energy on the future that you wish for. This is not a matter of some pie-in-the-sky placebo.
William Blake wrote: “What is now proved was once only imagined.” Imagination really does drive change—this has been true of pretty well every human advancement. For example, the 19th Amendment in 1919 gave American women the power to vote, but this was preceded by an unknown number of women, over an unknown number of decades, imagining that this day would be possible and then acting on that imagination.
When we think of the limitations of what is happening now, our emotions tend to become adrenalized into oh no!—anger with the present and fear of the future. Unpleasant to experience. But when we imagine the ideal, we are bathed with the elevated feelings of contentment, peacefulness, calm, compassion, kindness and courage. These elevated feelings do not only feel good, they actually encourage creativity and resourcefulness.
You can practice focusing on the future in the following exercise.
If you don’t use the audio version, here are the basic steps:
10-minute EXERCISE: Future Travel
Allow yourself to dream of a change in society or politics that you would like to see happen in the future. Write it down.
Close your eyes.
Take a few deep breaths and relax your body.
Imagine that you are sitting in a time machine. You see a dial in front of you numbered from 1 to 50, each number representing a year into the future. Even though everything around you will age according to the number you set, you yourself will not age at all. You choose the number 50—fifty years from now. You put the pointer on 50.
You are now fifty years into the future. You get out of the time machine.
You see before you, the change you wrote down. This change has already come about. You see it in action. You hear it in action. You experience it in action.
Notice how you feel when you see these positive changes in the reality around you. How does your body feel? What emotions arise?
Now, imagine that you set your time machine to move back toward the present, only stopping when there is an event or events that helped create the future reality you just experienced. Each time, ask yourself, What is this event? What is the step that led to that future reality I just saw?
And now set your time machine to move backward again toward the present, only stopping when there is something that you did that contributed, even the smallest amount, to this future reality. Ask yourself, What is it that I did that made a difference?
And now set your time machine back to the present day. It is [today’s date].
Open your eyes and write down what happened for you. Include:
The positive changes that occurred in fifty years.
The feelings you experienced when you saw the positive changes in the reality around you in fifty years’ time.
The events that led to those changes.
The actions you took that contributed, even the smallest amount, to the future reality you envisaged.
Next Steps
If you would like to go on and make your imagined contribution to your dream actionable, choose the actions you would like to do and schedule them!
Periodically, remind yourself of your vision of the future and the feelings that arose on seeing this vision manifest. In doing this, you are focusing your energy on the vision of what can be—as opposed to focusing your energy in upset, anger, or disgust at what is. The former is both more pleasant to experience and more powerful in effect.