Having (deep) Me Time

Written By Mila Khyentse

Mila Khyentse is a French teacher of Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen and the Dzogchen Today! project initiator.

Blog | What about me?

It is essential to have “me time” quite often. In this article, Mila Khyentse tells us how we can reconnect with ourselves, Dzogchen style…
We talk a lot about taking time for ourselves, the famous “Me Time”, and generally we don’t manage it very well. We say to ourselves: “ah, I’m finally going to be able to take some time for myself: I’m going to take this chance to go for a drink or go shopping with my friends”. But is it really taking time for yourself if you are always with people?

In the Dzogchen, taking time for oneself is really taking some time for oneself: that is to say to find oneself all alone “with oneself” and to take advantage of these moments of calm to concentrate a little more on what we are more deeply.

Each time we do this, we discover a little more about ourselves and our functioning and it is extremely satisfying because we know ourselves better and better. When we are interacting, always exchanging, we don’t have the space or the time to look back at ourselves and really observe what is there.

Even with your smartphone, that’s not taking time for yourself. It’s taking time with your smartphone and interacting in one way or another: checking your emails, reading the news feed of your favorite social network, or consulting the instant messenger of your favorite personal group, etc. All this is not oneself…

Ten minutes a day to realize perhaps what is most important to me… maybe that’s not too much to pay for?

Never taking the time to be alone with myself, I don’t really know who I am: I know that I have thoughts, emotions, pleasant and unpleasant feelings… but deep down, I really don’t know much about how I really function, all alone, without interaction.

So I decided to take at least ten minutes a day to be alone and focus on myself and try to observe, directly, what is going on in my mind at the moment; to look at what is agitated or on the contrary what is deeply calm. What do I really love or hate, in this moment, in this (deep) Me Time? This is what I have decided to do. Ten minutes a day to realize perhaps what is most important to me… maybe that’s not too much to pay for?

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