Tatiana Khodakova
“A person ages not by years, but by the absence of Presence” (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
Remember how, in childhood, summer seemed like a lifetime? Three months filled with new discoveries, the scents of grandma’s garden, and endless games in the yard. Every day was unique, new, and unlike the previous one. And now? In adulthood, it feels like we’ve been caught in an accelerating loop of time: “I blinked, and spring passed; I blinked, and autumn passed”. Why does this happen?
Has time truly started flowing faster? From a physical standpoint, no, but from the perspective of our perception — definitely yes. What does this mean, and how can we regain that feeling of “endless summer”? Let’s delve deeper.
Absence of Presence: Trapped in Routine
We do a lot. We are constantly moving, achieving, working. But are we truly present in our own lives?
Consider this: doesn’t it seem to you that you remember the plots of your favorite movies and series much better than the events and feelings of your own days?
Today, most people’s days disappear without a trace. Our brains, accustomed to having gadgets remember everything for us (from shopping lists to important dates), are practically forgetting how to record our own memories. This phenomenon has even been termed “digital amnesia”: we live, yet no deep, vivid traces remain in our memories.
Think back to your last two or three months. What remains from them? Not a dry list of tasks checked off (“traveled, met, completed”), but the very feeling of living — the light in the window, the smell of morning coffee, the beating of your heart? If the answer is silence, it means you’ve missed your own life on “autopilot”.
Why Time Compresses: The Neurobiology of Boredom
What has changed since childhood? Our perception mode has shifted. Here’s what happens in our “skull box” (brain).
Hippocampus and the “Optimization Mode”. Our hippocampus — the area responsible for recording new events — only registers information when novelty is present. When we repeat the same actions day in and day out (home-work-home), the hippocampus activates the optimization mode: it compresses all the similar days into one, skipping them. It’s like scrolling through a phone gallery where the same view has been photographed 30 times in a row.
Reduced Variability = Memory Collapse. Studies, such as those conducted at the Academy of Sciences in Finland, showed that when the variability of the external environment decreases by 60% (when not much changes around), the brain reduces the speed of forming new synaptic connections. In simpler terms, memory literally collapses. We notice this when driving down a long highway with monotonous scenery: it’s easy to miss an obstacle because the brain stops actively recording visual images.
Amygdala and Significance Markers. We also have the amygdala, which places significance markers on all events. If the emotional marker of an event is low, it simply doesn’t get stored in long-term memory. The brain considers it low in significance, and our “recording device” shuts off.
Conclusion: Childhood was full of novelty, strong emotions, and unpredictability, which is why the hippocampus and amygdala operated at full capacity. In adult life, we ourselves switch them to energy-saving mode.
Life on Display: When the Present Vanishes
A person often does things without waking up — without awareness. We run to keep up, to not let anyone down, to meet someone else’s or our own imposed standards.
Even vacations often become a beautiful but empty image for the camera, for Instagram, for acquaintances who will see the photos. A person “relaxes” to show relaxation, not to truly feel it, slow down, and enjoy the moment.
And here lies the paradox: when you stop feeling, time begins to race away. Sensations fade — days disappear.
When Presence fades — life itself disappears, and you disappear too.
Life seems to happen, but there’s no one to not just spend it, but to feel it — to rejoice in it, to perceive it, to be an active participant rather than a sleepy spectator.
The Paradox of Success: Life Without Meaning
If time doesn’t simply vanish, who really erases your life? The world, the brain, or you yourself, having long lived through a certain imposed role on autopilot?
Scientists have been trying for decades to understand which part of the brain, which neurotransmitters or hormones are responsible for this acceleration of time. And here’s the key conclusion:
OUR BRAIN DOES NOT COUNT SECONDS — THE BRAIN COUNTS MEANINGS
When a day resembles yesterday, our hippocampus stops placing time markers. It sees repetitions and compresses days not because we are tired, but because there’s nothing to differentiate — it doesn’t make sense to spend resources on this. When there is meaning — there is time and duration. When meaning disappears — time disappears.
Psychologist Katherine Wilbourn found that in the absence of personal significance, the activity of the frontal cortex drops to the level of drowsiness. A person is literally awake yet asleep. According to Gallup, 72% of people describe their workdays as indistinguishable. Months are lived in routine, and later it becomes impossible to remember a single day.
And here the paradox is born:
The more we accomplish, the fewer memories we have. The more we do, the less we remember, because by turning into a machine, we stop being in the moment. The brain only records where we are truly alive, while everything else is erased as unnecessary.
Thus, the Paradox of Success is born: you spend years working and achieving (an apartment, a car, a family, status), but one day you tell yourself: “It feels like I continue doing everything out of inertia; I have become a robot, an automaton, a function… I exist for everyone, but I don’t live for myself”.
This is the first crack that begins to grow: first, interest fades, then the ability to make decisions through intuition, to see the new. Instead, there is wandering in the mazes of the mind, where something always slips away, where you move but lose the very foundation. And then you completely stop moving and begin to fly along a set trajectory, like a projectile toward its two-meter pit.
Signals of Erasure: What the Body Cries Out
The signals of this erasure of life and time are always the same: months become confused, days blur together, you don’t remember what happened yesterday, and you catch yourself not even understanding why you are here right now and where you were planning to go. Food loses its taste, evenings pass unnoticed, and weekends seem as if they never existed.
We explain this to ourselves as stress and fatigue. But the truth is that we are disappearing from our own lives. We are no longer its authors, but merely functions.
However, our body behaves differently!
The mind can erase memories, choose not to recall them, but the body doesn’t erase anything. The muscles remember the constant tension well: the aching back, tense shoulders, and neck. They remember the burden of obligations we have carried more than we could handle, and the suppressed anxiety, the nausea from life that we held back to avoid breaking down.
People often say, “Everything turns into one glued-together stream. Life passes alongside us, time flies, but nothing happens”.
There is a feeling that you are managing to do less and less, as if you are standing still. “I keep holding on, and I am always holding on”, they say. Or, “I know what I want to change, and I really want to, but I can’t. Something always gets in the way: first one thing comes up, then another”. And it doesn’t matter where in the world they live and work. Everywhere, across the globe, the story is the same.
Here lies the point where we first notice the crack. But we don’t understand that it is not from fatigue, but from the loss of contact with ourselves, with that place from which the Presence of life and time is born.
And now the main thing, which changes the whole meaning: there is a loss of self, a loss of direct access to life. Time merely records this fact.
Root of the Problem: Where Did We Lose Presence?
Great minds have always spoken about the same thing. Even Rumi wrote: “Time compresses for one who lives outside the heart”. Stoics expressed it differently but conveyed the same message: “We do not receive a short life; we make it short”.
It’s not about the acceleration of time or the peculiarities of the brain’s functioning. Even age is not the cause. It is the essence of the one who was meant to live this life that disappears.
The Root Cause Lies Deeper. It resides in the point where we first stopped feeling ourselves and began to live as if our “I” could be postponed for later.
The Disconnection: From Body to Head
In our early childhood, everything was quite simple. If you wanted to play, you played; if you were tired, you lay down to rest; if it hurt, you cried; if you were happy, you laughed. There was no division between feelings and actions. We lived directly through the body.
Research by Andrew Meltzer shows that until the age of five, children make decisions almost entirely based on somatic navigation. That is, up to 80% of actions are pure bodily intuition.
And then upbringing, school, and everything flips upside down. We are taught to sit when we want to run. We are taught to be silent when we want to scream. We are taught to be not who we want to be, but who we “should” be to be considered good. We were taught to stop eating not when we felt full, but when the food was gone from the plate. And over all of this dominates the phrase: “It’s not what I want, but what I have to do”
According to UNESCO, children in schools have higher cortisol (stress hormone) levels than adults in offices.
Here, the child first leaves the familiar system of the body and sensations, fully entering the head. Everything below the neck gets blocked. Instead of a living impulse, there is control. Instead of “I feel”, there is “But how is it right? What will others think of me? What grade will I get”?
You block these sensations, stop relying on them, and begin to overthink. Earlier, you would feel and immediately translate that into action — it was alive, precise, and honest. Now a filter emerges through which everything passes: instead of sensations, there are reflections; the transition from direct experience to abstractions.
Functional Self: The Trap of “I Think”
In practice, we often observe how a person lives exclusively in their head, often without realizing it. They act, respond, and make decisions — all with the mind, completely ignoring bodily sensations.
This is how the Functional Self is born — a version of you that knows how to conform, meet others’ expectations, suppress impulses, and fulfill demands. An internal monologue constantly plays in the head: “Don’t forget, do it right, don’t let anyone down”. The person suppresses sensations and gradually fills all their inner space with thoughts.
By the age of 14, we essentially disconnect from ourselves. It becomes a habit: we learn not to be where it hurts, not to feel where it is frightening. And this undoubtedly becomes a form of survival.
The Trap of Analysis
But no one has ever taught us how to reconnect. Even in psychoanalysis, the return to sensations is often substituted with meaning-making and analysis. Instead of feeling again, people are taught to analyze their feelings, dissect them, describe and explain them.
And here we encounter a new trap: you talk about the pain but do not engage with it. You explain the fear but do not experience it. You try to understand yourself but do not feel.
Very often, when asked, “What do you feel”? a person describes what they think about those feelings and cannot articulate the bodily sensation itself.
The loss of sensation is a loss of navigation. Without it, you do not understand what you need. You lose internal support, faith in yourself, and you start seeking them externally, losing them even more under the weight of circumstances and the consequences of all the choices made without that support.
How Time Returns
When a person comes with the request: “I have little energy, no clarity, I want to understand which action is the right one”, it means that for many years they have been blocking pain in order to survive. And together with that pain, they blocked their entire life.
Sensitivity disappeared, and with it time disappeared too. Years turned into a gray corridor where there is movement, but no feeling that life itself is going anywhere. There are only obligations and functioning.
And when you begin to remove these layers one by one, the body gradually comes back to life. Inside, a free space appears that was not felt before. And when, for the first time in years, a person begins to feel their body, warmth, energy — at that moment time begins to return to the one who has started to regain the ability to truly live it.
The Price of Presence: Suppression of the True Self
Back in the 1970s, studies of divergent thinking (the ability to find non-standard solutions) were conducted to select engineers for the space industry. The results were shocking: at the age of five, 98% of children were creative geniuses. By age ten, this number dropped to 30%, by fifteen — to 12%, and in adulthood only 2% remains.
It’s not the talent itself that is lost, but its source is suppressed — the authentic Self, which lives in sensations.
Pay attention: what is your inner voice saying right now? “I need to remember this, write it down, this is interesting, this is about me”. There it is —that functional dialogue. You caught it. The voice that replaces and substitutes the feeling of being alive.
When was the last time you felt yourself, rather than the burden of obligations, rather than the pressure pushing you forward?
After thirty to thirty-five, many of us stop living and sensing life, and begin servicing the roles of parent, specialist, partner, leader. The roles change, but inside there is somehow more and more emptiness. You feel not your own “I want”, but what the role dictates as “I must”.
According to research data, 61% of professionals admit that they do their work without a sense of meaning. An employee spends more than three hours a day on tasks for the sake of tasks themselves: useless reports, meetings, emails. You run, you do, but you stand still.
This is not the system’s malicious intent. It simply feeds on absence: the less you feel, the more you consume (even food). The stronger the anxiety, the more manageable you are, the easier you sell yourself. The cycle is simple: anxiety → action → exhaustion → new anxiety.
Sensory Numbness and the Assemblage Point
When contact with yourself disappears, you stop living as a human being and start functioning like a robot — like a function. Chronic tension arises, in which the activity of the insular cortex decreases — and this area is precisely responsible for perceiving internal states.
Even the WHO reports that more than half of specialists aged 35–55 experience sensory numbness — a loss of subtle sensitivity. Time accelerates, sensitivity fades, Presence is lost, and decision-making turns not into a choice, but into a reaction.
On the outside — a successful life one can be proud of; on the inside — a glass ceiling, fatigue, anxiety, and endless running. The psyche lives in threat mode: “If I stop, everything will collapse”.
When you begin to remove this layer by layer, the body responds immediately: a sense of inner support suddenly appears, the constant “must” and anxiety disappear. A person sees the main thing: the problem was their state of permanent tension, from which they were trying to act — and which completely blocked them.
The Paradox of Stopped Time
And when was the last time you did something not out of obligation, but out of a genuine, spontaneous desire?
Each of us has had moments when time literally stopped — ceased to exist. Most often these are crises or powerful positive events (love, the birth of a child), when you return from thoughts into the body and are fully Present. In those few seconds, there was more life than in some entire months.
This is not mysticism. Neuroscientists know that the brain holds two kinds of time:
● Sensory, living Presence: arises when we feel the warmth of light on the skin, smells, taste. It is recorded in memory.
● Mental, cognitive time: thoughts, plans, anxieties. It is barely recorded, because it carries no novelty.
In moments of crisis, norepinephrine is released, increasing the rate of neural recording up to fourfold, and consciousness captures every detail. Love and the flow state (as in artists, athletes, surgeons) work by the same principle: control switches off, and the insular cortex gathers all attention into a single point — here and now. By the calendar, a week passes; by sensation, an entire year.
TIME DEPENDS NOT ON CLOCKS, BUT ON HOW CONNECTED WE ARE TO SENSATION IN LIFE
The Turning Point
Each of us has had a deeply important turning point. Try closing your eyes now and letting that memory arise:
At what exact moment did you decide that it was better to feel nothing than to feel that pain?
After experiencing intense fear, pain, or shame, a person makes a decision: “I will never let this happen again. Next time, I will be stronger”.
That strength turns not into support, but into armor. The price of armor is numbed feelings. In order not to feel pain, the brain begins to mute everything indiscriminately: joy, inspiration, energy — and you start to exist in a way that lets nothing unnecessary get through.
Research confirms: suppressing emotions increases muscle tone by 30–40%. People who experienced emotional trauma in childhood are four times more likely to experience sensory detachment in adulthood. Hence the fatigue, tightness, and tension in the chest and throat.
The body functions, but the connection with the center of sensation is severed. From that day on, life seems safer — but in reality it begins to wither and dry up. Time starts to contract from that very moment.
Breaking the Contract: The Life of the Spirit
Modern humans live under anesthesia of the spirit. They smile, talk, discuss goals and problems — but nothing resonates inside them. Something like being awake while asleep occurs.
The fewer the feelings, the less the energy.
The less the energy, the greater the tension.
The greater the tension, the more control.
The more control, the less life — and even less strength.
The cycle closes.
When this cycle is broken by restoring sensation, contact with oneself returns, along with the ability to act from clarity rather than fear or anxiety. Not from what someone told you or might punish you for, but from inner desires. And this creates real results in life — not another surge followed by a crash, but something that genuinely brings you joy.
The Memory of the Spirit
Your promise, your inner contract (the one you made with yourself in the moment of trauma, deciding “not to feel”) — can be dissolved. And it is simpler than it seems. Not through fighting yourself, but through a gradual, gentle return of feeling.
WHEN FEELING RETURNS, THE MEMORY OF OUR SPIRIT (OR THE SUBCONSCIOUS) RETURNS
Our Spirit lives simultaneously in three dimensions: the past, the present, and the future. For it, this is one river, one continuous flow — without breaks. An ordinary person lives differently: we regret the past, the future evokes fear or anxiety, and we are absent from the present because we are present in thoughts about it.
The mind cannot enter this life. It lives in projections, abstractions, in “it’s already too late”, “it’s not time yet”, “what will happen tomorrow”. It is like an observer, but one that exists outside the flow. The mind cuts us off from living movement and shows life as a flat diagram, a pale imitation.
The Spirit, however, stands above time (not outside it, but above it) and sees the whole picture at once. Among the ancients, this was called the Memory of the Spirit — the ability to remember oneself beyond time.
The Luxury of Time: Navigation of the Spirit
We lose this connection with Presence very early — perhaps at five, perhaps at seven years old — when we begin to believe that life flows in a straight line, from yesterday to tomorrow, and that we are merely a point being carried along that line. We lose this connection together with sensation and intuition. The most valuable thing we lose is not money; with the loss of sensation, we lose time itself.
The Body Knows in Advance
And here is what modern science reveals. Research from the HeartMath Institute shows that heart rhythm changes 4–7 seconds before the appearance of a stimulus that is not yet consciously known. The body responds to events before they occur.
On the level of physical time, this is the Memory of the Spirit. It is not about memories or predictions, but about navigation in time. It does not tell you what was or what will be — it simply guides you to where you need to be in order to resolve your tasks and pass through your lessons.
Control Through Urgency
Our world is held together not by money, but by time. A person with money quickly realizes: true luxury is when you no longer have to sell all of your time to someone else just to survive.
Whoever sets the rhythm controls consciousness.
The system benefits only from those who are always rushing, hurrying, catching up, afraid of being late, losing their time. A person who feels outside of this drops out of the control system. For a world built on urgency, this is dangerous. Time becomes an instrument of control: “deadlines”, “age”, “the clock is ticking”, “it’s already too late”, “it’s still too early”. These are not phrases — they are programs designed to create obedience. We accept them, and our energy begins to flow past us.
It seems that the faster you move, the less you notice who is swinging this pendulum of urgency.
Studies from 2016 showed that time scarcity activates fear centers. In haste, the ability to choose disappears.
Mystics have always known the power beyond time. Ibn Arabi said: “The awakened one lives in every moment of the Day of Judgment”. Laozi said: “The wise have no yesterday and no tomorrow. They return themselves to eternity”.
Modern civilization rests on the belief that time is running away and that you can be late for something if you don’t hurry. But this works only as long as you yourself believe it.
One who steps out of the linear race of “yesterday and tomorrow” and lives in a state of Presence ceases to be controlled through haste and fear — and becomes free.
Insight and Premonition
All our major breakthroughs and achievements we call insights, realizations. Modern neurophysiology has proven that they are not built on past experience, but arise from a state that has not yet manifested on the level of action, but is already formed internally.
Experiments by Benjamin Libet and other studies have shown: first arises an inner readiness for action, a premonition; only then does a thought appear, and only afterward the action.
And this is the key. Practice shows: when blocks are removed, a sense of lightness, of oneself, and of the flow of life returns. The need to do things out of “should” disappears. This is the result of the direct flow of life energy through you — energy you can feel. It’s just that before, someone skillfully siphoned it away, leaving you only a small amount so you could keep running in circles.
Navigation of the Spirit: Dead End or Retrocausality?
Let us once again turn to the findings of the HeartMath Institute, which show that heart rhythm changes several seconds before the appearance of an unknown stimulus. In other words, the body begins to respond to events before they occur in physical time.
Scientists called this phenomenon retrocausality — when a future state shapes a neural response in the present. Let me repeat: this happens in the body, not in abstract reasoning. A future state governs our behavior.
This is how the navigation of the Spirit works:
First, a future direction arises.
Then — a sensation (a premonition, intuition).
And only then — action.
But when this navigation is disrupted, sensation does not arrive, and a familiar feeling appears instead: a dead end, stupor, lostness, being stuck in the same place. This is simply a loss of contact with the source of the future — that inner line meant to lead forward.
When this connection breaks, a sense of emptiness arises inside. And it cannot be filled with busyness, goals, success, achievements — not even with willpower or discipline.
The connection is restored not through discipline, not through effort, but on the contrary, through relaxation. Through cultivating sensation, through that very inner movement that disappeared when time turned into a race, or when we decided it was safer to live this way.
How to Begin the Return?
The entire article is devoted to one thing:
TO RETURN TIME IS TO RETURN PRESENCE
And the starting point is not planning, but the simplest thing: beginning to feel again.
The Practice of Return: Tuning into Presence
Now I’d like to offer a simple practice that may help some of you restore this lost connection.
If you’re ready, let’s do it together:
The “I Remember Myself Beyond Time” Technique
Step 1: The Point of Observation
Sit or stand and fix your gaze on a single point in front of you. Allow sounds, light, and everything happening in the body to simply occur — without evaluation, without analysis.
Silently say to yourself: “I am outside of time”.
Feel as if everything around you continues to flow, while you are a still point of observation. After 5–10 seconds, sense that all movement of the world is happening inside you rather than outside. Notice how the mind loses its usual reference point, and reality begins to open not as a stream, but as a field.
Step 2: The Circle of Eternity
Close your eyes and allow yourself to recall a moment from childhood when you were fully alive, fully present. What were the smells, colors, sounds?
Do not try to see it as the past; feel that it is happening right now. Say to yourself:
“I am not remembering — I am returning. I am reclaiming this moment”.
Now add a second moment — any moment in which you were completely in a state of love, inspiration, or deep Presence.
Imagine both moments enveloping you like two fires merging into a single circle. Feel that you remain inside this circle, unchanged — beyond age, beyond biography, beyond time.
This is the Memory of your Spirit. The you that has never disappeared or gone anywhere.
Notice how the energy of the past and the energy of the future fold into a single field, and the mind loses its linearity. You begin to feel yourself as an observer not from somewhere above, but from the center.
Step 3: Dissolving Linearity
Slowly inhale, recognizing: the inhale is a return.
On the exhale — release the flow of time.
(If the mind asks, “What comes next”? — do not answer).
Direct your attention simultaneously to two points: to the body (chest/back, fingers) and to the space around you.
With this kind of focus, the brain cannot maintain linearity, and time will begin to dissolve.
In this moment, a silence will begin to arise inside, from which an image, a sound, or a feeling may come. Do not try to look for meaning — simply listen and sense. This is the language of your Spirit.
Say out loud:
“I remember myself beyond time. That which I was, am, and will be already lives within me here and now”.
Feel how your entire past ceases to be a heavy burden and becomes a living fabric that moves and breathes through you.
Returning Yourself to the Flow
Now look at your life, right here and now. Not as a list of tasks, and not as dates on a calendar where days are crossed out, but as a River in which you are, were, and will be.
When time runs away, we do not lose time — we lose contact with ourselves, with that center from which the very sensation of life is born.
The acceleration of time is not related to age, and emptiness is not related to laziness or burnout. Forgotten days are not about being very busy. They are the process of one’s own life disappearing. When you work, do, build, hold on, and carry on — but inside you are not living, only moving by inertia. Someone else is flipping through those days for you.
And if you don’t stop, the ending is quite simple: you look back, and the years are gone. Not because someone took them from you, but because you disappeared from them.
But there is another reality. Time has not gone anywhere. Life has not gone anywhere. And we have not gone anywhere. We have simply lost connection and synchronization with the place inside where time is born — where the Spirit lives in all directions at once.
Where there is no yesterday and no tomorrow, but the density of the Present — your true Presence in life.
Research in psychology and anthropology shows that a sense of meaning increases the subjective length of time by almost 2.5 times. People who live from this Presence, from a state of flow, experience their lives as twice as long and far richer.
And restoring this contact — this Presence — is the most important thing. More important than money, goals, or status. Because there is one force without which everything loses meaning. And you may have felt this. It is connection with yourself.
When it returns, everything else returns as well: direction, clarity, strength and energy, and the inner “yes, I can”.
And most importantly — your own, real time returns.
TIME IS NOT WHAT PASSES.
IT IS WHAT WE FEEL
Photo by Galina Nelyubova
Translated by Maria Zayats
Read also:
Don’t search, but live: How to leave the waiting room of meaning and return to the body
Uncertainty: the choice between freedom and prison
Татьяна Ходакова
Практический психолог
Интегративный подход
