Meditation to Start the Day
From a spiritual advisor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY
For the past ten years or so, every morning, the routine is to make my bed, read some spiritual literature, meditate, and pray.
Lately, I have gone back to the ole Headspace well for meditation. But sometimes, like today, I sit still for a few minutes before dropping my daughter off at school and then came home for a ten-minute Headspace. Youtube, Peloton, etc also offer good sources of guided and non-guide meditation.
The benefits of meditation are a plenty. I get centered in the here and now. Not perfectly. Not the whole time. But in fits and spurts.
I focus on my breath. The replaying of yesterdays events, both good and bad, fade from my mind. The excitement, fear, or indifferent expectations of the future are pushed from my consciousness. I get to live in the blue sky of my mind's eye and the heavy breathe of my body. Even if only for a few seconds, it's a win.
Alternatively, depending on the literature reading, I might choose to focus on and meditate on a subject.
When my mind wanders, it goes to financial markets, what I am planning to eat -- speaking of which I have to cook that pork tenderloin --, or whether I really want to do leg day at the gym. When this happens, I redouble my efforts to listen to my breath. I can deliberately and willfully focus on the spiritual matters of the day.
What is something I did yesterday that I can correct today?
Where didn't I support my wife?
Where could I have been a better father?
What would it look like, if I didn't take that comment personally, how would an emotional stable 42 year old have reacted, internally and externally?
And then I pray.