WALL TIME

Another interesting practice that facilitates stillness is wall time. What is wall time? It is spending time leaning onto a wall with your forehead. The sensation of having your forehead gently touching a wall does something in regards to stillness. Maybe it's the novelty of the act or the fact that the forehead is the location of the third eye. Maybe it is just knowing how weird that must be to an on-looker. Are you being punished? Whatever it is that causes the feelings that come up to emerge, wall time offers a unique type of support.

Positioning matters. Bring your whole body as close to the wall as possible. Your feet will hit the wall on the floor. You can open your feet a little to get closer if you choose. The key to getting close is preventing yourself from having to lean in too much with your upper body and neck. You want to be able to be as upright as possible in standing while also being able to get your forehead to touch the wall gently. The gentleness matters as well. You do not want to be leaning in so much that the wall is receiving more of your weight. Let it be a gentle contact, not too much. Do not let the contact be too gentle either, otherwise you will minimize the experience. Let your arms just dangle in front of you, between your thighs and the wall. Do not let your nose absorb too much contact on the wall. It can touch gently as a guide for positioning your neck in such a way that your third eye is truly being contacted.

The arms dangling work best for stillness. Play with the positioning of the arms to facilitate a wide variety of different feelings, of different qualities of neurological nutrition. Holding your arms behind your back where one hand holds onto the wrist of the other hand definitely changes the energy. Check it out. Even more interesting, try placing the palms of your hands on different parts of the wall too. With your hands up, for example, you can cotour the wall fully from your palms to your elbows. As you bring your hands down to contact the wall at the shoulder level or lower, only the palms can touch the wall. The nicest part of exploring the positioning of your hands occurs when you let your arms just dangle and hang down, you feel the increase of stillness.

Keep in mind, the brain loves novelty, newness, and thrives in the presence of it. Wall time is so unique and outside the box that the brain gets fed a nice dose of novelty. Get comfortable in doing the unusual, the things that capture the brain's interest. If doing something like wall time brings about awkward feelings, recognize it, give yourself permission to feel those feelings and "lean in" to the stillness, which, in this case, is significantly more than a metaphor.