What do you do first thing in the morning? Make a tea, coffee, read the paper, grab your phone, read your e-mails, or rush around like crazy before leaving for work? This is the reality of most modern people’s lives as life gets ever more busy.
But what should your morning look like if you want to live in balance? It’s not always realistic to say: “be in peace or go slow” if you have kids running about and you are late for work. But it is realistic to put 15-20 minutes aside first thing when you wake up and dedicate it to your Practise.
If you want to live in complete balance on a body, mind and spirit level where you have physical energy, mental clarity and feel spiritually connected then your early morning needs to be dedicated to your Practise.
What is Practise?
This is the time where you connect with the highest energy within you to be able to live life at the highest level possible. It’s a time that you draw awareness and strength from within and take that energy into your day to reach your goals and desires.
From my own experience of doing a spiritual practise every morning, I can say that nothing in my life would be meaningful without it. It strengthens my physical body, it engages my mind to be much more aware and it helps my relationships on all levels with my wife, friends and work mates.
Without it I can say life would not have the same joys and peacefulness.
Here’s an excerpt from my latest book The Yogi Code where I speak more about how you can prepare your life by controlling the excesses and extreme of your life so your practise can have a chance to blossom into a higher level.
Avoiding excesses and extremes
When you avoid the excesses and extremes you will get a good grip on controlling the senses. The mentality of living our life to the fullest usually means to live the highs and lows. No one really wants to live the lows, but they are a natural outcome of many highs. If you climb the highest mountains in the world, they have extreme weather conditions and altitudes that the body and mind have to suffer through.
Then as you descend you will feel the effects of the altitude drop, which creates another round of extreme pressure on your system. In the same way, if you eat until you are full, it is an extreme for the body and mind to deal with. If you do this once, it has a less negative outcome, but if you do it most of your life it has more serious consequences.
Thus, the highs and lows give the body and mind all their ailments and pain. But most people who hear this reasoning ask, “Isn’t life boring without the ups and downs, highs and lows, or the emotional thrills?”
It all depends on what the purpose and intention of your life is. If you are looking to go with the flow and experiment with your body and mind, then the highs and lows will be a natural reaction to this way of living. If you feel that this makes your life more interesting, then this is how you should live. But this doesn’t lead to the balanced life that a yogi strives to live.
If you want to live in balance with your body and mind, then you won’t experience anything that is an extreme. When you get to the point that the body or mind seems to be tipping the scale and becoming irritated, agitated, very excited, or too energetic, you will recognise the extreme and pull back a little to the point of balance, which is the focal point of the yogic life.
(This is the second column in a three-part series. You can read the first part here.)
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