the a.m. trifecta
clear your mind, cultivate peace
Once upon a time, I began my days by springing out of bed in a panic because I slept through my alarm, again. I started out feeling harried, rushed, and stressed, which set me up for roughly the same trajectory for the remainder of the day.
After hurrying through each crazy day I would finally collapse into bed, way too late, and grab a few hours of sleep before doing it all over again the next day.
I was stuck in a Groundhog Day that consisted mainly of panic and overwhelm.
Not good. Not healthy. Something had to change.
Despite the urge to assert my prerogative as an adult to stay up as late as I pleased, I knew I had to get to bed earlier. Not only that, but I needed to build a cushion into my morning by getting up earlier so I could take the time to focus on myself and my needs. This is a foreign concept to most working moms, but it is key to the whole operation. If we don’t take time to care for ourselves, the house of cards is going to collapse - it’s not a question of if, but when.
As my body adjusted to the new rhythm of early to bed and early to rise, I discovered a new development - free time in the morning. Finally, I could take a few minutes to do what I wanted, instead of waiting until the very end of the day when I was too exhausted to even think about it.
That’s when I began to implement my morning trifecta and it’s not hyperbole to say it transformed my life.
I started with carving out a half hour, before anyone else was up, when the house was quiet and there were no demands on my attention. Out of that, I devoted 10 minutes to each of these practices: reading, meditation, and journaling.
Reading
My morning reading ritual involves a combination of a page-a-day book and newsletters. I consciously choose material that will give me a burst of positivity or inspiration, and a blend of ancient wisdom and intellectual stimulation. My subscription list is carefully curated so that I only receive emails that I want to read, which cuts down on the inbox clutter and subsequent overwhelm. The world will shove everything in our face - it's up to us to decide what we want to consume.
Meditation
I began meditating as a New Year’s resolution in 2020 (one of the rare few that stuck), and now I can’t imagine my life without it. Learning how to take charge of my brain has been an adventure, and a skill that will never be fully mastered, so boredom is not a factor. The effects of meditation practice translate so beautifully into my daily life that it’s not something I have to make myself do - it’s something I look forward to. We have to cultivate peace within ourselves if we want to have a peaceful day. Peaceful days stack up to a peaceful life.
Journaling
The author Julia Cameron is a proponent of “morning pages” as a way to stimulate creativity for writers and artists. I aim for three pages of stream of consciousness journaling which sometimes amounts to more, and sometimes less. I use my journal to process life - to examine what has happened, and what I want to have happen in the future. The pages of my journal are where I discover who I am and what I want out of life. There is something about the act of putting things in writing that imprints them on our subconscious, which makes them more likely to come to fruition.
Since I began this practice years ago, it has expanded. I now spend as long as I want on these activities, but it usually ends up being about 15 minutes of reading, 15 minutes of meditation, and a half hour of journaling. These three pursuits are core to maintaining my mental, emotional, and spiritual health - it’s my little morning ritual that starts me off on the right foot.
As an introspective bookworm writer with a spiritual bent, I recognize that this may not be the type of morning routine that floats everyone’s boat. The idea is to tweak your morning if it’s not bringing out the right feelings in you. Aim to leave the house feeling good - not rushed and panicked. It might take time to figure out exactly how to produce that result, especially when you add young children into the mix, but it’s possible.
We are what we repeatedly do. If our current set of habits is creating a life that we don’t enjoy, then we always have the choice to change our habits. When we see how the results are worth the effort, the choice to stay on the right path becomes easy.
If you’ve created a morning ritual that brings you peace and joy, please share in the comments.
If this work enriched your life even a smidge, would you considering giving a modest tip?
I have gradually come to this ritual as I, like you, have more reliably honored my body’s announcement at the end of the day: bedtime!
A vital activity is my daily participation in several audio-text and text convos that have enriched my life beyond measure (I highly recommend trying audio-texting. Unlike IRL face2face convos, there are no lost threads, allows revisiting to amplify subjects superficially covered, and replaying audio-texts usually reveals —- OMG I didn’t hear that first time, and much less time — AND no need to respell & battle spellchecker!
But to answer your question, most of the time there isn’t enough awake time to adequately respond to friend’s inquiries… or I just can’t write a response that is “just right”.
So I sleep on the “open threads” … having learned to always write the responses that are the gift of the morning … and gifts they are. My best writing (which is really just transcribing what the Universe downloads… hoping you know the joy of participating in that flow!) seems to have a space to easily flow upon waking, before my brain starts focusing on what the world demands of me to survive.
"We are what we repeatedly do" is powerfully instructive. We forget! This was lovely, thank you Amy.