Imagine time as where you live, specifically, where your soul resides.
Multitudes of people reside emotionally in the past. Some live in dim cottages of negative experiences, foraging scraps of hurt, anger, regret, resentment, grief, isolation, etc. Some live in brittle castles of former glory, feasting on pride (or humility), devotion, satisfaction, gloating, etc.
Hoards of people reside emotionally in the future. Some live in bleak hovels of fear, existing on an unpleasant diet of alarm, scarcity, worry, misgiving, dread, doubt, etc. Some live in vague edifices of fantasy, reaching for the empty fruit of desire, expectancy, greed, lust, impatience, etc.
Minorities of people reside emotionally in the present, dining regularly on acceptance, wonder, curiosity, humor, patience, tolerance, compassion, and courage.
Where do you live?
If you can think of time as place, you have the power to relocate.
Wherever in time you’ve been living, take a good look at the emotions you’ve collected, stored or treasured and evaluate their worth. Do they help you create the life you want? Manifest a specific intention? Access more of your personal power? Do your memories strengthen you or disable you? Do your expectations empower you or immobilize you?
Every place in time has both costs and benefits. It’s easy to criticize the past for its tendency to calcify the heart, or disparage the future for its capacity to shrivel the body. It’s also easy to extol the present for the solid foundation it provides. It’s harder to bless the past for lessons learned and memories accumulated, or embrace the future for the possibilities it holds. It’s harder still to recognize the potential of the present to stagnate the mind.
The Past
While every event of your life holds a potential memory, you probably remember most clearly the events that carried an emotional impact. The degree to which you live in a past event depends on its emotional hold.
Some events remain in your memory with a soft and gentle presence: good memories, fun times, pleasant connections with the people involved. Memories of this sort encourage you to move on. Many even empower you.
Some events inspire you to learn and grow, to see yourself and the world more clearly, to stretch out into new directions. Their influence may be that of helping you discern what works and what doesn’t.
Some events maintain such a strong emotional hold they anchor you to the past. For their own survival, they require you to stay put, to feed and nurture them, to give them life. If you were to move on, they would die. When you agree to their terms, you take up residence in that emotional space. You feel trapped in that time, by that energy.
The Future
Since we’re looking at time as space, consider how often and under what conditions you visit the future.
Are you so detached and indifferent to the future you rarely drop in for a visit? Perhaps you trust the future to take care of itself, with little or no effort on your part. Or perhaps you can’t be bothered, and you’d rather pick up the pieces resulting from your indifference than plan ahead.
The future might feel like the home of a good friend: fun, supportive, generous. You like to hang out there because you learn, you get ideas, you see opportunities, and you return to the present enthused and empowered.
Or perhaps you’ve spent so much time in the future and invested so much energy in it, you live there. The energy might be so anxious and fearful you feel you have to stay there to keep watch, to stay on guard, to prepare for the looming danger. Or it might be so full of anticipation and expectation, you become ensnared by daydreams. The beauty generated by your desire or your greed casts the present in such shadow you can’t abide even looking in the direction of now.
The Present
When you reside in the present, you can look back into the past, learning the lessons and enjoying the memories. When you look forward to the future, you can plan, explore and create. Since, you actually exist in the present, the tools and techniques of the present are easily at hand. When compared to the worst of The Past or The Future, The Present may seem the ideal.
As with the other two wheres of time, however, the present has its challenges, mostly relative to the other two time frames. For the present to have power, you must aggressively learn from the past, and you must confidently create the future. Otherwise, the past becomes a fog (as with Alzheimer’s patients), and the future holds no opportunity. It’s entirely possible to be so lost in the now, you sacrifice your personal power to it.
The Power of Time
No doubt you’ve heard the adage, “Time is money.” This statement places a monetary value on time, sometimes down to the second. How much time is worth becomes a question of how much money can be produced in a given amount of time. Actually, time itself is not money, it merely provides money with urgency.
The same goes for power. Time by itself is not power, but it provides a way to think about power. Unlike money, there is no tangible way to measure power, especially personal power. With the Modes of Power diamond, I conceived one way to define power in terms of emotions. I assigned Victim Mode a power level of 1, Interpreter Mode a power level of 100, Observer Mode a power level of 10,000, Partner Mode a power level of 1,000,000, and Creator Mode a power level of 100,000,000. This is an arbitrary scale. The numbers are for illustration only, and even the emotions I’ve assigned to the different modes will a) have different amounts of power within the mode, and b) sometimes move from mode to mode, depending on your definition or experience with them.
Very clearly, however, the Modes of Power diamond shows the power transitions from misery to struggle, to calm, to cooperation, to oneness.
So what does time have to do with this? In terms of how we measure time, not much. In terms of how we experience time, everything.
A period of time in which we experience no emotion has no power whatsoever. If you can reach a place totally free of emotion, say in meditation, you can stop time. By contrast, when your emotions are generating high levels of energy, time speeds up. The rate at which time elapses is relative to the energy levels of your emotions.
The same is true for how much you reside in a where of time. The stronger your emotional connection to some event, the stronger your ties to that event will be. If the emotion is very strong and exerts a strong pull on you, you will return so frequently to the when of the event it might become your where. On the hand, when an event generates only fleeting emotions, the event itself flows easily through your life .
If you have strong emotional ties to a past event, you must heal the emotions in order to relocate your soul to a different where of time. Strong emotional ties to something you anticipate in the future can likewise fix you in time. Your emotions can bind you to your expectations and close off all other possibilities.
Time as a Function of Power
Time provides you with two extremely important aspects of personal power, the power to heal and the power to create. See Pacify Your Objections for exercises to heal the past and create the future.
In Your Path to Power, I suggested three ways people access their personal power – through the mind, through the body, or through the heart.
Each way of accessing power connects with time in a different way. People who access power through the heart have a direct connection to the past. They have strong healing energy, and in order to create in the present, they need to heal any injuries incurred in the past. Once healing is achieved, creation comes easily.
People who access power through the body have a direct connection to the future. They have strong creative energy, and when that energy is projected into the future, miracles result. In order to create in the present, they need to visualize the future in the widest possible view of possibilities. Once creation has begun, healing follows easily.
People who access their power through the mind have a direct connection to the present, because all choices originate in the mind, and choices can only be made in the present. They need to choose in the present before they can either heal the past and or create the future.
Where to Begin
Clearly, everyone is better off if they live in the present, since choice is only possible in the now. However, coming to now is the starting point only if you access your power through the mind. If you are a mind-power person, you may find settling into the now is merely a matter of choice. You decide to move from Interpreter mode and relocate in Observer or Partner mode, and there you are.
Coming to now if you are a heart-power person may require some dedicated effort to heal the past (often called recapitulation). You can revisit past experiences and revise them by rewriting and reenacting. Or you can identify the emotions you’ve been carrying around since the event occurred, release those emotions and fill the vacuum with different energy. Either way, healing occurs when you let go of the Victim or Interpreter energy and replace them with Observer or Partner energy. From Observer perspective, your possibilities expand and you can begin to create.
Reclaiming now if you are a body-power person requires recalling every vestige of Interpreter energy you’ve projected into the future. Be very clear that what you’ve sent into the future will deliver back to you in kind. If you project any form of fear (dread, anxiety, apprehension, worry) into the future, the future will deliver back some manifestation of what you fear. If you project any form of avarice (greed, hunger, ambition, pride, lust) into the future, the future may return some form of what you desire, but it won’t fill the emptiness that motivated the desire in the first place. When you step out of Interpreter Mode into Observer or Partner Mode, you free yourself of the energy needs of fear or conquest. You become calm, and calm illuminates a vast array of possibilities. Healing becomes one of the possibilities you see; a possibility that can easily become reality.
Live in the present. Use the past to heal and the future to create. All three aspects of time are key to accessing your power and manifesting your best good.




