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ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

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Hello hello, it's Brooke Devard from Naked Beauty. Join me each week for unfiltered discussion about beauty, trend, self care, journeys, wellness tips, and the products we absolutely love and cannot get enough of. If you are a skincare obsessive and you spend 20 plus minutes on your skincare routine, this podcast is for you. Or if you're a newbie at the beginning of your skincare journey, you'll love this podcast as well. Because we go so much deeper than beauty, I talk to incredible and inspiring people from across industries about their relationship with beauty. You'll also hear from skincare experts. We break down lots of myths in the beauty industry. If this sounds like your thing, search for naked Beauty on your podcast app and listen along. I hope you'll join us.

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ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com the Neurodivergent Experience podcast presents Mindful Mondays. I'm your host, Ashley Bentley, and this is your invitation to pause, breathe, and begin your week with presence and purpose. Here we flip the script on Mondays. Instead of starting your week with dread or overwhelm or the weight of all that's expected of you, we create a moment to reclaim your attention, to return to yourself before you return to the world. Each week we explore something rooted in psychology, neuroscience or spiritual practice, but in a way that's actually digestible and usable for your very real, very human, and very uniquely wired beautiful, neurodivergent brain. And after we explore these concepts and ideas together, we'll ground them with a guided meditation so you don't just think about presence, you feel it. And today we are looking at time not as an enemy to fight, but as a misunderstood dance partner. We can learn to move with a partner that becomes easier to dance with when we shift how we relate to it. Time can feel a bit like a bully when you're neurodivergent. Too fast, too slow, never enough, or always too much and we might experience time blindness, where an hour passes in what feels like five minutes, or where a task that takes five minutes feels so overwhelming that we avoid it for days. And there's also the time dread. The Sundays filled with anxiety, the ticking countdown to a deadline, the blurry transitions between tasks. And for those of us with adhd, autism, or sensory processing differences, time can feel more like a threat than a resource. But what if time isn't out to get us? What if it's not a whip cracking taskmaster or a finish line that we're always too late for? What if time is just a rhythm, a beat, a current we can learn to flow with? Time is not the enemy. It is a misunderstood dance partner. It's not about controlling time, it's about befriending it. Now, we can't stretch time, but we can stretch our experience inside of it. Because when we are present, time stops shrinking. And when we are regulated, we stop rushing. And this presence allows us to meet each moment with clarity rather than urgency. Okay, so how do we begin to do that? We begin by pausing, noticing, allowing. We begin by changing the relationship, not the clock. And let's talk about time inside the body for a moment. Because we don't just experience time on a clock. We are clocks. Every day, your body goes through a kind of internal rhythm regulated by your circadian biology and your brain chemistry. In the earlier part of the day, say from morning through to early afternoon, you're working with higher levels of dopamine and cortisol. And I know cortisol gets a bit of a bad reputation, but let's reframe it here. Cortisol isn't the enemy. When it's released in the right amount at the right time, like in the morning, it's exactly what we need. It's what gets you up and moving and focused and what helps release that healthy morning cortisol light, getting outside, being present with nature, letting sunlight hit your eyes. Obviously not directly looking at the sun if it's high in the sky, but ensuring sunglasses are off and sunlight is naturally getting through. Even a few minutes of morning brightness can activate your natural wake up systems. And this is the time of the day when your brain is best wired for linear thinking, numbers, logic, facts and planning. If that's part of your day, this is the window for it. And then as your day moves forward, your internal chemistry shifts and serotonin begins to play a larger role. So late afternoon through to early evening is when your brain becomes more tuned for creativity, connection, reflection, and even play. So if you can let yourself design your day around your actual brain rhythm, use your dopamine rich mornings for structured focus and use Your serotonin rich afternoons for imagination and flow. And we'll be talking more about burnout and cortisol in future episodes. But for now, just know that getting that cortisol release early in the day via light helps prevent the dreaded wired but tired feeling later. Because if cortisol doesn't come in the morning, it will show up later in the day, making it difficult to switch off at night. And that's when you find yourself wide awake at midnight with a buzzing brain and a tired body. So again, presence isn't just spiritual, it's biological. And when we start listening to our body's rhythm, we find that time isn't just something we manage, it's something we collaborate with. And let's take a moment to talk about rushing, shall we? Because sometimes we're in a rush for a genuine reason. An appointment, a deadline, a real need. But a lot of the time, we're rushing, even when we don't need to be. Does this sound like you? We find ourselves speeding through small tasks and snapping at interruptions and moving as though everything is urgent, even when it's not. And if that's something you relate to, it might be because you have what's called a hurry up driver running the show. Now, I'll be explaining this driver in more detail in a future episode when we dive into the drivers of our behavior. But for now, just know this. That inner voice, the one constantly urging you to go faster, do more, keep up. It's not always helping you. In fact, the hurry up driver is kind of a con artist. It pretends to be productive, but what actually does is keep you in a low level state of panic, wired, scattered and very, very far from the present moment. And here's the thing. When we rush, we don't actually save time. We often make mistakes we wouldn't have made if we had just slowed down a little. We forget things, we lose things, we misread the moment. Rushing rarely helps, but being present, that almost always does. So today, see if you can notice that voice that says hurry up. And instead, gently whisper back, I'm allowed to go at my pace. Okay, so how about a little chunk of bite sized Buddhism? This is where we take ancient Buddhist wisdom and distill it into something easy to digest, simple to remember, and deeply useful. Because sometimes the simplest teachings are the ones we need the most. And today's teaching is the eternal moment. In Buddhism, there's a reminder that the past is memory and the future is imagination. All that ever really is is this moment now this doesn't mean we forget our past or ignore our plans. It just means we don't live from them. The eternal moment is not about ignoring reality. Far from it. This very moment is reality. It's about meeting the present moment without time traveling. When we enter the eternal now, we meet life more directly. We stop worrying for a future self or replaying the judgments of a past one. In the eternal now, things aren't rushed, they just are. We slow down enough to witness the aliveness of this moment. The breath, the body, the thoughts passing through. If we can meet just one moment in full presence, we often find it's not empty, it's rich. Rich with choice, rich with sensation, rich with meaning. The eternal moment invites us to drop the fight with time and just land right here. And what you'll discover is that presence doesn't require peace. It creates it. Okay, now, is everyone ready to microdose some meaning into their life? Microdosing meaning is where we explore how to find more meaning in our lives. Not by overhauling everything, but by noticing the little things that already matter. Because when life feels big, heavy, or overwhelming, it's usually not more information we need, it's more meaning. Meaning gives us a why, a thread, a sense of direction that doesn't rely on hustle or perfection. And sometimes meaning lives in the very places we overlook. Here's a real world example. Let's say you make tea every morning. You fill the kettle, wait for the boil, pour the water, and watch the steam. What happens when you shift your attention into this moment, noticing the textures, the sounds, the ritual of it all? Suddenly, your morning cup becomes a ceremony, a tether to your day, a rhythm you can count on. And this is such a beautiful way to microdose meaning. You take an ordinary moment and saturate it with presence. Another example. Maybe you pick up your child from school. And it's usually a rush. But one day, you decide to arrive five minutes early, and you just sit and breathe and watch the sky and feel the pause. That pause becomes sacred, not because it was planned, but because you were in it. And one of my favorite ways to microdose meaning is when I wash the dishes each morning. Each morning, I create a ceremony to welcome my day. I clear off the draining board and clean it fully, even if it doesn't need is my metaphor for starting each day with a clean slate. And as I wash the dishes, I engage with the bubbles and the curvature and design of each dish. I express deep gratitude for having hot water on my command and relish in watching it cleanse each and every dish, glass, piece of cutlery, I am fully present and in deep reverence for all that this moment represents. This practice was inspired by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who once wrote, if while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if it were a nuisance, then we are not washing the dishes to wash the dishes. What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. The fact that I am standing there and washing is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. And that one line really struck me when I first read it. If you are doing the dishes to be done with them, then you are not truly doing the dishes. And that applies to so much of life, doesn't it? Treat these little moments in our life, especially the ones you may not usually enjoy, as the most divine ceremony. We are able to choose the context of everything in our life. What daily task do you dread that you could turn into the most divine moment of your day this week? Can you ask yourself, where do I already have rhythms that could become rituals? What small act could I approach? Like it matters. The neurodivergent brain often craves depth and novelty and personal connection. And presence is the doorway to all three. Meaning doesn't come from doing more, it comes from noticing more. So if time isn't the enemy, what is it? It's a space, a rhythm, a canvas, a presence, partner. And you don't need to dominate it, you just need to dance with it. And let's take the next few minutes to do just that. Let's practice unfolding into time. Now, if you are driving or operating heavy machinery, please pause the recording until you can safely come back into stillness. And now, let the noise of the day begin to fall away. Let the edges of your day soften. Let the to do lists blur. Let the clocks melt into mist. You are not behind, you are not running out. You are not late for your own life. Just let that settle, let that land. And wherever you are, whether lying down or sitting, allow your eyes to gently close and invite yourself to arrive and feel the pull of the earth beneath you like a slow breath from below. Let your shoulders drop, let your jaw loosen, and let the breath find you just as it is. This is a sacred pause, a Breath shaped doorway. A moment made not for rushing, but for remembering. Remembering that you were never meant to to chase time. You were meant to dance with it. Now just imagine. Only imagine. Now begin to sense a wide open space unfolding before you. A grand ballroom, but not the kind with chandeliers or marble floors. This one is soft, timeless, boundless. The air is golden and slow moving. And the floor beneath you breathes. It hums. This is the ballroom of time. And time itself is here. Not as a ticking clock or a looming deadline, but as a presence. Time is not watching you. It's not judging you. It's waiting. And it extends a hand. Not to push you or pull you, but to invite you. To invite you, to move, to sway, to explore the rhythm of your life from inside your own body. Can you sense it, that invitation? You've spent so much of your life being pulled forward by alarm clocks and schedules and expectations. But now you get to move at the pace of truth and feel your breath now as a dancer, breathing in expansion and breathing out surrender. Your breath is your first partner, your oldest rhythm. Always moving, always returning. Bringing your awareness now to your heartbeat, that steady drum inside of you. And imagine that every beat, it is a footfall on the dance floor of this moment. You are not walking through time, you are composing it. And time, your partner, begins to mirror you. Not demanding you hurry, but moving in step with your breath. There is no choreography here, only intuition. Only trust. This is the rhythm your nervous system remembers. Before pressure, before performance, before perfectionism. Just breath and beat and being. Now picture time not as a line, but as a river. And you are floating, not being swept. You are buoyant, not lost. And you drift past hours, not like numbers, but like landscapes. A morning of clear light. An afternoon of amber gold. An evening of gentle hush. You are not late. You are exactly where the current has brought you. You let go of calendars and countdowns and you feel what it is to be held by time, not pursued by it. And in this letting go, a new kind of awareness blooms. Presence that doesn't demand awareness that doesn't fix. And stillness that doesn't shame. Let yourself float. Let the current carry what you no longer need. The rush, the guilt. The inner whisper that says you're not doing enough. It's all silt in the water now, falling away. And you remain floating, present, free. Good. That's right. And can you now imagine stepping onto a soft landscape? Bare feet on the grass. And the air smells like memory. And around you is the garden of your life. But it's not fixed in time. It shifts and sways like weather. And you begin to notice there are seasons within you. Moments of spring, fresh ideas, new beginnings. Moments of summer, bold energy, wide open days. Moments of autumn, letting go, making space. And moments of winter, deep rest, stillness, sacred pause. None of them are wrong. None of them need to be changed. What season are you in now? Feel it not with the mind, but with the body. Where do you feel that season's energy resting in your chest, in your belly, in your breath. In this dance with time, there is no pressure to bloom, no shame in resting, no punishment for pausing. You are allowed and invited to match the season within. Even if the world wants you in summer, but your soul needs winter. Let your rhythms be your guide. Let your gentleness be your pace. And let your truth be your tempo. And now, dear friends, time has not passed. It has moved through you. You are still in the ballroom, still in the river, still in the garden as these images begin to fade. Not because they've ended, but because they want to follow you and feel the floor beneath you. Now notice the world returning and wiggle your fingers and toes, but keep the rhythm. Carry it in your breath, in your spine, in your step. You do not have to rush back into time. You can bring this rhythm with you so that every dish you wash, every breath you take and every step you make feels like part of the same dance. Because it is. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not failing at time. You are moving with it. And that is enough. Thank you so much for spending your mindful Monday with me. Remember, your nervous system doesn't need you to be on time. It needs you to feel safe in time. Come back next week where we'll explore letting go of the shoulds and how internal pressure often blocks our peace. Until then, start soft and stay steady. Only Boost Mobile.