Your Roadmap to Greatness

Reflections on the Breath…

 

Setting the tone for your day EveryDay is really
important.  I’ve done this for years with
my own morning rituals, allowing myself ample time to get ready for my
day.  The addition of this new morning
meditation – now only on Day 2 – so far is proving to be much easier to include
than I originally thought.  Of course,
thoughts are always the problem, aren’t they? 
Too many thoughts are what tend to lead us nowhere and can prevent us
from doing much of anything.  But I
digress!

My assigned morning meditation is something I’ve decided to
really work on, at least for the next 4 weeks of my “Meditation, Concentration,
& Breath” course.  So even though Day
2 was on a Saturday, I knew I had to stick to it.  This morning’s start was a bit more
difficult, because it was Saturday,
and I could just lounge in bed as long as I wanted to without any real reason to get up and go (other than
to get my butt to yoga!).  But being that
my body is so used to getting up early everyday for work, sleeping late doesn’t
really happen naturally on the weekends for me. 
Well, maybe that’s only half true. 
If I’m really honest, it’s probably my fear of missing out on another
day I’m so blessed to have here in the world. 
I do insist on getting up earlier than necessary on the weekend.  In any case, the struggle to get up is always
there, and the weekend always makes it easier
to be lazy. 

So to torment myself a bit, I almost always set an alarm on
the weekends too.  Some may call this
sad, crazy, extreme, unnecessary.  I call
it, typical & responsible me.  And in
some way, I quite like it actually.  This
morning’s alarm was set to 8am.  Of
course, I was naturally awake by about 7am. 
Refusing to look at the clock, I tossed and turned and noticed how
incredibly heavy my eyes felt.  It was
like someone had glued them shut.  It was
like I hadn’t slept in days, and I could almost continue to sleep for several
more days.  The idea of getting up and
meditating sat at the edge of my thoughts.  
No, not that!  How exhausting and
difficult that would be right about now! 
Ten minutes would be simply impossible. 
Forget it. 

After a bit of this arm wrestling with my thoughts, I
decided to be stronger than them and take control of this ridiculous
argument.  At 7:50am I was sitting on the
floor again, just like yesterday, cross-legged and eyes closed (not that they’d
ever truly opened!).   This time I
decided to try the yoga hands turned upward in the ‘receiving’ position to see
if that would make it different.  In my
half-asleep state I wondered how I’d hold these yoga hands in this way for so
long, but then I quickly forgot about them. 

I began to focus on the So Hum breathing.  I also added the focus on the third eye,
which always creeps me out a bit.  I
always think my eyes will get stuck trying to look up into that place in the
middle of my forehead.  It feels weird to
strain my eyes into that center, but eventually I forgot about that too.  I listened to the breath as it rose and
fell.  It seemed so loud.  I could only hear myself breathing.  This Ujjayi breath is quite difficult to keep
doing.  And again, I watched all the
thoughts come and go, come and go. 

In my sleepy state, I realized why a morning meditation must
be the best one to do.  While the
thoughts are still there and keep running through the mind, they’re sort of
muffled.  I was aware of all the
thoughts, but they weren’t as loud & as vivid as they are throughout the
day.  They were somewhat muted.  I could see them as if they just stood in the
background quietly going about their business, not making much of a fuss.  The other thing I noticed was how at every
moment there was a brief pause in all the thoughts.  It was the shortest of moments, incredibly fleeting,
but it was most definitely there.  I
could almost grab it and catch it, but then it was gone.  And then immediately a new thought would
quickly appear in its place.  It was kind
of like a picture book of thoughts and images that kept showing up, like
flipping through a book.  I could see my
mind as if it were sitting there thinking what it should think next.  Just as soon as it would relax into
nothingness, it started flipping through the book.  Searching….searching….hmmmm…there’s got to be
something in here to think about next?  

I watched it all happening. 
And then I would gently bring myself back to the third eye, which
sometimes looked like a black dot, and other times like a gold light.  But it never looked like an actual eye.  That would be creepy.  I thought about all these things as I noticed
them too.  I even thought about what I
might write about all of it when it was done. 
Endless thoughts.  And then, the
alarm went off – this time, it was my CD alarm clock that was already set for
8am.  It always makes a brief clicking
sound right before the CD plays the Mykonos music (which seems like an odd pairing with quiet meditation).  As I
heard the click, just like yesterday, I was completely surprised.  Time had gone so fast.  Ten minutes of meditation was just so quick
and easy.  Yet minutes ago, it seemed it
would be an impossible feat to accomplish. 
Ten minutes is not as hard as your pesky thoughts will have you
believe.  And disciplining the mind to
get into this habit seems like it’ll be a worthwhile project.  Stay tuned…