The One You Feed - Surfing the Waves of Time and Finding Balance in a Busy World with Paul Loomans
Episode Date: November 26, 2024In this episode, Paul Looman explains the meaning of surfing the waves of time and how we can start finding balance in a busy world. He shares insights from his 40 years of Zen practice and his work h...elping individuals and groups find calm amidst chaos. We discuss how traditional time management techniques often fall short and why a more intuitive approach can lead to greater productivity and peace of mind. Key Takeaways: The connection between Zen practice and effective time management How to transition from control to trust in managing our time The importance of doing one thing at a time and truly finishing it Creating “breathers” between activities to enhance creativity and clarity Transforming tasks into manageable items Observing and working with background mental programs like worry and hurt Developing and trusting our intuition for prioritizing tasks For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Our guest on this episode is Paul Lumens, a founder and coach at Unraveling Stress in Amsterdam,
where he works with individuals and groups, helping them to regain a sense of calm in their lives.
with individuals and groups, helping them to regain a sense of calm in their lives.
Paul has been a Zen monk since 1984 and runs the European Zen Center in Amsterdam.
Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I'm excited to have you on. We are sitting in a studio in Amsterdam.
Yes.
And I was talking to an old friend of the show, Oliver Berkman, last week.
Yeah. And as we were talking, he mentioned you and said that you were in Amsterdam.
And you were both a Zen monk and wrote a book about time management.
Yes.
As a longtime Zen student myself, I thought, well, I've got to meet this guy.
And I emailed you.
And like the next day, here we are sitting in a studio.
So thank you for being so easy to show up.
Yeah, it's marvelous. It's marvelous that you see an occasion and you jump in it.
That's also time-surfing.
Yeah, it's also Zen.
We're going to get into your book, which is called Time-Surfing, but before we do,
we'll start like we always do with the parable.
Yes.
In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild, and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.
And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
The grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins?
And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you
in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's a nice question. What do you do with the
things in yourself you don't like or you think you should change it? And most of the people are
starting a battle with them. And when you battle with your
weaknesses, with the things you don't want, you make them stronger. So I would say accept them,
accept them and try to know them very well and to become a friend with them. To not see it anymore
as a wolf, but to see it as a friend. A friend who might be afraid of something, might not know something, might want to go in
another direction. And you look at him and you try to understand him and then you say,
well, come, we go nevertheless. We can do this. Yeah. And the same you do with the other one,
because the other one, I think it's much more right to become in a relationship with your intuition.
And your intuition sees your fears, but sees also your courage and taking part of everything that's in you.
Your intuition says to you, go there.
And that's the leading one in your system.
We'll get to intuition later on. Yeah. But first, you're a longtime Zen monk,
an intensive practitioner for 30 years now? 40 years. 40 years now. Yeah. Tell me about a Zen
monk writing a book about time management. How did those two things connect? Well, when you practice
Zen meditation, you deal a lot with time all the time all the time you
deal with time you're sitting without moving facing a wall with your eyes half closed you
let things pass by in fact the only thing there is is time time passes by and you see what yourself
are you struggling with the time are you embracing the time what is your
relationship with it can you forget the time and time is like the beats of your life you have a lot
of beats in your life it are small items you're all the time we are in an item now and afterwards
you will be in another item and how are they colored what is the color of your item and how are they colored? What is the color of your item? And can you accept this color and
live it, live it completely? Yep. The analogy you just made there, I just want to share it with
listeners and you make it in the book at a variety of different places, is that if you think of a
necklace, right, each bead on there is a little thing of time. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, well, I brought this.
It's a case.
This is what we wear during Saint-Xen.
When you're a monk, you make one yourself.
It takes maybe to make it.
I'm very slow.
It took me one and a half years, my first case, to saw it.
And it's made with very small points.
So you make point after point after point after point.
And every point is concentrated because you see the line you make on it.
You could say it's concentration.
It's concentration or better you could say it's attention.
And you wear this like for a monk it's the most important thing you possess.
You could even say it's the only thing you possess.
You take care of it.
You take care of it above everything else.
It's a rule, of course, that you take care of it,
but it's also, you feel it like that.
The more you are sitting, practicing Zen meditation,
the more it becomes important, disclosed to you.
And it seems material, but it's not material.
It's your entrance into practice.
It's the way you practice. It's your soul your soul or it's the cosmos if you want to yeah more important than
everything else that you can could possess and it's nothing it's just attention yeah attention
and yeah yeah so practicing meditation got you thinking about. I've sat a lot of zazens and meditation and long sessions, you know, longer retreats. And yeah, all you have is time. Sometimes time is flying by. Sometimes you don't notice it. Sometimes it is going so painfully slow that you're just like, when?
When is this over?
So you get a real opportunity to work with that.
So how did that translate into you thinking about how people manage their time outside of a sitting practice?
Well, which is beautiful in the way we're practicing.
So I'm a Zen monk, but we are as investigated in the social life as in spiritual life.
So at that moment that I started thinking closer about time,
I was an actor and a director of physical theater.
I had a family with three young children.
I was responsible for a Zen center,
European Zen center in Amsterdam.
So I had a lot of things to do.
Yeah.
And to not forget anything, I made lists.
And my lists, they were very detailed.
And that shows something for me, that shows my approach to not forget anything, to be very responsible.
I had three lists, one for the acting pole, one for meditation, and one for the family.
for meditation and one for the family.
So I saw myself each evening navigating between my lists and there I have done, that's good.
And oh, I wouldn't forget this.
And I was trying to finish, to have everything done.
That was my motive.
I did a step back and I thought, is this what I want?
I'm teaching people in the Zen center to be more close to themselves.
And I am just trying to finish all the things that I'm doing.
That one day I can say I have finished.
I've done everything.
And then I thought, no, this is not what I want anymore.
What I want is I want to live out of calmness.
That's a starting point.
I want to live out of calmness. That's a starting point. I want to live out of calmness.
And I knew it was possible because in the Zen, you know people who live out of calmness.
The Zen does give this a little bit to you.
So some people more as others.
I know several people who lives out of calmness.
They are always, always ready.
You ask them a question and they are ready for you.
And they have nothing in their
head. And I thought, what is their secret? How do they do? And that was the starting point from
my research with time surfing. You say that time surfing is intended to transition us from control
to trust. Yes. Trust is a very interesting thing because it's something I think about a lot.
In what can we trust?
Yes.
So in the time surfing model, what is it when we make this transition that we are trusting?
Yeah.
Well, that's a very important question because I would say that's the beginning and the end of time surfing.
Right.
Trust.
And time surfing shows you
how you can approach life that you can trust because trust needs some conditions to trust
yes if you don't know what is going to happen it's difficult to trust you can trust and you
can go in but it's better to know a little bit what everything concerns and what everything is dealing with.
Time surfing, when you take all these actions you can do in life, what time surfing does do is this item I want to work on it.
This is important for me.
Okay, look closer.
Look closer what it is.
Look closer to the continents of this what you want to do and ask yourself questions so that you very well know it.
And then the moment you know it, you can let it go.
And you do this with every action in life and everything you want to realize in life.
You're looking close until the moment it becomes a friend of you.
You know it very well.
And then you let it go.
And the trust comes at the moment that you are going to decide, what am I going to do
now?
And then I can trust my intuition because my intuition will choose out of all these
actions, all these things I want to realize in my life, and because my subconsciousness
knows them very well.
And so my intuition can choose out of all of them what he thinks that is the best to do now at this moment.
At first listen or first read of that, my mind has 50 objections.
Yes.
However, that's the last step in time surfing is this ability to let your mind surface what you want to work on.
Let's not start at the end.
I know it is the beginning and the end,
but let's walk through the seven instructions
so that we can get to a place
where that is going to make a little bit more sense.
Yes.
So the first instruction is a straightforward one,
a very Zen one,
which is to do one thing at a time
and finish it. Yeah. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah. I would say it's an instruction,
but it's also a condition. If you want to experiment calmness, it's a condition. Just
do one thing. When you're doing two things, when now I'm talking to you and there is coming some
person in and each time I have to say something, you're not calm.
You're not calm and you won't be effective.
It's a condition.
And it's a very simple condition.
And the last part of this instruction is very important.
Finish it.
So I'm going to do something and it's ready and the last part is finish it.
Finishing can be what do I want to do with this in the future. Finishing can be I clean
the table and make an empty space but finish it. But because when you finish it there is comes new
room for new space for the next bead. If the big bead that we're trying to create say something
like writing a book. Yeah. You're not going to sit down and finish the book. You're trying to create, say something like writing a book, you're not going to sit down
and finish the book. You're going to finish some part of the book or some chunk of time that you
work on the book. Say how we think about that with these tasks that are bigger than like
clean out the closet, right? Okay, do that, finish, right?
A lot of things that we do in life are projects more than they are tasks.
Yeah. Well, I will give you an example and this example that shows really how time-serving is
working. For example, I write every Tuesday morning, I write a small article about something
that I met, something about stress, some experience I had in this week.
Every Tuesday morning at 11 o'clock, that's the deadline, it's finished. I start working on this
during the week. I see if there are some occasions, some possibilities. So I think, oh, this could be
possible. Oh, that could be possible. I could write about this experience. I could write about that.
But I don't decide.
And then comes Saturday, Sunday.
And then at the moment, everybody is gone and the house is completely silent.
I'm going to sit at my desk and I write it.
And it comes immediately.
I'm sitting and I decide what I'm going to do.
I write it down.
And in three quarters of an hour, I've written the text. I finish it and I close it. And then comes Monday and Monday, I look at it again. And when I look at it again,
then I clean it up and I write some other sentences and it's better and it's finished.
And then the last part is I have to put it in the program and the program will send it to everybody.
This is really time-saving. Each part of it, for each part,
is do one thing at a time and finish it,
for each part of it.
But all these parts together, they make a project.
And you see also in the beginning part
that I let simmer things in my subconsciousness
and I let my intuition decide what I'm going to do.
And that's why on Saturday or Sunday
it's very easy for me to choose
something because it has already simmered in my subconsciousness before.
So it sounds like part of this is, again, if what we're trying to be is more calm,
which is what part of time surfing is intended to do, is to make us more calm.
Some of that calmness descends upon us by trying to do one thing at a time so that our
attention is a little bit more focused and it has a chance to be a little more settled.
Exactly. Exactly. What is so beautiful is when you act out of calmness, I never put productivity
in front of what I wanted to do to be more productive, more effective. I wanted to do everything out of calmness. And what is so beautiful is when you act out of calmness, you
become more productive. You are much more productive. When I was time-saving, I was much
more productive than I was before with my lists. Because I did do things at the right moment.
My choices were better. I was more open. I was more creative. I could also think this is not so important.
I let it go.
My decisions were more clear.
So instruction two is to be aware of what we are doing and accept it.
Yeah.
Tell us about this one.
That's the Zen instruction.
Okay.
You recognize it now.
The Zen instruction is in the Zen temple you have the afternoon and we have Samu.
And Samu, that's the work we do have the afternoon and we have Samu.
And Samu, that's the work we do for the temple.
Work practice.
Yeah, work practice.
And there's one person who says, who wants to clean the toilets?
And then put your hand on and say, I want to clean the toilet.
Okay, and we need three persons to work in the garden.
Yeah, see, I'm waiting until the garden comes up. I'm letting the toilet go by, And when they say garden, my hand goes up. Very good. But for a Zen monk, it's all the same. It's all the same.
Are you working in the garden or working in the kitchen or cleaning the toilets? What you're
going to do is you don't do it in practice, but it is as if you close your eyes and you say,
this is the most important thing I'm going to do in my life. And then you open your eyes and you say, this is the most important thing I'm going to do in my life.
And then you open your eyes and you start doing it calmly with an open mind.
And then you enjoy it.
You don't think, ah, do I still have to clean another toilet or something? No, you just make it clean and say, okay, yes, well done.
And you're satisfied about the work you have done.
Yes.
okay, yes, well done, and you're satisfied about the work you have done.
Yes.
Yeah.
You say in this instruction number two,
it's useful in the beginning to intentionally name the activity.
So to be very clear about what we're doing, I am cleaning the toilet.
Yeah. I am writing my article.
Yeah, yeah.
Why is this naming important?
It helps.
It helps because we as human beings, we are so in the future.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm doing this, but I still have to do that.
And afterwards, I have to do that all the time thinking about the future.
Yeah.
And naming the action, I'm now on my bike going home.
Yeah.
That means that you're biking.
Yes.
And not trying to come home.
Right.
Biking.
Yep.
Yeah.
You also talk about elevating monotonous tasks to an art form.
Yes.
That's what's happening.
When you repeat tasks, a lot of times they become art.
When you, for example, well, I think everybody knows the way he puts all the stuff into the washing machine, you know.
In the beginning, you put them like this.
But at a certain moment, you want to have them like this because that's the way it works the best.
And it becomes art.
This becomes a source of dispute in many partnerships, the proper way to load the dishwasher.
I think, here's art.
I'm modern art.
She might be more impressionistic
or more classical Dutch art, Rembrandt, right?
Yeah.
Or ironing.
When you're ironing,
I like it to do ironing.
I'm not so good at it,
but each time I'm ironing,
I have my way of doing it.
I try to become better in it, and I have my way.
Yeah.
It's strange with things like that or cleaning,
because I notice there's sort of a natural aversion to doing them.
But if I pay attention while I'm doing them, I notice that it's actually very pleasant.
Yeah.
Yes.
I would think my brain would update and be like, oh, this is enjoyable. And it sort of does, but there's still a little resistance.
Yeah. Yeah. Jump over this resistance. It's good to name the action.
Okay.
At a certain moment, you don't need to name anymore because it becomes a habit that whatever
you do, you jump into it. But in the beginning, you can feel
resistance with some actions, and then it's good to name them. So on to instruction three, which
would be to create breathers between activities. Alternate times of focused attention with moments
where we let go of focus. I always say to people, when somebody asks me, what is the most important
instruction of the seven? I would answer, I can't say. You need them all seven. But when
I have to make a choice, I will choose the third one about the briefers. It's the most important
one. Because when you don't do the briefers, the breather is such a source of everything else.
The breather is such a source of everything else.
If you don't do them, you are much less creative.
You don't have a view about everything you want to do.
The intuition doesn't work anymore.
The breather is giving this all to you.
A breather is also, it gives you, you have done something intensely.
Afterwards, you want to breathe out.
And the best way to breathe out is to do something where you don't need to be focused.
Because when you do something where you're not focused, for example, cleaning something or making a cup of tea, or you do something where you're not focused, your mind starts simmering,
you call it simmering? Your mind starts simmering. And this simmering, you have ideas and you think, oh, yes, this I want to remember.
Oh, yes, this I want to do later.
And this I shouldn't forget.
And at the same time, you become calm.
So you have done, you have given a lot of energy.
And during the breather, it's as if the energy comes back to you.
And very quickly.
So in my courses, they last for two hours and then
after 60 70 minutes i say we now we stop for five minutes and then i explain to people what's a
breather so i say don't take your phone yeah don't take your phone avoid communicating with other
people just take a breather go stand for the window, go cleaning something, go to the toilet, go outside, just for a couple of minutes.
And then people come back and they are fresh.
Yeah.
They are fresh and they have understood much better what we have done just before. I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden.
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I find this to be a really important one also.
I'm working on a book, and the way I do it is I write for 30 minutes.
Yes.
And then I get a little thing that tells me it's 30 minutes.
If I feel like I'm really in it, I'll just allow myself to go a little longer.
If it gets to an hour, then I'm like, okay, time to get up, time to do something different to sort of replenish that energy.
I have something,
I can't decide if it's a bad habit or not. I think it, well, sometimes it is, which is one of the things I like to do for a breather is to play solitaire on my computer. The reason I like
to do it is it, for me, the mind turns off, but it doesn't serve the purpose of getting me away from my computer
and my screen. So I try and make myself sort of get up and take a walk or do something like that.
But sometimes that works for me as just my mind goes somewhere semi-blank.
Yeah. Well, what's important with the instructions of time surfing, it are no rules.
Okay.
It are just indications. For example, I like playing chess.
And often when I've done something, I make a chess puzzle.
And with the chess puzzle, I'm really concentrated.
Yeah.
Because if not, I cannot find it.
But afterwards, I take a breather.
Yeah, yeah.
So I do both.
Yep, yep.
Instruction four is a really interesting one.
And I really like it.
It makes a lot of sense to me. It it says give your full attention to drop-ins creating a relationship with everything you want to do
when something unexpected happens take it seriously rather than rejecting it yeah so let's talk about
this one yeah that's also a real zen instruction because people in Zen, they don't study this. Nowhere is the rule is written on the wall. But because of the Zen practice, people are open. And so
when someone knocks on the door, when someone is coming and asks you a question, what do you want?
They are open to something else. And when we are working, it can be that you are working and you
are really in something and you're really concentrated and you have creativity and everything.
You don't want to be interrupted at that moment.
Right.
You do everything to not be interrupted.
You close the door and you say, we are here, we are talking.
But if it happens that someone comes in and says, excuse me, Paul, I know you are busy.
I have a question.
Then I say, one moment, one moment. I finish my
sentence. Yes, here I can stop. Yeah, tell me. And then the person will tell me what is going on
and why he interrupts me. And then I will think, am I going to do this now or am I going to do this
in the future? So when it's a short question, I will tell him, yeah, it's okay, you can do it. When it's a bigger thing, I say, okay, I understand you, but I want to finish this
first. So let's say, when do we have time? Can we see this in two hours, maybe? And so, but I give
him full attention. So he feels himself hurt. Yeah. And also, because I switch 100%, I can very easily come back to what I was doing.
I can very easily find the same creativity, et cetera, again.
When I would have been into, in between the two, oh, you asked me a question.
What is it?
And I'm still working on my screen.
It's stress.
Yeah, I find this one is really interesting because it ends up not being good for either person.
Like someone interrupts me and I'm trying to give them half my attention, keep half my attention on what I'm doing.
They're not feeling like they're heard, right?
So it's not good for them.
And I notice it in myself.
I get irritated.
I feel irritated. When I do sort of
what you're suggesting, which is stop, say, okay, hang on a second, turn and give them my attention,
that works much better. I mean, I'll notice it like I'm just sort of, let's say I'm reading in
the morning. My partner, Ginny, finds something really interesting as she's doing her reading or whatever, and she says,
hey, I had a tendency in the past to sort of listen and sort of keep doing what I was doing.
And I've learned, I don't do it perfectly, but I've learned a little bit more to stop,
turn, and either say, oh, tell me about it, or to say, like you said, this isn't a good time right now. I'd love
to hear it, but could I hear it later kind of thing. Exactly. Very good explanation of the
fourth instruction that you gave. Yeah. One of the things I noticed in the past was when there
are multiple things coming at me at once, I get very irritable. Yeah. And so by doing sort of
what you're suggesting, like just trying to not do three of them, do one, then two, then three, that internal irritation seems to drop down.
Yeah.
And just before you have paid some attention to one and to two because you are doing three, but you paid some attention to the other two, which will come later.
And because you gave them attention, they calm down inside of you.
That's also the fourth instruction.
The fourth instruction is also drop-ins.
Give full attention to drop-ins in your head.
So when your mind interrupts you with something.
Yeah.
For example, there would be, I would say, oh, I must not forget this evening.
I have to, that's a drop-in in my head.
Yes.
So then I have to drop in my head and I look at it and I think, oh yeah, I'm going to do
this.
Not I have to do it, but oh yes, I'm going to do this. Not I have to do it, but oh, yes, I'm going to do this later.
OK.
And then I return.
So I give also the drop ins in my head full attention.
Then they go into my subconsciousness.
Which leads us into instruction five, which I'm just going to read the sentence and let you explain it.
Beware of gnawing rats and transform them into white sheep.
Yes.
What does that mean?
Gnawing rats.
When my children were young, we had rats.
Rats are very nice animals.
Okay.
One rat had died and we had just still one rat left.
And she was coming into our kitchen.
It was Mia was her name.
And she came into our kitchen and looked and saw and then she saw the meal of the cat.
And she took the meal of the cat and put it into her mouth, not eating it, but putting it into her mouth and hiding it somewhere at her places.
And then that evening we couldn't find her back.
She was disappeared.
Mia, where's Mia?
Well, never mind.
We are going to sleep.
We will find her tomorrow.
And we slept.
In the middle of the night, I woke up,
and I heard under the bed,
knack, knack, knack, knack.
She was eating the meal of the cat.
She's nine.
Yeah, under the bed.
So it awakes you.
And things you postpone, they awake you. They are like
gnawing rats. They awake you in the night.
In the night you awake and you think, ah, I have
still to do this. How can I resolve this?
And I should have done this already.
And you start blaming yourself that you
didn't do it. And so gnawing rats
transform them into white sheep.
And you do this by
the book gives a manual for it.
You ask four questions.
But the four questions, they are in fact, go and look at your Gnoing Red.
Go and look at it from all sides and become friends with your Gnoing Red.
And when you do so, it transforms.
There's nothing to be done.
There's nothing done.
It's not been executed.
But you have another relationship with your Gnome Ingrid.
And for me, then it's a white sheep. It doesn't harm you anymore. It's there, you know it's there,
you know it's not done, but it will be done in the future sometime, at some moment, at the right
moment, it will be done in the future. So it has, you have the relationship from a sheep that walks
behind you instead from Gnawing rats who awake
you in the night. So this sort of blends right into instruction six. So we're going to be talking
about five and six here, which is to observe background programs, thoughts that keep going.
Yeah. Right. So for example, let's say I have a gnawing rat. It's a worry about something and
it wakes me up. And I think, oh, I should have done this by now.
I think we all know what it's like for that to just keep coming.
What's happening when I am able to use your terminology to make it a white sheep versus it continues to just gnaw away?
Like how does the transition happen? What's
the difference there? Well, the sixth instruction is not only about knowing rats, it's also about
worries. For example, when you have had a discussion with your partner and it wasn't resolved,
then it becomes a background program. You had an emotion, you were maybe hurt by your partner or by someone,
by something he said to you, and your mind starts creating thoughts that have a higher speed as
normal thoughts. And this is because hidden under the surface, you have an emotion. You have fear
or you are hurt and you have an emotion. And this emotion
that makes that your thoughts are going to turn into loops and won't find any solution.
So that's the sixth instruction. Okay, so before we move on to worry,
when you're talking about a gnawing rat, is that normally, does that mean we're talking about a gnawing rat is that normally does that mean we're talking about a task a thing that
needs to be done is that kind of specifically what we mean when we say turn a gnawing rat into a
white sheep is it we're talking about these things that we think we have to do yeah i'm talking not
only about gnawing rats i also talk about rough diamonds okay gna reds are things that you should already have done,
but you don't do them for one reason
or another. And rough diamonds
are plants you have for the
future, but they are still not clear
in your head. But the way you treat
them is the same. So a gnawing red
gives you a lot of stress,
but a rough diamond, you should polish
it. You should polish it
because when it's polished,
then it's much more easy to execute them.
And the way to do this is I have an instruction with four questions.
I ask four questions about this task.
And when you answer all the four questions, you know them much better.
You have nothing done, but you know them much better.
Yeah.
you know them much better.
You have nothing done, but you know them much better.
Yeah.
An example of one of the questions is,
what don't I know about this task?
Yeah, you start asking, what do I know?
I would start a good beginning question.
Then what do I not know?
Which knowledge I don't have?
What I'm not able to do is the second question.
The third question is, do I need some help?
Is there a person who can help me? And could that be is there some help and the fourth question is do i have a worry about
something and do i have limiting beliefs this is too difficult for me i should do it in my time
and but it is as if you walk around this gnawing red or rough diamond and you look at all sides until you know it quite well.
And then, and that's important, because you have done this, again, it is in your subconscious.
And when it's in your subconscious, may I talk now about the subconscious?
Yes.
Yes.
When it's in your subconscious, I use the metaphor of a cave.
So let's represent a cave.
And in this cave is stocked everything you want to do in the future.
All your small tasks, the drop-ins, all the big tasks, the rough diamonds and the glowing reds,
they are all in this cave.
And in the middle of this cave is your intuition.
And your intuition is like blindfolded.
It's yourself in the middle of your subconsciousness blindfolded.
There is another part of the subconsciousness and that's the important thing. The other part
of the subconsciousness is behind the wall. You cannot see it, but there is stuck everything you
have done in the past. All your experience, all your knowledge is stuck there. And between this first part, the future part, and the second part, the past,
there is unconscious thinking.
We do a lot of unconscious thinking.
When you think about a rough diamond and you let it rest,
and next day or in two days you come back to it,
it has become more rich.
You're more clear about it.
You have more ideas. You have done
nothing in between, but you have more ideas.
It's coming closer to you.
So the time surfer suggests to put
everything into the
first part of the cave, everything you want to do
in the future, and then
to let it rest. Then the
ancient subconscious part with all your
memories and all you
have done in the past, we'll try
to find solutions, we'll try to find ideas, we'll try to help and sense this all to the
front part, the future part.
And then in the middle you have the intuition.
When you take a breather, it's as if you open the door to your subconsciousness.
So during a breather, these good ideas,
they come out of the subconsciousness. And also your intuition will tell you during a breather,
the next thing that fits the best to the next moment is when the intuition may feel everything
you want to do in the future and knows all the conditions that are around and everything else you want to do,
the intuition will say, the best thing you can do is this task. And so when you are taking a
breather, you think, I'm going to do this now. And that can sometimes be very illogical for
the rational mind. For example, last weekend, I had really a lot of things to do, really a lot of things to do. And I had promised my wife I would make on the toilet some photographs of the mountains in which we had been this summer.
I started doing that.
I worked on it one and a half, two hours.
I worked on it and I made something.
It's very nice, but it calmed me down.
It calmed me down and it made me ready for all the important tasks that comes afterwards.
So sometimes the choice of the intuition seems illogical, but I'm very well listening to her, him, him.
Very well listening because he takes also care of me and also for all the people around me.
So this is where I run into problems with the method, and it's probably somewhat rational brain, right?
There are two sort of challenges that I see.
One is memory.
I do not have a good memory.
I don't retain things well.
It sounds like you're saying if I look at things in a certain way, my subconscious will be able to remember them in a
way my conscious brain isn't. Have you found in the years you've been teaching this, people,
when they just try and put something sort of into the cave, that it never comes out of the cave?
Yeah, I understand what you say. In the beginning, I suggest to people, in the beginning,
you may still use a list. Okay.
But when you make your list, turn it around.
So you have made a list and then you turn it around and then you start functioning with your intuition.
And then after a half a day, you can look on your list.
Didn't I forget anything important?
And then again, you work on your intuition. And you will see that when the months and years pass and you do this, your memory starts to become much better.
Because you have taken the habit that everything you want to do in the future, you've looked well at it.
You don't think in terms of I have to do.
You started thinking and I want to do.
I want to do this.
I want to realize that.
And you know also the way to do it because you wait at the moment.
You know, okay, I have to do this, I want to realize that, and you know also the way to do it because you wait a moment, you know okay I have to do this and so when I first do this then I can do this and then
you let it drop down.
So the subconscious is very well informed also about the way how to execute it and it
will drop it on the right moment and you will remember it.
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It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Years ago, I made a rule for myself, and maybe it seems to have served me well, but it's
very different than this approach, which my general rule is, if I want to remember anything,
a phone number, something to do later, a short thing I read in that book that was
interesting, right? Like I try and put it into my off-board memory system, you know, which seems to
have served me well, but to the point that you're making, it's sort of the polar opposite.
Yeah. I wait a moment. What I'm doing is I wait a moment. For example, after this meeting with you,
I'm quite sure I won't jump on my bike going to the next thing.
I will walk a little bit.
I will walk a little bit.
And during five, ten minutes, then I remember, oh, you said this to me.
And, oh, that was a nice part and could have explained better.
And I take time for it.
I really make relationship with everything I do in the end.
And also, what do I want to do
next? There's nothing will happen in the future that, yeah, well, for us, it was very quickly,
that was nice. And we were both ready to do this. But mostly, I know the things I'm going to do.
I know them not very detailed, but in overview. Yep. So this idea that our intuition will surface the right thing for us to work on,
a lot of people's experience is of procrastination. Yeah. And sometimes it's procrastination of
certain things. Yeah. But for some people, without some sort of impetus, it's across the board procrastination, not doing anything. What's
happening in the mind of someone whose intuition is selecting what needs to be done and is working
on them in a calm manner? And somebody who maybe doesn't have lists, doesn't have a system,
they don't get anything done. They procrastinate. What's happening here?
Yeah. Well, the theme stress is not only about time. The theme stress, and you know, I wrote
two other books, and in fact, there are four themes in which you can have stress. And now we
touch another theme. You have the cellar and you have the, how do you call it?
First floor.
First floor. Yeah. The first floor is about time.
The second floor is about your beliefs,
your beliefs and your opinions about things.
And the things you repeat are also your patterns,
your patterns of behavior.
Yep.
And someone who is postponing a lot of things,
he has a pattern.
Yes.
And it's nice to go more profoundly into it
and to look why do you have this pattern in yourself?
What is happening there?
And mostly with people who postpone a lot of things, when you ask them when they are satisfied, they have a very, very high standard.
They want to do everything very perfectly.
Yes.
That makes them that it's never the right condition to start because they wait
that everything is in the good condition to start and to make it perfect. When the person understands
this and he also understands this is an old pattern, it's a pattern that he created in his
youth. He copied his papa or his papa was saying, you have to do better. And so it's an old pattern.
Then he can start, and that's my suggestion that I would give, he can start observing it.
He starts observing it exactly at the moment that you postpone.
And to feel the tension at that moment, to feel the tension from, okay, now it's fear.
It's fear.
I feel fear that I don't want to start.
And then, okay, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
And the fear will go down when you wait, when you do nothing.
The fear will calm down.
And then you can make the step, the step to start doing something.
And my suggestion would be to start doing something.
Not too long.
For someone who is postponing a lot, just make small beginnings.
Make 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you work on it. Then you make a step back. Not too long for someone who is postponing a lot. Just make small beginnings.
Make 10 minutes, 15 minutes you work on it.
Then you make a step back.
And you say, wow, I have started.
I have started.
And that makes it much more easy to continue afterwards. So for time surfing to work, your intuition needs to be working well. One possible objection could be that you are a 40-year Zen monk practitioner. Your intuition is really well sharpened. It's working very well.
Someone who is not had any of that sort of practice, who's much more frenetic in their mind, not so calm.
How does time surfing work?
It sort of seems on one hand like you have to have good intuition for time surfing to work.
But you get good intuition by doing time surfing.
And we're sort of caught in a little bit of a circle.
So how do people begin?
Is it just start at step one and do these instructions to the best of our ability and this intuition will grow over time and it will become something we can trust more
as we do the other instructions consistently?
Well, it's the right question.
I think, of course, my Zen practice will influence me
and will make it maybe more easy for me to have a relationship with my intuition.
But I have seen a lot, a lot of people I instructed in time surfing that they start to awake their intuition and do courses with five times two hours.
So each week we work two hours together.
In the second session, I start working on intuition.
And then we are in the fourth and the fifth session we work together. People show that they
follow their intuition and they become more calm because you need the whole system. But one part
of it is the intuition that awakes more by doing the other. because you say trusting the method is an important precondition right to
trust this method which is to ultimately trust our intuition when at the moment that we're starting
our intuition may not seem so trustworthy yeah yeah but you're saying you see when people buy in
and they do it you can often see their intuition sort of start to guide them quickly and they begin to then trust it more.
Yeah.
There is a Dutch book about from Professor Dijksterhuis and it's about the subconscious.
And he explains a lot about the intuition.
And when you read it, he gives also good examples. He says the inventions that human beings made, the big inventions, they come out of the subconsciousness and they are made by your intuition.
And that's not that the person is standing before and saying, oh, this is it.
No, he has thought about it.
And then he let simmer it.
And then he's walking in the forest. And at one moment he says, I got it. I got it. And then he let, he let simmer it. And then he's walking in the forest. And at one moment,
he says, I got it. Right. I got it. But the solution came out of his subconsciousness,
not out of rational thinking. Right. Yeah. I think part of the challenge as I see it is that
I use this as an example, but I'm a former heroin addict. And there was a time. Heroin addict?
but I'm a former heroin addict.
And there was a time.
Heroin addict?
Heroin, yeah, I was.
But I don't know the word.
Oh, heroin, drug, opioid.
Oh, yeah, heroin.
Yeah.
Heroin addict, yeah.
There was a time where the messages I was feeling,
they felt very strong.
They felt very real.
They were very destructive.
Yeah.
And so I think sometimes I wonder with people who have had, say, trauma, childhood trauma,
oftentimes they have an intuition, for example, that they are in danger when they are not in danger at the moment.
How do we separate the subconscious repeating destructive patterns from the good part of the subconscious that is intuition.
Yeah.
I told you there are other parts of the house.
So now we are in the cave.
We are in the cellar.
In the cellar we are.
In the emotions.
Okay. And in the emotions, that's another part in the second book.
Yeah.
It explains that emotions are a medicine for us.
Uh-huh.
But a lot of times we mix up our emotions with our thoughts.
Then they become more destructive or they change.
When we have, for example, when you have fear, fear is a medicine.
It says you are in danger.
Take care.
That's what fear is saying.
Then the ratio is coming, the rational mind.
And the rational mind says, I don't want to experiment this.
I don't want to be in danger.
And this feeling of fear, I don't like it at all.
So he starts to suppress the fear.
The fear cannot come out anymore.
It transforms into angriness.
You become angry.
Ah, leave me alone.
And I don't want this.
Or you become paralyzed. But me alone and i don't want this and or you become paralyzed but you
have a another reaction so in the cellar i try to learn people to become friends with their
also with emotions that doesn't feel comfortable but that are in in fact, medicines. So to become friends with your fears, with your pain, and to feel it and not to obstruct it.
Okay.
So Instruction 6 takes us into this area a little bit, right?
Because we're talking about observing background programs.
And you say there are two major kinds of background programs that are running.
One is worry.
Yeah.
And the other is feeling hurt. Yeah. And then you go on to talk about integrating these things. So how do we work
with these background patterns? You sort of just said it, but I'm going to put it specifically on
worry and feeling hurt. For example, I remember when my children were 14, 15 years old.
You know, as a parent, you have worries.
You don't know what they are doing.
They go out and, you know, they discover the world, but you don't know what they are doing.
So you have worries.
Running loose in Amsterdam.
There's all kinds of stuff in the city.
Yeah.
And the worries they make that your thoughts are going to, what is he doing?
I should do this.
No, no, no, that's not good.
No, I shouldn't do nothing.
No, it's not good to do nothing.
Your thoughts, they start turning into a loop.
And my suggestion is at that moment,
the thoughts, you cannot stop them.
So just observe your thoughts.
And that's the sixth instruction.
Observe the thoughts.
Observe the background programs.
Don't believe them, but observe them.
They don't give you the solution.
And at the same time, you're going to your body and you're going to feel, where is the fear?
What does it do in my body? You will notice that the fear will be in your ear or ear.
And fear is there.
And you will remark that you are suppressing the fear.
And the suggestion I give to people,
the most easy way to be open to your emotions like fear and hurt
is to go for a walk.
To go for a walk and not a slow walk, but a walk in...
Okay, risk walk.
Yeah.
And when you do that for 10 minutes, 15 minutes,
you will already remark that
the emotion becomes more calm because it takes off your resistance and when the emotion becomes
more calm your head becomes clear yes yes your head becomes clear and then you think okay well
i don't know what my child is doing but in fact in, in front of me, I have confidence. I should just stay on speaking terms
with my children
and not try to act out of fear,
but out of confidence.
So we're trying to allow the emotions
and breathing room,
allow it to be within us
to pay attention to it.
But also moving helps
that emotion in a sense, move.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, because I think there's this idea of being able to think our way out of something.
And my experience is similar to yours, which is when the emotional temperature is too high,
the brain doesn't work.
Yeah.
It does not think well.
the brain doesn't work yeah does not think well it just cycles in in you know fear thoughts and and it's similar to like a two-year-old when a two-year-old just you know when a two-year-old
gets too angry yeah you don't try and be like well bobby you really should share your toy because
sharing is a foundation of western civilization and right like that's not going to work you've
got to get it you've got it how do i calm yeah the child yeah and then we can maybe have a talk about it yeah exactly similar yeah
yeah okay we sort of already hit on intuition yes but we're near the end of our time here but let's
talk about intuition say a little bit more how do I know when something to do is coming out of my intuition
versus it's coming out of, say, my fear? Yeah. I always tell people, don't see intuition as
something mysterious. In fact, you know it already, your intuition. The intuition is that what is
coming up when you don't use your rational mind. So when I have a list in front of me and it's a rational list,
you should do this and that, you should do that,
and you have should, you should, you should, you should,
and you have tensions when you read it.
And you think, oh, yeah, I shouldn't forget it.
Oh, that must be very well done.
But when it's turned around and you have looked well at them
and they calm down because you know them,
and so they are in your subconsciousness.
You turn your list around.
Then you stand up.
You stand up and you walk in your room and you make a cup of coffee.
And then with the cup of coffee in your hand, you think, I'm going to start with this.
It looks like your rational mind.
But because you have no list, it's your intuition.
When you have in front of you something written, your ratio will work. But when you're just walking around and you don't have
anything that tells you what you should do, your intuition will tell you what to do.
Have you ever heard of the phrase, eat the frog first?
Yes.
So eat the frog first is a, I believe it's probably an American business phrase.
It came out of the American business culture, some business writer, which says that you
should do the hardest thing you have to do first thing in the morning.
You've got something to do that seems unpleasant, you gotta work on your taxes and you hate
working on your taxes, eat the frog first.
You're actually saying like, eat whatever you want first.
There is some reasoning in this.
Yeah, okay.
Because we all have the same habit in the morning.
We come into our working place.
When we work with a laptop, we come into our working place,
we open the laptop, we open the email.
Yes.
And at the moment you have opened your email, you're lost
because you start answering the email,
and your email becomes leading in what you're doing
and it attracts you and so you're in it
and then you have worked two hours on your email
and then you have not done anything
from the big things you wanted to do.
Right.
Frogs.
So what my suggestion is,
when you come into the morning,
before you open your laptop, before you open the email, you wait a moment and I call it a wish list.
You make a wish list.
What do you want to do today?
I make a wish list.
This is what I want to do today and that's what I want to do.
Oh, yeah, that's important.
And the wish list is a wish list.
So I don't care about if I have time to do it.
I just know I would like to do it. That's the only thing I would like to do it. And then when I made my wish list, I shut it
down. I'm not capable anymore to see it. And then I opened my email. I opened the email and then
and then I see my email and then I start I only answer the two or three emails that are urgent.
But the other emails I read carefully.
So I see all the emails, I read them,
I know all the emails in the inbox
and also the ones who stayed from yesterday.
I have seen them and then I shut down my email.
So that took me maybe 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
And then I make a walk and I decided to make my first big action. That can be a frog, that can be a minutes, 10 minutes, 50 minutes. And then I make a walk and I decide to make
my first big action. That can
be a frog. That can be a frog.
But at that moment, it's more probable
that I will choose a big
action that's really important as the
first action I'm going to do in this day.
And then after one and a half hour
working on it, I close
down and then I open the email
again.
And then it's curious because in between,
in the one and a half hour
I worked on this big task,
my subconscious was thinking
about the email.
Yeah.
In unconscious thinking.
So I opened my email again
and I read the email
for the second time
and then very quickly I answer,
yes, I'm doing this,
oh, this is my advice I give to you.
Very quickly,
it comes out of my subconsciousness.
And so that's another reason
why you see that time surfing
is more productive and without stress.
So you get more better ideas,
but you work less on it.
Because your subconscious is working on it while you're doing other things.
So when you come back to it, able to do it more quickly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Excellent.
Well, we are at the end of our time.
We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get your book, Time Surfing.
Yes.
And where they can find your work in general.
And thank you so much for, on such short notice, agreeing to meet me in the studio in Amsterdam.
It's been a real pleasure.
Well, it was a big pleasure for me.
Maybe just one thing to tell is that in January,
there will come the second edition of the book,
and the book changes from title.
The name won't be anymore.
Time-serving the name will be I've Got Time.
I've Got Time.
Okay.
All right. And like I said, links will be I've got time. I've got time. Okay. All right. Okay. And like I
said, links will be in the show notes to where they can find you and all of those things. Thank
you very much. Thank you.
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