5am Meditation Day 20- Living in the present moment

"My mind never grew still but Rick assured me that the goal of meditation was less to quiet the mind than to witness its ceaseless activity, using what Swami Kripalu called 'self-observation without judgment.'"

-from "Meditation and Me" by Danna Faulds, Kripalu Compass Feb 2012

It was reassuring to read Danna's words above. I have been struggling with trying to quiet my mind instead of just simply observing it. Hearing from another meditator that I can just observe my thoughts takes some of the pressure off. Hopefully over time my mind will race less and less during meditation. I am also looking forward to meditation without the need to blog about it, because during meditation I often think about the blog and what I will write about late on. I was thinking that today's blog post would be about BEING IN THE NOW and LIVING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, but while I was struggling to come across the perfect Dalai Lama or Buddha quotation that would sum up my thoughts precisely, I instead found Danna's article above and gravitated toward her words. She described her journey to becoming a daily meditator and expressed how it wasn't easy. I am definitely feeling the not-easy part of it. I am still struggling to commit to 20 minutes per day, so an hour a day seems unimaginable right now, yet remains an obtainable goal reading about others' journeys to get there. Whatever your goals are, focus on the journey, not just the destination.

5am Meditation Day 19 - Giving up Technology and Social Media

No, I'm not giving up technology and social media! I wouldn't be able to do my job or take my graduate course. But, I just read an article about a student who did just that. And he did it for 90 days. Check it out!

5am Meditation Day 15- inspirations

From a variety of sources...

Peace. It does not mean to be an a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

Prayer is when you talk to God; meditation is when you listen to God.

Meditation is listening to the Divine within.

Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It's a way of entering into the quiet that's already there—buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.

Take the time to come home to yourself every day.

Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth.


Never lose sight of this important truth, that no one can be truly great until he has gained a knowledge of himself, a knowledge which can only be acquired by occasional retirement.

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmoorr/1922485388/

5am meditation Day 14- ocean breath

Last friday I blogged about my meditation practice and how I needed to focus on my breath to bring myself back to a place of calm and to quiet my mind. Today I discovered that doing my "yoga breathing" helped me bring my attention back to my breath whenever my mind wandered.

I have gone to several yoga retreats in the past, and for some reason, when I sat down to meditate earlier today, I was reminded of ujjayi, or "ocean breath" from yoga. I think it was the sound of the breath itself that kept my mind more quiet than usual. I found this to be a very effective technique for getting more out of my meditation session. I was able to sit still longer. I'm not sure whether I drifted off to sleep, but I may have, because I felt so relaxed and the time sure seemed to fly by today! I didn't seem to be as aware of myself in the physical sense as usual. Perhaps I did fall asleep! If I can fall asleep on the massage table, I am sure I can fall asleep during meditation!

image from: flikr

Wanderlust coming to Vermont

From the Wanderlust website (http://wanderlustfestival.com/):

"Wanderlust is a one-of-a-kind festival bringing together the world's leading yoga teachers, top musical acts and DJs, renowned speakers, top chefs and winemakers, and much, much more -- all in a setting of breathtaking natural beauty. We're talking about fun in the sun and dancing under the stars. Hiking on peaceful trails and gettin'your down dog on at the top of the mountain. Sipping poolside cocktails with your friends, and then enjoying a tasty farm-to-table dinner with views of the surrounding mountain peaks. Early morning meditations and all-night chakra spinning musical performances -- it's an all-out ecstatic celebration in the most awe-inspiring locations in the world.

So what's a day like at Wanderlust? Wake up to crisp mountain air and morning sunshine in your mountainside condo, throw a couple of items in your daypack, and join dozens of fellow attendees for one of Wanderlust's signature morning meditation hikes. If you have kids with you, no problem -- drop your children off at the Wanderkind kids' program before you head out. After your hike, cruise for some handcrafted goodness in the vendor village, grab a quick snack from one of our local & organic food vendors, and then hop into yoga class with one of your favorite teachers in a stunning outdoor classroom. After class, reward yourself with a delicious meal from one of our on-site restaurants. Have a seat in our outdoor food co-op, grab a cup of tea in our tea house, and stroll over to our Speakeasy venue, where you can listen to a fascinating lecture by one of our many speakers. In the afternoon, you might check out some of the live music at our Casbah stage, rock an afternoon yoga class, go kayaking down the local river, hit the trails with your mountain bike, or ride the free cable car up to the top of the mountain to kick it poolside with your crew.
As the sun sets, head over to Winederlust and sample a variety of biodynamic and organic wines from local vineyard, then take your appetite up the mountain to the Farm to Table Dinner. After dinner, you could sit back and enjoy a film at the Soulful Cinema, walk around the festival grounds to check out the eclectic art installations, or get your dance on at the Wanderlust main stage. And if you're still looking for more, Wanderlust's late night DJ dance parties go until 2 am. Eventually, you'll fall into your comfy bed -- but the best part is that another adventure awaits in the morning.

Whatever you do, the choice is all yours. That's Wanderlust. "

Yoga and Music schedules will be posted January 24th

5am Meditation Day 9- Kripalu's January Healthy Living "Time for Self Care"

This morning as I was meditating, I listened to my mind wander from one subject to the next. I was aware of my thoughts and kept trying to come back to the present and ground myself in the NOW. However, my mind kept wandering. After my meditation I came across Kripalu's January healthy living e-newsletter, and it included an article about meditation (pasted below). It reminded me to focus on my breath. Whenever my mind wanders, I need to bring it back to my breath. I had forgotten to use this technique, so the timing was perfect. I will try to remember this tomorrow when I start mentally planning my day instead of calming my racing thoughts. I have been considering recording myself saying "Breathing in, I am aware that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I am aware that I am breathing out" repeatedly, or something along those lines (Thich Nhat Hanh has some great books on this subject), so that I can have a soundtrack for my meditation that will help me focus on my breath until it becomes second nature.

yoga practice going within to let go

By Janna Delgado, Yoga Teacher and Personal Trainer

Anxious? Tense? Worried? Try meditation. This simple tool for self-care can be done anywhere and anytime to de-stress, and with practice, you can reboot and find inner calm in just a few minutes. A main component of any meditation practice is focusing your attention. By creating a single point of focus, such as the breath, the multitude of distractions that overload your mind and cause stress can be cleared away. Meditation allows your mind to settle and your body to relax, creating a balanced state that benefits overall health and well-being.

Ready to try it? Find a quiet place to practice where you are free of distractions. Get comfortable, whether you’re sitting, lying down, or walking. Begin to breathe deeply through your nostrils, taking slow and even breaths. Focus all of your attention on the flow of your breath. Bring your awareness to the feelings, sensations, and sounds that occur as you inhale and exhale. Continue to breathe deeply and slowly. When your attention wanders, gently return your focus to your breath. Remember, meditation takes practice, so be kind to yourself. It’s natural for your attention to wander. When this happens, simply refocus your awareness on your breath.

http://www.kripalu.org/KripaluOnline/hlenews.html

Happy meditating!

5am Meditation Day 9- guilty or proud?

I am trying to decide whether to feel guilty or proud of myself that I turned off my 5am alarm YET AGAIN, but I did choose to meditate at 8am when I first got to work to start my day off right, and I even did it for a new increased total of 20 minutes. I am also trying to decide whether I should feel guilty or proud that about halfway through my meditation session I chose not to sit but rather decided to lie down instead. I am so not used to meditating to the point where the back pain becomes distracting and takes over my mind.

I noticed that the first several minutes in my brain are all about the physical sensations- I'm cold, my butt hurts, this floor's too hard, where's my pillow, my pants are too tight for meditation and I should be wearing loose comfortable (elastic waistband!) pants, my back hurts, and so on. Then my mind started to drift towards all those other busy thoughts about my day, but this time, perhaps knowing that I had a full 20 minutes and could get to the point of calming my mind, I sort of stepped outside of myself and just observed the thoughts. I tried not to get mad or frustrated that the thoughts were there. After all, we can't really control our thoughts; they just appear. I tried to be that mountain observing the thoughts as clouds floating by, but instead, it was more like I was the cloud, and I was floating by my physical self, observing myself, and observing the thoughts in my head. Then, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that this is how I spend my meditation session, but I went into an almost dreamlike state that played like a movie in my head as I imagined where I would hang the hooks on my living room ceiling if I decided to install chair hammocks. I know, crazy! When my mind shifted to another thought, it was almost like waking up too early from a good dream, and I struggled to remember what I had been so excited to think about, and then I went back to trying to figure out where the beams in my ceiling would be, and whether I still have that stud finder...

Should I feel guilty about my stud-finding thoughts?

5am Meditation Day 8- a racing mind

First of all, I tried meditating at work today in the middle of the day to see how it would impact the rest of my afternoon (or, at least that's what I tell myself so I don't feel guilty that I turned off my 5am alarm to wake up up 6am instead!), so this blog entry should be my 1:30pm meditation, not my 5am meditation.

I think it's time for me to increase the amount of time that I meditate, because its feels like from the moment I sit down until the moment my alarm rings to tell me my time is up, my mind races. It races from what I will write my next blog post about (perhaps it was not a great idea to start meditating and start blogging at the same time), to my to-do lists, to my New Year's resolutions, to how much my upper back aches, to my next lesson plan, to how I plan to fit exercise into my daily routine that particular afternoon. I feel like I am not sitting there quite long enough, so I don't get to the point of calming my mind. It feels very choppy, so perhaps increasing my time will both help me get used to meditating and give me enough time to quiet my mind to truly reap the benefits of a daily meditation practice.

One thing that my racing mind did reward me with was the reminder of the metta practice I have been building with my daughter. Metta meditation is also known as lovingkindness. Years ago I came across an article written by a father about how he meditates nightly with his sons. I was so inspired by his story that I decided to try the same with my daughter. I looked up the story again for this blog article, and while it's in a different place, it's still the same story. We start by sending love and kindness and positive thoughts and energy to ourselves, then to our immediate family and friends, aunts and uncles and cousins, then teachers and others we encounter during the day, then it usually gets sent off to animals and trees and mountains and even the dolls in the room.

Metta website

Metta with Children

Seeding the Heart, the father's story

LovingKindness Meditation to do with Children at Night

What I am going to take away from today's racing mind is that I want to make a stronger commitment to both my own daily 5AM practice as well as my nightly metta practice with my daughter.

Dalia Lama's January 16th Tweet

The key to human happiness lies within our own state of mind, and so too do the primary obstacles to that happiness.

5am Meditation Days 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 - Challenges

I have two challenges facing me- meditating and remembering to blog about my meditating. I have had several different experiences over the last several days ranging from meditating at 5am, not being able to meditate until 9pm, and completely forgetting to meditate period. What incredibly insightful knowledge did I gain from these experiences? I truly believe that it does take 90 days for a behavior to become ingrained in your being as habit. So when I go away for the long weekend (after only 3 days or meditation), it doesn't occur to me to remember to pack a yoga mat or prayer rug or meditation cushion yet, and I don't remember (or necessarily feel the need) to set my alarm for 5am. I think after taking the challenge on for 90 days, I will feel the benefit to the point that I want to meditate, and I crave to meditate, as if it's in my blood. And I will feel empty or stressed and anxious or somehow different on the days that I don't get a chance to meditate, making me feel that I have to do it as a part of my daily routine and self-care. That';s my goal at least. Clearly not there yet.

Another one of my goals is to be meditating enough that I have thoughts worth sharing through a blog, that I learn from my experiences so that I can pass on my knowledge and share in the process. I have been reading about meditation since my last blog post, and I have discovered another blogger who took on the challenge of daily meditation practice. She said meditating was like taking a shower for her mind every day. She also had some insightful comments about the thoughts that come up during meditation- that there tends to be about 7 recurring thoughts that you slowly become aware of over time. When these thoughts appear for me, I try to sit quietly and listen to my thoughts, just watch them floating by me like clouds and not get upset that the thoughts appear and feel that I am somehow failing at meditation. But what this blogger said that I found really interesting was that she talked about using the meditation practice to retrain her mind, to change negative thoughts or worries into positive thoughts or hopes. I am truly hopeful that after continuing my journey, I will have similar useful nuggets of information or inspirational comments to pass along to you, my readers and faithful followers.

5am Meditation Day 2- Better Late than Never

5am??? Not so much. Try 9pm. As guilty as I felt at 5am when I turned my alarm off, I have forgiven myself already. Even though it wasn't at 5am as I had hoped it would be, at least I meditated today. Better late than never. My goal was to meditate at 5am everyday, and I think the most important part of that goal is the meditation part, not the 5am part.

We all have to learn how to forgive ourselves, and how to find a balance in life. While I had all intentions of waking at 5am for 90 days straight, sometimes we get sick, and sometimes we stay up late, and sometimes we stay up until 1am doing homework AND get a stomach bug, as was my case yesterday. We can't help these things, so we have to learn how to have balance and take care of ourselves. I set my alarm for 5am just in case, but I had a feeling it wouldn't happen. And I'm OK with it. I knew that my sleep was more important today and that I would fit my meditation in eventually.

I am learning two things- how to simplify and how to let go. There are some things in life that we just can't control, and we have to learn to be OK with that. I often find myself with a plan that has a hiccup, and I am trying to learn how to let go of my plan, accept that it is what it is, and be able to move on instead of holding on to what I thought it would be. Today was a step in the right direction. It was what it was, and I am OK with it. But I'm still planning on waking up at 5am for the next 88 days :)

5am Meditation Day 1- Clouds floating by

So, shocker of all shockers... I did it!!! This is a very exciting day for me. I actually woke up at 5am as I had intended and did not hit snooze or set an another alarm for a later time. I actually woke up when my alarm went off and headed straight for my "sanctuary," a little alcove in my living room, where I sat on a cushion on a prayer rug with a shawl draped around me. It was the ideal setting, a nice cozy comforting atmosphere.

Now, I had planned to sit there until 5:15, and I had set an alarm so I would know when my time was up without constantly having to interrupt my serenity by checking my phone for how long it had been already, but I thought maybe something was wrong with my alarm. I mean, it MUST be 5:15 ALREADY, I thought to myself. Surely I set the alarm for 5:15pm by mistake... right? I'll sit for for a couple more minutes. Time always goes slowly on this cushion for me... But it must be 5:15 already, or at least close to it. I just had to look and double-check. If I had sat there and waited until the alarm went off, I could have been there forever. It could be 5:30 already for all I know! What if the alarm really is messed up... how long will I sit here before checking. Now was as good a time as any. How relaxing is this meditation anyway if I can't stop thinking about at which point I will stop to check the time...

It was 5:12. Oh well. 12 minutes isn't too bad for my first day. Of course, I don't know how fulfilling it actually was for my spirituality when I sat there most of the time thinking about whether it was 5:15 already and what I would write for my blog! Be a mountain, I said to myself. You are a mountain, and all of these thoughts are just clouds floating by you. Still your mind. Quiet your mind. I tried to imagine myself standing tall, calm and still, like a mountain, with all my busy, crazy thoughts simply drifting along. This is good- I'll have to add this to my blog later!!!

Oh, well. It's only Day 1, what can you expect!?! At least I actually woke up at 5.

Decision Day 1

I've chosen my first new healthy habit to add to my life- a daily meditation. I have been meaning to do this forever. I know it will help me in the long run, but I haven't quite been able to muster up the motivation to rise at 5am daily YET. Now that I am going to be held accountable by my blog, I will commit to waking up at 5am every day for 90 days. After 90 days, I am hoping I can do it with ease (i.e. without the snooze button tempting me.) If I commit to 90 days, I promise to do it for 90 days, and then after the designated time period, I can reevaluate whether I really want to wake up before the roosters. But until I've done it consistently for 90 days, I won't really know whether it is a habit that can change my life. So, here it is, I promise to wake up at 5am every day for 90 days straight... starting tomorrow!

And I promise to check-in regularly to report my progress. Let's see how it goes!

90 Days to Change Your Life Intro

I once heard that it takes 90 days to break a bad habit or to get a new behavior engrained into your being. So I've created a blog to track my daily progress in starting some new habits (or tackling those bad ones if I feel brave enough). Every 90 days I'll choose a new habit to start or break. Here are some of my ideas-

1) daily morning meditation

2) creating my own yoga practice at home

3) running, possibly trying out those Vibram 5 Fingers "barefoot" running shoes

4) home-cooked meals, try a new recipe every night for 90 days

Evidently it's January, and I've got New Years resolutions on my mind...