A Mindful Morning: Start Each Day with a Clear Mind and Open Heart

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A Mindful Morning

Start each day with a clear mind and open heart

David Dillard-Wright, PhD

Avon, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2016 Simon and Schuster

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.

www.adamsmedia.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-9636-0

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9636-0

eISBN 10: 1-4405-9637-9

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9637-7

Library of Congress record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007749.

The information in this book should not be used for diagnosing or treating any health problem. Not all diet and exercise plans suit everyone. You should always consult a trained medical professional before starting a diet, taking any form of medication, or embarking on any fitness or weight-training program. The author and publisher disclaim any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of this book.

Cover design by Stephanie Hannus.

Cover images © 2004 Visual Language, iStockphoto.com/flas100, iStockphoto.com/beakraus, iStockphoto.com/CSA-Printstock, iStockphoto.com/katyau, iStockphoto.com/blueringmedia.

Interior images © 2004 Visual Language, Nongnuch Leelaphasuk/123RF, David Methven Schrader/123RF, iStockphoto.com/macrovector, iStockphoto.com/Alioshin, iStockphoto.com/tomograf, iStockphoto.com/flas100, iStockphoto.com/123dartist, iStockphoto.com/elyaka, iStockphoto.com/nicoolay, iStockphoto.com/daboost, iStockphoto.com/Zenina, iStockphoto.com/aleksandarvelasevic, iStockphoto.com/duncan1890, iStockphoto.com/Slanapotam, iStockphoto.com/Craig McCausland, iStockphoto.com/katyau.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

But I’m Not a Morning Person . . .

Mindfulness: More Than Meditation

Taking Refuge in the Present Moment

Hitting the Pause Button on Life

Stress Relief Through Contemplation

How to Use This Book

Find Calm in the Storm

Hear the Silence Around You

Embrace Change

Exercise Your Mind

Responding to Failure

Encourage Yourself to See the Divine Mother

Radiate Love and Peace

Move Beyond If Only

Dealing with Resentment and Anger

True Renunciation

What Are Your Real Needs?

Be Grateful for Spiritual Teachers

Unite the Outside and Inside

Peace As Practice

Contemplation and Action

Overcoming Victim Consciousness

Balance the Bitter and Sweet

Ignite Your Curiosity

Zoom Out

Equal Vision

Respect Your Emotional Awareness

Cherish Our Shared Destiny

Inbox, Outbox

Venture Into Uncomfortable Places

Defusing Resentment

Reunion with the Present

Taming Your Inner Dialogue

Let Go of Predictions

Expand Your Vision

Practice Refinement

Cultivate Inner and Outer Silence

Disarm Negative Emotions

Break Out of Your Routine

You Are Part of the Whole

Don’t Worry about Technique

Sync Body, Mind, and Environment

Cultivating Receptivity

Craving the Monastic Life

Orient Yourself with Your Center

Redirect Your Mind

Meditation on Death

Find the Love Within You

Push Past Limits

Reboot Your Mind

Spiritual Journaling

Permission Slip for Self-Care

Get to Know Your Motivations

Living in Line with Your Goals

Silence As Teacher

Slow Down to 2⁄3 Pace

Questioning Happiness

Recover Your Artistry

Respect Your Power

Love List

I Am You, You Are Me

Truly Experience Your Senses

Immerse Yourself in Your Surroundings

Quiet the Voice of Despair

Cherish Our Sacred Sun

Step Outside Yourself

Saying No

Examining Your Favorite Fix

Drawing Inspiration

Belonging to Others

Find Your Sacred Word

Lean Into the Moment

Abandon Complaints

Upright Posture, Sincere Intention

Try Chakra Yoga

You Are Not the Doer

Fine-Tuning Yourself

Stop Escaping

Undoing Negative Self-Talk

Don’t Be a Know-It-All

Delve Into Your Messy Places

Stop the Panic

Reject Labels with Not This, Not This

Cooperation and Commitment

Get Unstuck

Think Just in This Moment

Good Qualities

Simplify Your Life

Find Depth and Duration in the Present Moment

Take One Step Toward Goals

Care for Your Mind, Care for Others

When You Feel Uninspired

The Life of Your Dreams

Letting Go of Control

Working with Resistance

Move from Separation to Unity

Concentrate on the Task

Seek a Placid Disposition

Feelings of Goodwill

Pay Your Debt to the Earth

Swim in the Deep End

Increasing Awareness, Not Productivity

Countering Skeptical Doubts

Stopping Self-Torture

Look Around This Room

Try Not to Fix the World

Lengthen Your Interior Silence

Use Your Discomfort As a Guide

Smooth the Rough Edges

Truly See and Hear

Breathe In the Light

Connection and Thanskgiving

Everything Falling Into Place

Think of Life As Improvisation

The Heart As the Hearth of the Body

Trade Cynicism for Enthusiasm

Look for Solutions in Process

Waiting with Mindfulness

Release Tension

Don’t Get Taken by Your Own Thoughts

Get Out of the Boat and Swim

Do What Makes You Sane and Balanced

Miracle Addicts Anonymous

Mindfulness As Medicine

Build a Bridge to Your Dreams

Encouraging the Culture of Mindfulness

No Castigation, No Congratulation

Name the Awe-Inspiring Presence

Managing Anger

Retiring the Sad Stories We Tell Ourselves

Harness Your Natural Power

Transcending Limitations

Bringing Light

Dealing with Difficult People

Reuniting Scattered Consciousness

Stop Forcing Things

Work with Heart; Let Go of Reward

Follow Your Muse

Love Your Body

Reading a Transcript of Your Thoughts

You Do Not Face Your Troubles Alone

Embrace a Living Tradition

Value Relationships over Ideology

Aligning with Inner Purpose

Changing the Camera Angle

Taking What Comes

Find Guidance in Silence

Unplugging (At Least Some of the Time)

Walk Down the Path

Offer an Unguarded Heart

Look to Truth

Look for Your Gifts in Disguise

Life Is Defined by Change

Getting Beyond Surface Spirituality

Duty Can Be a Spiritual Calling

Contemplating Global Changes

Listen to Your Inner Guide

Love Yourself

Starting Over Again

Accept Risk

Welcome Slow, Subtle Shifts

You Have Everything You Need

Trust in the Universe to Provide

Avoid Beating Yourself Up

Think Like a Tree

The Branching Lines of Choice

Shedding Thought

Build Your Concentration Skills

Forget about Whether or Not It’s Working

Meet Your Subtle Body

Celebrate All Insights and Victories

Wear the Rich Garment of the Present

Being Mindful of Addictive Tendencies

Reflect on Your Ups and Downs

The Dark Parts of Your Life Can Offer Blessings

Using Mindfulness to Address Addiction

Revising Our Concepts of God

Find Inspiration in Dull and Dreary Times

Live Your Life Without an Escape Hatch

Be Kind to Your Mind

Open Spaces, Open Minds

Look Beyond Carrot and Stick

Appendix: For Further Reading

Per ardua

Introduction

In devotional Hinduism, the hours before dawn are thought to be among the most auspicious for meditation, as the veil between the divine and human worlds is the thinnest during these hours. The morning rituals serve as purification for the day to come, to set the mind on the right track. Taking a few moments in the morning to collect your thoughts and check in with your emotions can do wonders for your ability to manage and dismiss stress throughout the remainder of the day. The modern rituals of drinking coffee and reading the news also prepare the mind to face the challenges ahead, and these, too, can be met with mindfulness. Mindfulness, an intentional and steady embrace of the present moment, comes from within.

Few of us claim to be morning people, but perhaps we haven’t given ourselves permission to savor the early hours, to appreciate the light of a new sun. The reflections in A Mindful Morning come from a variety of world philosophies and religions, and they will help you start each day intentionally. These moments of centering will help take the sting out of the morning commute and pressing schedule by easing you calmly into your day. Over the course of this book, you will develop strong inner reserves that help you remain at peace despite the trials of our frantic society, so you can move throughout the day consciously and purposefully as your best and most authentic self.

You may think that you do not have time for mindfulness or meditation, but just think about how much time you spend reading random bits of news and Internet ephemera. Think about how much time you spend tweeting or going on Facebook, or playing Minecraft or Candy Crush. Think about the time that you spend sorting through mostly nonvital e-mail. Think about the stuff that you have to do: compiling reports for work, taking care of the kids, paying bills, buying groceries, doing the laundry: The list goes on and on. You deserve a break of a few minutes, several times a day, to collect yourself and put your mind in a calmer state. You deserve a break from the constant stream of noise and information.

I wrote this book thinking that you, dear reader, have lots of competing priorities—that you do not, in fact, live in a hermitage on top of a mountain. I imagine you sneaking a few minutes here and there to center yourself. I imagine you setting down your cell phone and finding that comfortable chair or reading nook. I see you lighting a stick of incense for a brief time of sacred silence. I see you at your desk or cubicle grabbing a minute or two to take some deep breaths and engage in thoughtful reading. Know that, wherever you are, you stand at the center of the struggle of the ages learning how to live a peaceful life in the midst of the hectic world. May you find a welcome respite in these pages.

But I’m Not a Morning Person . . .

Most of us think of morning as time to be endured or rushed through quickly. We try to be as highly caffeinated as possible, to drop off the kids, to make the commute, and maybe catch the weather and the news along the way. Very few among us would confess to being a morning person, which sounds like a sort of mythical beast, the unicorn of the twenty-first century. It’s not very cool to be a morning person. Confess to loving to wake up in the morning around the coffee pot at work and prepare yourself for scowls and murmurs. We think of morning people as Pollyanna types who whistle Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah on the way down the front walk, past the picket fence and the rose bushes, which, of course, they stop to smell. Get real. Who has time for that? Crack open a can of Red Bull and get in the f*#king car!

And so the day begins, with an aggressive cast of mind, with a heavy foot on the accelerator. When the morning hours are full of stress and anxiety, the rest of the day follows in that pattern. No wonder we seek to escape through entertainment. No wonder we medicate through junk food, prescriptions, and booze. But I’m not here to preach or moralize. Rather, let’s seek to understand the true nature of the problem and move beyond it.

We should probably start with sleep. According to A. Roger Ekirch’s fascinating history At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, staying up late at night didn’t become very practical until the advent of electric lighting. All of those candles and oil lamps were expensive and apt to catch fire, so people generally went to bed much earlier. People in preindustrial societies largely slept in two sessions with a break in between. It was quite common to rise in the night and spend some time in quiet reflection, perhaps reading a book, saying prayers, or engaging in more (ahem!) carnal activity. Going to bed and rising were timed with the sun, which meant more sleep in winter and less sleep in summer. The watches of the night, those nocturnal waking hours, were like bonus free time. But night held more terrors like the fear of burglary or fire, which were both more common before streetlights. With electricity, we came untethered from the sun and could arrange our time accordingly. For many of us, this is simply convenient and has little downside. For others, like medical professionals and factory workers on the night shift, working at night means permanent disruption of sleep, with many mental and physical health side effects.

These days, we tend to sleep in one big block, rather than two smaller ones, but the size of the block gets smaller as the years go by. With our electronic devices and overabundance of entertainment, we sleep less. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classifies insufficient sleep as a public health problem, with the lack of sleep interfering with work, hobbies, and basic safety on a massive scale. In 2005–2007, thirty percent of adults reported getting six hours or less sleep per night, a level of sleep deficit associated with higher levels of chronic disease and even increased mortality. In daily life, not getting enough sleep reduces concentration and memory, which means that nearly every task becomes more difficult. So perhaps the exercises in this book should begin with trying to get more sleep. Completing these little meditations probably requires going to bed a little bit earlier and rising a little bit earlier. We’re not talking hours here: You can start with five to ten minutes, probably less time than you spend in the shower each morning.

We shouldn’t idealize the morning, but we also shouldn’t discount it. It is never easy to awake from sleep, and yet those early hours do have an impact on the day. We measure our lives in years, in days, in hours, in minutes, and to dismiss part of the day is to look a gift horse in the mouth. So maybe you won’t immediately become a morning person, whatever that means, but you might learn to get a little more out of the early hours. Not for reasons of productivity per se, but to just enjoy life a little more, to find more satisfaction in the daily grind. If you think of the mornings as times for yourself, rather than for the proverbial man, you might be inclined to get out of bed more nimbly.

Mindfulness: More Than Meditation

The trouble with the word meditation is that it implies, for many people, an activity that is conducted separately from the rest of everyday life. Meditation implies an idyllic setting, perhaps a monastic vocation, and usually a religious frame of mind. There is certainly nothing wrong with tradition, religion, or monasticism, and people who come from ancient traditions certainly have a lot of guidance to offer to lay practitioners. The trouble with viewing meditation as separate from daily life is that it implies a dualism between spiritual life and everyday life. It builds a wall of separation between the sacred and the profane. The goal of meditation should be to look upon every act as sacred, to see every moment as holy, and to view each person, place, and thing as a manifestation of the divine.

One of my own teachers, Shree Maa of Kamakhya, Assam, is a lifelong devotee of the great Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna. She tells a story that helps us remember the sacred in the midst of everyday life. When Shree Maa was a little girl, she had a large share of the household responsibilities like cooking and cleaning.