I don’t have a dedicated place in my day for my meditation practice. When I manage to do it, it seems to be in the evening and it always feels like I’m somehow getting lucky. Other daily habits have places in my daily routine where they feel natural and good. I’d love to figure out what that could be for meditation and I’m wondering if it might be right after I wake up?
I learned a couple weeks ago that I’m not as reliant on coffee as I thought I was so I think I could get up and meditate right away and then go into my morning coffee routine. As silly as it sounds, I’ve struggled with meditation right after waking up in the past because I couldn’t figure out the order of operations with my coffee routine. Option A is making coffee and then not drinking it for twenty minutes while I meditate. Meditation is difficult enough as it is... smelling coffee and knowing that it’s waiting for me the whole time feels like doing it on Hard Mode. Option B is making a cup of coffee, drinking it and then meditating. This seems rational but at that point, roughly thirty minutes later, I’ve kind of lost the “wake up and meditate right away” vibe and more often than not it’s difficult to put down whatever I’m reading and go do a harder thing (i.e meditate). Option C, which always seemed too hard, was to meditate immediately and then go make coffee after finishing the session. That’s the version I’m going with for this experiment.
For the next week, as soon as I wake up and use the bathroom I’m going to immediately do the twenty minute Daily Meditation in my meditation app of choice before doing anything else in my day (including making coffee). Under normal circumstances this means I’d be cutting into my morning reading time. In vacation mode, I don’t really need to worry about that. If it goes well, I can cross that bridge when I re-enter real life in January.
So, how did it go?
A week later and here I am. I successfully meditated for seven days in a row but I did not do each of those sessions immediately upon waking up. I think I managed to do that for five of those sessions. A couple things worth noticing:
Somehow I went to bed a couple times this week with my phone sitting on the table next to my bed — which is not how I normally operate. On those occasions I found myself scrolling through Twitter in the morning rather than immediately getting out of bed and putting my butt on a cushion.
Broadly, I noticed it can be tougher to get out of bed and get moving when the first thing on the docket is twenty minutes of meditation. Usually, making a hot cup of coffee is my animating force.
That being said, I felt good when I did the morning meditation. A nice mix of calm, focused, and accomplished.
I think this is probably the best spot in my day for meditation to live. I’ve still got a long way to go to make it feel automatic but I at least showed myself that it’s possible.