Dear Subscriber First Name,Search the internet for ‘ideal morning routine’ and you’ll get a million results, but you won’t find your ideal morning routine. Don’t worry, you can create it yourself. On the last few retreats I’ve led, I’ve changed the morning schedule. It used to be a wake-up bell at 6.30am, then a double meditation from 7 to 9. You’d walk outside to the meditation room and your first glimpse of the day is the mist rising through the majestic trees that surround the retreat centre, except you don’t have time to take it in as you are late for the meditation! The new schedule is no schedule. Instead, there’s an invitation to create your own morning practice. At first people are a little thrown, “What? I can do what I want?” But soon it becomes the most cherished part of the retreat. One person is getting up early, and going into the woods with a flask of coffee to meditate amongst the trees, then arriving later in the meditation room to sit with others. Another is also outside, wrapped in a blanket, with tea writing in their journal. There’s qigong, yoga, a morning walk, sitting quietly in the shrine room, walking meditation outside, standing meditation in the woods, reading dharma, reading poetry, writing about your dreams. And tea, coffee and even toast accompany all of this. Some of these activities are more explicitly what we call meditation. But if we engage with them in the right way, they can all be our meditation practice. Thich Nhat Hanh tells us: “Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” So any practice in which we are not evading our actual experience, but coming into deeper contact with it, could be seen as a meditation practice. Of course, we all know that sitting in meditation posture with our eyes closed isn’t always meditation. We might be planning tonight’s dinner! Maybe you already have a meditation practice that you love. But if not, why not design one? You don’t even have to stick to the same one, you can change it as often as you like. You could even have a practice that was so open that you just asked yourself each morning, ‘What wants to happen this morning?’ and trusted the answer that came through. My current routine looks like this. I have coffee in bed and read, usually Dharma. Then I go out to the woods to do a little qigong, including some (newly discovered) standing meditation. Afterwards I sit in my room, sometimes with more coffee, and look out the window for a while, just doing nothing. Then I dip into my books and notes, do some pondering and writing and more looking out the window. I once heard someone describe the Dali Lama’s routine. They said he meditates for a couple of hours... with his books. With his books?! How can you meditate with books? I thought I would love that, so that’s what I do. What would you love your practice to look like?
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