Your Timeline

Hi, let me introduce for you the idea, the concept of a timeline.

What is a timeline?

Well, it’s a bit like, but not quite the same as the kind of timelines you saw, like when you’re doing history in school or what have you, timelines of various events.

Well, your life has a timeline like that as well.

And what’s helpful to know and realise is that the way our mind encodes events in our lives is not dissimilar.

Not a lot is known about the way we encode our timelines and our memories, but we know enough to know that by understanding the concept and the idea of timeline more and the way in which we memorise and encode our memories helps us to unravel and go back to those events and see them, reframe them, if you will, look at them in a wholly different way.

And from there, you’re able to feel differently about it.

And it’s all to do with the emotion.

It’s not the event itself that happened.

It’s your interpretation of it or how your memory sometimes plays tricks with you on, even as time passes, embellishing and making it even more powerful than it has the rightful need to be.

And so by looking at the way memories work in a different way, that can help you to unravel and feel better about something.

So if you feel sad or if you feel angry or if you feel grieving or anything along those kind of negative, not so helpful lines, then this can help you.

So the first thing you need to do is to establish how your timeline works and to be able to help you to do that.

Just sit comfortably and quietly for a moment.

And I’m going to ask you a question.

Imagine that you do have a timeline and think of what you had for breakfast yesterday.

Whereabouts is it in your mind’s eye?

Everyone will be different here.

And in fact, one thing I should have said is it might be helpful if you have someone else around you at the time you do this and they can play along with you and try this with you as well.

So when you think about what you had for breakfast yesterday, imagine it as a kind of a blob, like a station stop at a London Underground or a tube station.

These different circles that represent stops, events in your life.

Where would you put breakfast yesterday?

Point to it and make a mental note or if somebody is with you, point to where it is.

Now this could be absolutely anywhere.

It could be in front of you.

It’s all very much third dimensional.

It could be in front of you.

It could be behind you.

It could be to your left.

It could be to your right.

It might be kind of wobbly.

It might even be inside you.

It could be your understanding and the way you sense this event happening.

Just imagine that again now.

It’s somewhere.

Where is that somewhere?

Where is it?

Next, think about what you’re going to be doing at breakfast time tomorrow.

Whereabouts is that?

Notice where that is.

It’s like it’s been a different place to the other one.

Think of the last holiday or break you took.

Whereabouts is that?

Think of your next holiday or break.

Where is that?

Just be aware now of these bubbles, these flags, whatever you visualise them to be.

These are where you position, psychometrically, if you like, your memories.

And not only your memories, of course, but where you see positions, points of the future being.

So think about something that happened a month or two ago.

Were there any events that happened?

So think about what time of year it is now.

Were there any celebrations or any birthdays or any other major holiday events that happened two or three months ago?

Or anywhere between, say, I don’t know, one month and six.

One month and six.

If you can think of both that are about that period of time.

So something that’s three or four weeks ago and something six months ago.

Think of that.

Think of something that might happen six months from now.

Where’s that?

Six months to a year.

If necessary, pause this film to get more of a feel and idea.

It might even help for you to actually write it down on a piece of paper.

But knowing, having that, once you’re aware of this, it’s very difficult to forget, isn’t it, where it is.

Can you think of your first day at school?

Doesn’t matter which school it is, primary school or secondary school, high school.

Go all the way back and notice where that might be on your timeline and how that relates to what you had for breakfast yesterday.

Where are these pinpoints?

Yeah.

Go back to an event, perhaps if it’s safe and you’re happy to do it, go back to when you were a child.

How old would you have been?

Think of a happy time when you were a child.

Go all the way back.

What does that bubble look like for you?

And think of other events in your life in terms of just trying to locate your timeline events and how you view it and those events in it.

Remember, it’s the feeling, not the actual factual events themselves, is what we’re going to be working on in the next video.

Perhaps on a piece of paper, just write down various other events, preferably happy or if they’re not so happy, middling ones, middling to low to low intensity ones.

Notice where they are.

You might want to jot those down just with a key word or a short sentence.

If you’re doing this with anyone, what you can do is compare notes, perhaps discuss with each other how you both view differently, view your timelines.

If you’re doing it by yourself, then that’s fine, too, because your timeline is unique to yourself.

That’s the end of the introductory video on timelines and getting an understanding and awareness of how the points at which you record events in time.

In the next video, I’m going to move on to showing you how you can help yourself to reframe and change the ways in which you view, you feel about events that have happened in the past using this timeline technique.

So I’ll see you in the next one.