Start your day with a simple routine to
soothe your emotions, stave off stress, and help you create the life of your
dreams.
When your yoga teacher invites you to “set
an intention” for your practice at the beginning of class, it’s for a good
reason that extends beyond your yoga mat. Intentions can play an important role
in your life when you’re faced with difficulty, whether you’re struggling to
find ease in a pose or dealing with emotional turmoil.
Intention is essentially the capacity to
stay in touch with the core values that you wish to live by as you pursue your
life’s goals and engage with others. Being grounded in your intention literally
changes what you perceive in a situation and how your mind interprets what you
perceive; it also affects how you act on what you perceive. Knowing what is
essential to you allows you to respond to life’s ups and downs with a clear
mind and an open heart. Your intentions also support you in making choices and
decisions, help you endure anxiety and stress, and enable you to bear
disappointment and difficulty with equanimity.
Of course when difficulties arise, it’s
easy to get swept up in strong emotions and close awareness of your intentions.
You may do or say something that isn’t aligned with your intentions and regret
it later. So, just like learning new yoga pose take practice, developing
continual awareness of your intentions also requires practice.
There is one practice that you can start
straight away, with very little effort or investment of time, that can
immediately enhance your ability to live from your intentions. I call this
practice “staring your day with clarity.” If you try it for just 5 to 30
minutes after you wake up each morning, while you’re still lying in bed, you
can dramatically improve your sense of well-being and reduce the amount of
emotional chaos in your life. You may be skeptical and think this sounds too
simplistic, but if you give this practice a try, you’ll quickly discover that
the period of time just after waking up in the morning provides an incredibly
rich opportunity for developing new habits of mind.
Fresh start
Think about that moment when you first wake
up. You may not have even opened your eyes yet, but your mind is already busy
forming an attitude about how you feel and about the day ahead. What you mind
does right after waking strongly affects you throughout the day; it crates the
context for how you will perceive, interpret, and respond to all the things
that will happen to you.
Your mind is fresher, quicker, more
flexible, and less perturbed in those first moments after waking up than at any
other point in the day. Therefore, it’s the perfect time for orienting yourself
and grounding yourself in you intentions. You are less defined by your stories,
less consumed by the soap opera of your life, and not so trapped in you
persona. ( This is the reason that spiritual communities consider the early
morning hours to be ideal for prayer and meditation.)
Tune in
The practice of starting your day with
clarity begins with becoming mindful of what’s true in you body and your mind
when you awaken. So while you’re still lying in bed, notice if you feel rested
or if you’re still tired. Is your body tense or at ease? What parts of your
body are relaxed? Next, observer your mind and notice whether it is relaxed or
tense, quiet or busy. It is resting, planning, complaining, rehearsing, or
remembering a dream? Is it fuzzy or clear? Is it experiencing an emotion such
as excitement, dread, or fear? Now you know exactly what needs your attention.
The next step is you use your body as an
object of contemplation. Let’s say that on a particular morning you don’t feel
rested, or you feel rested, but parts of your body are tense; or, when you
think about your day, parts of your body tense up. All of these states are
common. But even if your body feels fine, taking a few moments to appreciate
the feeling can have a positive effect on your mind, and it can greatly enhance
your ability to stay relaxed in your body throughout your day.
In response to whatever you discover to be
true in your body, continue to lie in bed, and do a body scan. In a body scan,
you progressively tense and relax each part of your body as you imagine healing
energy moving through it. You can start at your head and move down your body,
or begin with your feet and move upward. Inviter your breath to move into those
places in your body where you feel tightness, pain, nor numbness. Not every
part of your body will completely relax in response to the body scan, but most
people report experiencing an increased sense of ease afterward.
If you have a high degree of emotional
turmoil in your life or a great deal of pressure at work and wake up tense
every morning, this progressive relaxation can help you release that tension
before beginning your day. This is turn makes your day much more bearable and
can even help you be more effective in dealing with challenges. When the body
feels relaxed, the mind tend to relax and become more able to absorb the shocks
that you encounter throughout the day.
If you are dealing with a physical and/or
emotional trauma that is either happening now or is a relic of your past, an
early morning body scan help you distinguish between the emotional disturbance
and the physical challenge, which oftentimes are conflated in your mind. This
discernment make it possible for you to soothe yourself and calm your mind.
Consequently you may find that your view of the trauma changes. Rather than
viewing it as fixed, you start to see your trauma as an even in the stream of
your life that is characterizing your experience at this moment but that does
not define you forever
