Another interesting experience today. I’m afraid I only managed 5 hours of sleep last night- not quite enough, even for this serious meditator. Interestingly, the first hour of my early morning meditation went splendidly up until the final 5 or 10 minutes. However, once reaching that point, I realized I was simply to short on…
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 9 of 30
Day 9 was my second day of intentionally deviating from the title of this post, an allowance I am giving myself once a week to stay out and have fun. In this case, I went to see my friend Pat’s band, White Shoe Brown Shoe, at the Middle East in Cambridge. I helped with load-in/load-out,…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 8 of 30
Today was my first day waking up at 5:30, and it was an absolute success. In fact, despite getting only 6 hours of sleep, I woke up feeling excited and refreshed- holy crap! It’s hard to argue with results like that. As I mentioned yesterday, I used my extra time today to flesh out my…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 7 of 30
Another day, another 2 hours of early morning meditation completed. This morning I tried adding a 2-minute jump rope exercise to my routine, which was much more effective than the handful of dumbbell curls I had tried the day before. At the last minute, I also made the choice to switch from a 90/30 meditation…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 6 of 30
Day 6 of early rising was a good day. I tried waking myself up with some basic dumbbell exercises, but I didn’t find them particularly effective. Luckily, since I’m now back home after a long weekend with a friend, I can experiment with an aerobic versus anaerobic rising routine: jump rope and jumping jacks. In…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 5 of 30
Today marked an important breakthrough in my habit experiment: jumping back into my 5:45 wakeup time after intentionally taking a day off from early rising. Moving back the clock from 9:45 to 5:45 was no cakewalk. In fact, I’ve always found it challenging to drastically shift my wakeup/sleep time more than a couple of hours. …
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 4 of 30
Today, I intentionally ran things a little differently. In fact, you could lop off the “early” part of this title and it would be more accurate. Nevertheless, today still went strictly according to plan. I’m talking about a concept I introduced yesterday: controlled habit deviation. This is the simple idea that sometimes, it is important…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 3 of 30
Once again, I successfully woke up at 5:45 and fit in my 2 hours of meditation. My routine today looked like this: Wake up, yoga routine 5:45-5:55 Wash up, push-up’s, water, sit for meditation 5:55-6 1st meditation session 6-7:30 Juice break 7:30-7:45 Meditation 7:45-8:15 My first meditation session today was definitely more successful than yesterday’s. …
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 2 of 30
I achieved similar success today as I did on the first. Once again I got about 6.5 hours of sleep- not because I didn’t go to bed early enough, but because I simply didn’t fall asleep. Either way, I woke up fairly refreshed, so it wasn’t a problem. As mentioned yesterday, I modified the routine…
Early Rising + 2 Hours of Meditation: Day 1 of 30
I’m happy to say that the first day of my experiment is complete, and a smashing success at that. Despite getting only 6 ½ hours of sleep (11:30PM-6AM), I awoke this morning feeling highly awake. I took 10 minutes for my usual yoga routine, got dressed in my workout gear (neatly laid out in front…