(… continued)
Here are a few more tips for a wakeful early morning meditation –
DON’T engage with the outside world before your morning meditation: if possible, don’t speak to anyone, consume any information, check any messages or look at the internet until your morning meditation is complete and assimilated. Engaging with the world only invites the world’s problems and distractions into us and entrenches our perceived tiredness.
DON’T meditate on or next to your bed. Having just emerged from it, our bed not only symbolises sleep, it still carries the vibrations of our sleep: its presence and proximity can exert a tidal pull, beckoning us to return to its enticing nest. The further we are away from our place of sleep, the better. Making our bed immediately after we get up is also a simple, symbolic act that reinforces the message to ourselves that we have cast off the sleep world and are now embracing the wakeful, alert, dynamic flow of our new day.
Last thing at night, write a list of inspiring reasons to start your next morning bright and early with meditation. Then read your list the moment you get up. You can even use the same list time and again.
Bookend your sleep with meditation. While meditating for a few minutes before you go to bed, consciously imagine your meditation continuing and expanding the next morning. Promise to your heart that you are taking a brief time-out, and will return to take up and continue where you have left off. Place an imaginary bookmark in your meditation, to “save” the place you have reached. Then when you awake, you will feel the pull of your previous night’s meditation, calling you to make good your promise and fulfil its unfinished course.
(to be continued…)