Meditation is Better Than Cookies

by Tom Evans | Oct 4, 2016 | Expanding

After listening to one of my sample meditations on the free Insight Timer app, Dr Ashley Curiel got in touch. She read my new book and listened to the 10 companion meditations for 10 days. Here’s what she had to say about them:

“Studies continuously document the psychological benefits of mindfulness and meditation. As a clinical psychologist, I know both personally and professionally just how beneficial a mindfulness meditation practice can be.”
“I frequently suggest establishing a meditation practice to my clients. Those who are able and willing to try it are able to experience their emotions without letting their feelings take over and run their lives; meditation facilitates their ability to stay in the driver’s seat of their lives rather than be relegated to the back seat, with anxiety, depression, or other strong feelings driving the car.”
“One difficulty consistently emerges when I suggest my clients begin to meditate. They are not sure where or how to begin. Once they start, they are often confused about how to sustain their practice.
In The Authority Guide to Practical Mindfulness, Tom Evans masterfully designed a program to introduce the modern individual to a timeless tradition. He demonstrates how, in just 10 minutes per day, one can re-shape the experience of his or her world. His meditations meet and address the needs of society today and offer real-world suggestions to encourage initiating and maintaining a mindfulness meditation practice.”
“I have been listening to the meditations that accompany this guide daily and have witnessed the serendipities and benefits he describes. I recommend this book and the corresponding meditations to my clients nearly every day. When they are able to become more aware of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, they are more likely to be able to effect positive and lasting change in their lives.”
“I now listen to at least one of the ten meditations daily and I love them; in fact, my mind has come to crave them! Sometimes I’ll be having a rough moment and I think “I need one of Tom’s meditations right now!” I used to consistently reach for a cookie, now I crave mindfulness meditation. What progress!”

Learn more about Ashley’s work and philosophies in this podcast from the Zone Show

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Find out more about Ashley and her transformative work here
Listen to my sample meditations for free here

Get Your Copy of The Authority Guide to Practical Mindfulness

Cataracts of the Third Eye

by Tom Evans | Jun 17, 2016 | Expanding

Earlier this week, as I shook the hand of the eye surgeon, Mr Simon Horgan, after having the second of two cataracts removed, I said, “No more eyes to do then”.

As soon as I said this, I realised that we all possess a Third Eye, also known as the pineal gland, or master gland. What’s more, it is easy to harbour or develop a cloudiness of vision in our Third Eye too. It’s also easy to remove it and to do this without any surgery.

Causes

Cataracts in our ‘optical’ eyes are caused by a degeneration in the clarity of the lens. The primary cause of clouding of the lens is thought to be exposure over time to ultraviolet light, but it’s also thought that it can be brought on by smoking and diabetes. By the age of 80, around 40% of Americans have lens replacements. In the developing world, where treatment is not readily available, it is one of the leading causes of blindness.

Lack of clarity in our ‘knowing’ third eye similarly has many causes:

A sense of isolation and seperate-ness
A cynical and sceptical outlook
Excessive ‘self-talk’

Symptoms

So how do you know if your Third Eye is not ‘seeing’ well?

You feel lost or directionless
You can’t see the wood from the trees
You feel that the world is out to get you

Benefits of a clear Third Eye

When we open our Third Eye, it is like gaining a new super-sense. It is also worth pointing out that René Descartes believed the pineal gland to be the principal seat of the soul. When it is clear, we get:

Clarity of vision
Improved claircogniscence and clairvoyance
An opening to channel

Cures

Fortunately the cure for ‘third eye impairment and blindness’ is relatively simple and painless. It involves two stages:

Firstly, recognising the role and existence of the third eye as a location for super-sensory awareness.

Secondly, moving your consciousness to the third eye by spending a few minutes each day in meditation.

Thirdly, working on and in what you are passionate about under your own steam, or ideally with others.

Insight for Sore Eyes

I am fortunate to live in a part of the world where I can get access to top class medical care. As a result, just a few months after diagnosis, I have clarity of vision back again. I could then see clearly that I have a beautiful mechanism available whereby someone who can afford it gains clarity of vision for their Third Eye and, as a result, someone who can’t afford it gets their eyesight fixed.

So in the second half of 2016, I started donating £40 from every sale of my Heart-full Living course to The IMPACT Foundation. This way someone who can afford it improves their Third Eyesight and someone else got their sight back.

Making an Impact

Since meeting up with the people that run the charity, I realised they do much more than fix eyes. They assist with education and with many other medical interventions. So going forward, I am dropping the single donation idea related to sales of my Heart-full Living course. From any sale of three of my self-study courses*, 20% of the gross amount will be donated AND all courses are available at variable price points to suit what people can afford.

* The relevant courses are Heart-full Living, The Magic of AHA and How to Channel Your Book

Check out my courses here …

Who’s ‘Watching’ Over You ?

by Tom Evans | Feb 11, 2016 | Timing

watch [verb] : to observe, to keep a look out, to view
watch [noun] : a timepiece, a chronometer (worn on the wrist or carried in a pocket)

From when we are born until we leave the planet, time is superimposed upon us and someone or other seems to be ‘watching over you’.

We are indoctrinated with the notion of time from birth. Babies have times for feeding, changing, and bathing. Timetables regulate our school lessons. School-time all too quickly morphs into the nine to five of work-time. We intersperse our days with breakfast times, break times, lunch times, tea times, and supper times. Commuters just have to catch that train, right on time, so they can ‘clock in’ and ‘clock out’ at the end of their working day.

We have a bedtime and, before we know it, it’s time to get up again. Note that between these two times, when we are sleeping and dreaming, time takes on a different and ethereal quality. If you ever end up awake in the small hours, however, time can seem to stretch to eternity.

Our language, too, is littered with temporal references:

‘Just a minute.’
‘Give me a second.’
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
‘Another day, another dollar.’
‘That is so last season.’
‘Holding back the years.’

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

It seems that time is imposed upon us from birth right through to death, and that we cannot escape either its forward arrow or its grip. Yet, go back just 200 years or so, and nobody wore a watch. So this obsession with time is actually quite recent. In our so-called modern society, what is making this somewhat worse is that the world is permanently ‘switched on’. Before we had electric light, people snuffed out candles and went to sleep when it got dark.

The key to taking time back under our control lies in ‘watching’ ourselves internally. Firstly, take notice how the speed of time seems to vary depending on what we are doing and thinking. A busy weekend with friends seems to zoom by. An interminable wait in a doctor’s surgery seems to drag out forever. When we travel somewhere new, it seems to take longer than the journey back or the return trip. Secondly, reflect on days where you got lots done and on those days where you where pushing water up a temporal hill. Notice how you felt about those days before, during and after.

Synchronising with EMT

The passage of time is subjective and herein lies the clues on how we can control it, as opposed to it controlling us. The practice of mindfulness meditation is what opens the door to a new way of being that I call timefulness. Taking 10 minutes of ‘me time’ out each day is all that’s needed to slow time down and to get more done with less of it. With just a few days practice, we can enter Extended Me Time, or EMT. This is a luxurious state to be in where we become time lords, and of course time ladies.

When we sync with EMT, here’s what happens:

We get our creative tasks done, in what seems like ‘no time at all’
Interruptions are minimised
External events seem to happen ‘just in time’
Our stress levels reduce whilst our productivity increases
People want to learn our secret

p.s. I haven’t worn a watch for years and am rarely late 🙂

If you’d like to know more about how to manage the passage of time, as opposed it it managing you, get a copy of my new book Managing Time Mindfully. It comes with free guided meditations to give you the luxury of ‘me time’.

Switching to EMT
A Synthesis of Time
My Magical Week
Another day, another dollar

Switching to EMT

by Tom Evans | Feb 5, 2016 | Expanding

Extended Me Time – EMT

People of the world work to all sorts of different times standards. For some of the year, the UK is on GMT, at other times it shifts by an hour to BST. I interview guests for the Zone Show podcast on AEST, EDT, PST. The five time zones of China are harmonised, for simplicity, into one with the whole territory falling under Beijing Time, or CST.

International travellers sometimes don’t know what day it is, with their body clocks jumbled by the shifting of hours!

I’d like to propose a new common and simpler time standard that all humans switch to called EMT.

EMT stands for Extended Me Time. It is the ’time zone’ we switch to when time elongates and we get more done in less time. It is a magical and creative space where we are both ’in the zone’, while also ’zoning out’.

We can enter EMT simply by beginning each and every day with 10 or 20 minutes of ’me time’ in meditation. This is far from a waste of time. I discovered in my mid-40s that the days I took this time out when so much smoother and I got so much more done. There are also many benefits to our health and wellbeing such that it is thought every minute we spend meditating gets added to our life expectancy. If true, it’s a kind of madness not to meditate.

Throughout the day, and especially while working on creative tasks, with a little practice it becomes then possible to enter the meditative state with your eyes open. We truly enter EMT when we do this as time elongates. Simply put, we begin to control the speed at which time passes by and we get more done in less time.

There is more magic to unfold when we live in EMT. We begin to tap into aha moments on demand where bright ideas that change our world arrive in less than a second. They come from ’inside time’ and ’outside space’.

The regular practice of meditation, and adoption of EMT, also makes us luckier. We begin to notice serendipities that might otherwise slip by. People and events start turn up just at the perfect time. This of course all saves bags of time.

If you’d like to enter EMT and start meditating then I get the free Insight Timer app and I have uploaded a number of free meditations to help you get into EMT.

Get Insight Timer and access to my meditations here

If you’d like to know more about how to manage the passage of time, as opposed it it managing you, get a copy of my new book Managing Time Mindfully.

Start Managing Your Time Mindfully

A Synthesis of Time
Five Time Management Hacks
My Magical Week

A Synthesis of Time

by Tom Evans | Dec 16, 2015 | Timing

As we approach the feast of Christmas, very often another temporal milestone gets missed and that’s the Winter Solstice. Both dates have their significance and their differences.

The 25th December is a man-made date that some people use to either celebrate the birth of Christ and/or catch up with relatives. The Winter Solstice represents an alignment of the Earth relative to the Sun where some have their shortest day and others have their longest.

In our modern world, with central heating and electric light, we have somewhat distanced ourselves from Natural Time, yet it still has its usefulness.

I began to use Natural Time for project management about seven years ago and have discovered my life runs much more smoothly as a result.

At the same time though, without wearing a watch, I always know what time it is and am rarely late for meetings. Our modern calendar has its place, so long as we are mindful not to become enslaved by it.

Accordingly, exactly on the last New Moon (the 11th of December), the next book in my series on practical applications of mindfulness was published. It’s called Managing Time Mindfully and the synthesis of two calendar systems is just one of the temporal delights it explores.

It’s available worldwide for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Readers and I bent some time so readers in the UK can get the print version (and via Amazon early in 2016).

Big thanks to all those who placed a pre-order, you helped me get it into the Top #100 books on time management. I’d love to get it into the Top #10 so, by way of thanks for all those who get a copy, there’s a free pack of meditations available for all who place an order before the end of the year (which incidentally is another man-made date).

If you’d like to get more done next year than this year, get your copy here …

p.s. you would make my day and my aim from the book is that is that it helps you get more done, more easily with yours !

What one reader said about the book …

Publishing in Tune with the Moon
Quarter 1 : First Tickings
Quarter 2 : Perceptions of Time
Quarter 3 : Managing Time
Quarter 4 : Temporal Alchemy

Publishing in Tune with the Moon

First Tickings

Perceptions of Time

Managing Time

Temporal Alchemy

Managing Time

by Tom Evans | Dec 3, 2015 | Timing

Quarter 3 : Five Temporal Takeaways

This is the third of four sneak previews of what’s inside my forthcoming book, Managing Time Mindfully, published on the 11th December 2015.

Managing Time Mindfully

Temporal Takeaway #1:
When we procrastinate, we often become creatively uncreative and engage in everything else other than what we really should be working on. This is often a sign that a fear is lurking in our unconscious mind.

Temporal Takeaway #2:
We are awake for around 60,000 seconds each day. This leaves around 26,400 seconds to sleep and half of that again to dream. If you seed your dreams and learn how to remember and analyse them, this is not wasted time but creative time.

Temporal Takeaway #3:
Nothing in nature beats to the seconds other than the thoughts of somebody who is watching a clock.

Temporal Takeaway #4:
When we get in tune with the Moon, we stop pushing water uphill and go with the temporal flow.

Temporal Takeaway #5:
Every year, we all travel together over half a billions miles through space around the Sun on a spaceship we call Earth. It kind of makes sense if we all got along.

p.s. this blog was posted live exactly at 7:40 GMT on the 3rd December, the 2nd quarter of the Moon Phase

These themes and more are explored in the third quarter of my new book, Managing Time Mindfully, which is published on the 11th December — the exact date of the next New Moon.

Order your copy today and get free access to the Your Perfect Day pack of meditations, to help you get more done in less time.

Get your copy of Manage Your Time Mindfully here

Publishing in Tune with the Moon
Quarter 1 : First Tickings
Quarter 2 : Perceptions of Time
Quarter 4 : Temporal Alchemy
November Moon Phases

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