This exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. The exercise also balances left and right hemispheres.
Set up your environment so that you have at least ten minutes when you won't be interrupted or distracted: five minutes for watching the clock and five minutes afterwards for thinking and writing.
Find a quiet place and set up a clock to watch, preferably a large clock that is 7-8 feet away from where you will sit. You watch the second hand, and concentrate loosely as you watch the hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. (See Breathing Exercise.)
Watch for five minutes or so. Before beginning, it can be helpful to set a timer for five minutes--a timer can relieve you of the need to track clock time. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness--this is important.
As you relax and observe the movement you might explore these questions: Does the SOTP change? If so, how? Does every minute seem equally long? How are pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time? Make some notes about what happens.
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After doing the exercise you might find it helpful to read the following section of Results in No Time in which a character named Michael does four sessions of the clock watching exercise. This material gives some ideas of the kinds of experiences that can sometimes happen when doing the clock watching exercise.
First Session
Michael put a chair halfway across the room from the large clock in the den. Then he set a timer for five minutes and sat down facing the clock.
"This is an unusual thing to do. Most of the time when I watch the clock I'm anxious, and I'm doing something else. Well, let's get into it," he thought.
"Jed said to breathe through the mouth and nose, very evenly. I heard that this same type of breathing was used in Kum Nye practices, and in some martial arts like Tai Chi."
Michael noticed some tension in his shoulders and relaxed it. Then he became aware of breathing through nose and mouth, which was a new method for him. "The breathing feels a little unusual, but maybe I'll get used to it. . . ."
"Nothing interesting so far." he thought. He just saw a second hand going around the way it always did.
Then he recalled the instructions. "I'm supposed to let the breathing slow down a little, with each breath lasting longer than before. . . . Breathing is a little more subtle in a way. . . . There's still a kind of jumping back and forth between noticing the second hand and attending to my breath. Maybe I can relax a little more. . . ."
"Whoops. The hand seemed to jump five seconds there. I guess I lost track of it for some reason. . . . Ugh, did I really think that? That reminds me of my discussion with Jed about 'losing track' of time--we feel we need to 'accurately track' some imagined external movement of time. [See "What We teach About Time."] I guess I'm still stuck in that perspective to some extent."
"Well, the usual experience of tracking time is back [See Linear Time], with myself sitting near the typical conveyor belt of time moving from past to present to future. . . . But I'm not paying much attention to the breathing now, so I'll put a little more attention on the breath and relax some more. . . . And gently focus on the movement of the hand. . . ."
"Whoop, there I lost it again. In fact I lost the whole clock. . . . That was interesting--kind of like falling asleep. . . . Except that I've been sitting here upright, and I know that I didn't sleep. . . . At least not the way sleep usually feels. But my awareness was different somehow. . . . Whatever happened, I'm back to tracking time the 'normal' way."
The timer went off. Michael reached toward the desk for his notebook, then wrote some notes about his experience: "That five minutes went 'pretty fast'. Except of course for a couple of breaks in the middle where time didn't seem to 'go' at all. There was some insight about the belief that our SOTP is supposed to track some kind of external time-flow. I found it was important to just keep relaxing and balance awareness over both watching and breathing."
Second Session
After watching the clock for a couple of minutes, Michael's breathing became very even and regular, almost palpable. He wasn't trying to breath any certain way any more, and was hardly even aware of breathing as something separate from the clock watching. . . .
He seemed able to just watch the second hand as a motion and not associate it with 'time'. The hand was just a thing moving timelessly in space.
Then a 'normal' feeling of time returned. "Wow. My breathing is a little rougher, not so even. Maybe my breathing is closely related to the way I experience time."
The timer went off. Michael reached for his notebook and wrote: "Breathing became very even, and almost palpable. Kind of nourishing somehow. 'Lost track' of breathing as a separate activity. Second hand was no longer a 'thing' and neither was the 'clock'. There was just a motion, with no SOTP (sense of time passing). Interesting! Maybe that's why Jed calls this exercise 'looking into the eye of time'. It can be like the eye of a hurricane, where there's a combination of movement and a feeling of no movement. Then 'normal time' showed up. Quality of breathing seemed related to experience of time. Perhaps my sense of myself as a separate observer disappears when my SOTP disappears. And when time returns, the observer returns, separate from a clock being watched."
As a result of his finding that breathing was closely related to his SOTP, Michael tried to do the breathing through mouth and nose all day long--except when he was jogging, eating, talking, or sneezing.
Third Session
"Lots of thoughts today. Hard to relax and slow down the breath. . . ."
"I wonder how much time is left. . . . The hands of the clock are very meaningful to me now. Nothing interesting so far. . . . This reminds me of the treadmill that Adams was talking about. Boring and repetitious. . . . I feel very separate from the clock, and it definitely looks like a 'thing'. . . ."
"Maybe if I focus more on the breathing. . . . And relax that tension behind my eyes. . . . Now the breath is slowing. . . . Balance attention on hand. . . ."
The timer went off. "Wow. Those were some of the longest minutes I've spent doing this." He reached for the notebook and wrote: "Hard to relax, lots of thoughts. Very aware of regular SOTP, with myself separate from a thing called a clock. Focused more on breath. Seems like the tension behind my eyes was related to habitually looking outward for something."
Fourth Session
Over a couple of minutes Michael's breath became very even and regular, almost shallow, as though he was hardly breathing. There was a deep sense of relaxation, no anxiety at all. . . .
Then he came out of the concentration and commented: "It's a little easier to get relaxed each session. . . . Perhaps there's some kind of stability or balance in my breathing as a result of practicing every day."
"Now to gently balance attention between breathing and movement of the hand. . . . "
"There was a timelessness--for who knows how long? Then there was a tendency for the hand to emerge along with an observer. But noticing that tendency made it possible to relax and let the structure of self-other-time dissolve. . . ."
The timer went off. "Too bad that that period's over!" Michael reached for the notebook and wrote: "I feel energized. Breath was very even, almost shallow. Came out of it and commented, then balanced awareness over breath and movement. A timelessness. Noticing how self and clock tended to emerge at poles of 'clock watching activity' made it possible to dissolve the subject-object perspective and stay in an open space."
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