Book Review:  Take Your Time - by Eknath Easwaran

"I would like to practice more, but I don't have the time."

If I had one minute for each time I had said these words, I could do yoga for another lifetime.  Not one of us *has* the time.  It is not as though we keep an hour or thirty minutes or even five minutes unused each day.  Time is not money, that we can hoard and accrue it.  No one has time to practice yoga, or read, or spend with family, or any additional pastime.  All of us *make* time.  It appears that one makes time by choosing one activity in lieu of another, or by forcing one's time into double-duty.  You may ignore the television in order to spend time reading the newspaper.  I  might make time to sleep by eating my breakfast while driving.

Easwaran observes that by multi-tasking activities, the mind become fragmented.  If If I persist in this behavior, I will not have the unified mind that I require, the focused mind that I desire.  What we call "multi-tasking" and take as a mark of efficiency is, for Easwaran, poison.  A fragmented mind does everything poorly.  Practitioners of asana has experienced the difference in quality between mindful practice and the alternative.  Compare the physical battle in an unfocused Vrksasana (Tree Pose) to the poise and stability of one with concentration.

Having presented the problem, Easwaran then offers practical wisdom that will lead one to living intentionally.  First, slow down; moreover do so with sacrificing efficiency.  Then, confronting the world at one's own pace, one makes deliberate choices.  "Take your time" is the heading under which the principles lie.  In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali has written "Yoga is the intentional cessation of the fluctuations of the mind."  In this book Eknath Easwaran urges the same goal.

Eknath Easwaran was a professor of English in India before coming to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship.  He taught in Minnesota and the University of Calfornia at Berkeley, and founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley, California.  As a young man, he walked with Mahatma Gandhi.  These experiences have given Easwaran a wealth of anecdotes that he draws upon to illustrate his points.  The practical examples are necessary; often my reaction to reading stated principle was disbelief.  Reflect on your activites, he suggests, and forego some of them.  Balderdash, I thought.  Easwaran followed "Very often you will find that you and world can do without activities you had thought essential".  He writes with a playful tone that makes the lessons delightful to read and palatable to follow.