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.