My journey towards mindfulness

The Human Mind is a wanderer. It does not like to stay in a place. It likes to teleport you to places you like, dream or to random thoughts about the past and future, which most of the times are very distracting.

As many of you who have read in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”, the human brain has two sides, one which is the thinking and slower side & another which is the more spontaneous intuitive side. Over the years our dependence on the latter increases and many a times, this impulsive side of yours, to your peril, makes you feel that you know it all.

To remain aware about the pitfalls of spontaneous thinking, one needs to have a strong routine to practice thinking slow and remain focused. One can do it at any point of the day – but as ancient sages have said, the morning hour is magical for you to reconnect back with oneself. You can also do the same by playing thinking games like Bridge or Chess, but over the time, even in these games, the spontaneity takes over.

I have never been a morning person and my several attempts to wake up early and build a routine have failed after a week of excitement. I always wanted those extra two hours for myself when I can meditate, think without any distractions, read, and exercise. When I saw a LinkedIn post from Rajan Singh talking about an online program to help you towards building your morning routines, I jumped at it. Rajan is an ex Indian Police Service officer who quit his job to finally land at something which he loves doing, ie helping people build strong healthy habits which can be transformative.

I started on 14th of June and was not sure how long I would continue waking up at 4.45 am, participating in an hour long session where you program your mind to focus only and only on your breathing – for 45 minutes. You then do 15 minutes of journaling on topics which help you think deeper about yourself and your behavior.?This meditation apparently helps you to reboot your mind and gives you a fresh start for the day. A good analogy for this exercise will be clearing your computer’s cache for all the cookies loading up the Random-Access Memory (the short-term memory) of your computer. We all know that these cookies slow your computer down.

To be honest, it was difficult to change, but I pushed myself to join Habit Strong’s “Become a Morning Person” online boot camp. While the mornings were refreshing, it was groggy in the afternoon and I felt terrible by the end of the day. But a few days later, after correcting the time of hitting the bed or reducing the pre-sleep screen time, I was sleeping and waking up on time. The meditation session is challenging, the wanderer mind keeps taking you back to the “cookies” your experiences have left in your brain, and you have to purposefully bring back your attention the present, and the simple act of breathing. Now this is not a breathing exercise, it’s an exercise for your mind where your thinking side takes over and helps you stay away from distractions.

To my own surprise, I have woken up everyday at 4.45 am – without a fail for the last 28 days. Post the meditation, I have restarted my physical exercise routine and spending some time in reading. I must say I feel more energized and focused at work and can attentively listen to what is being discussed in the numerous online calls during the day. The impulsive mind still wanders around the greener pastures, but to my joy, the thinking side brings it back, to the here and now.

To sum it up, the journey in the last 28 days, has been transformative.

Post Script : The cover picture was clicked by yours truly after one of the morning mediation session. Perks of a morning routine.