How to Make the Day in Your Image - The Art Waking Up Earlier.

Dear All,

Could the secret of your success be in getting out of bed earlier in the morning?  Probably, but what you actually do with that extra time when your head is at it's clearest is equally important.

Mark Wahlberg, the movie actor, created a social media storm back in September when he posted his daily schedule on twitter. At first glance it seemed to consist of a lot of snacking, meals and workouts between his wake-up time of 2:30am and his bedtime of 7:30pm.

The schedule is shown below and what is interesting is that the first activity on it is what he describes as 'prayer time' at 2:45am. 

Mark may be on to something. According to Yoga, the best and most effective time to meditate is very early in the morning when the new day hasn't yet formed and it is possible to make an imprint on it. 

A bit like baking a cake; if you wait for the cake to get baked and discover there's not enough sugar or cinnamon in it, then there's not much you can do about it. But if you're there at the beginning, you can choose the ingredients and get exactly the cake you want. So wake up early and meditate to give the day the shape you want it to take.

If there's no way you're going to be getting up at 2:30pm then that's fine;you don't have to. Wahlberg got his wake-up time slightly wrong. The actual time that is said to be special for meditation is the 'ambrosial time' beginning roughly one and a half hours before sunrise and lasting about 48 minutes. It's called 'Brahma Muhurta' in Sanskrit.

Current London sunrise is 07:46am , so the ambrosial time starts at about 06:16am to about 07:04am which makes it easily doable. At that time it's much easier to get into thoughtless awareness and also feel the vibes(ambrosia) flowing from the top of your head downwards.

See you tomorrow at group meditation when you can tell me all about the wonderful effect you got from rising early to meditate.

Regards