“Dawn wakes the body,
Meditation wakes the mind,
And night rests the soul.”
Premise:
Today I find myself acknowledging my awakened state. It is familiar yet noticeable because it is not an everyday occurrence. How can one be awake and not be aware of it? It’s quite easy, in fact. For many years my body would be the one waking moment of my day. I’d wake up to whichever part of me took centerstage in that first woken moment and he would stick with me throughout the rest of my day, relatively unchallenged. He’d usually wake up to the ringing of an alarm or five alarms on my phone. He’d then begrudgingly get out of bed, tired, frustrated, start the coffee, put on some clothes, and string along a chain of prewired rituals in preparation of his daily voyage to work.
At the work place he’d follow more or less the same protocol. Keep with the program, stay on top of the tasks, maintain a feeling of control over what will happen next. Getting off work and coming back home just as tired as when I woke up earlier that morning sometimes thinking to myself “Where did the day go?”
This is what I call waking up once. The biological process of simply exciting your sleeping state and cruising on whichever frequency you woke up with until you go back to sleep only to repeat the same process the next day.
It wasn’t until I discovered a second waking moment that I noticed new spaces in my mind that I could wonder into which strangely allowed me to move differently in my outer world as well. As a therapist I was no stranger to the topic of mindfulness and its usefulness for my clients in gaining further Self clarity. But I had gotten so wired into teaching mindfulness that it became my baseline reality, part of my “first” wake up. This is when I began to intentionally wake up twice a day, the earlier the better for both of these wake ups as this would allow a new perspective to arise earlier and thus contain more influence over the rest of the day. Interestingly, the second awakening was more gentle, slower, and more intentional. This new space softened the edges of my psyche and allowed to find a more consistent and steady flow than my first waking moment had. Because of this, I was going to sleep a little less tired than before and thus a little more energized by the time my body awakening would come in the morning.
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