All World
Gayatri Pariwar

  Even though he had no job to go to, no children to feed and get off to school, no external reasons to get up early, it was Thoreau’s custom, for the time he lived at Walden, to wake early in the morning and bathe in the pond at dawn. He did it for inner reasons, as a spiritual discipline in itself: “It was a religious exercise, and one of the best things I did.”

Benjamin Franklin also extolled the virtues of health, wealth and wisdom obtained from waking up early in his well-known adage on the subject. But he didn’t mouth it; he practiced too.

The virtues of getting up early have nothing to do with cramming more hours of busyness and industry into one’s day. Just the opposite. They stem from the stillness and solitude of the hour, and the potential to use that time to expand consciousness, to contemplate, to make time for being, for purposefully not doing any thing. The peacefulness, the darkness, the dawn, the stillness – all contribute to making early morning a special time for mindfulness practice.

Waking early has the added value of giving you a very real head start on the day. If you can begin your day with a firm foundation in mindfulness and inner peacefulness, then when you do have to get going and start doing, it is much more likely that the doing will flow out of your being. You are more likely to carry a robust mindfulness, an inner calmness and balance of mind with you throughout the day, than had you just jumped out of bed and started it on the call of demands and responsibilities, however pressing and important.
The power of waking up early in the morning is so great that it can have a profound effect on a person’s life, even without formal mindfulness practice. Just witnessing the dawn each day is a wake-up call in itself.

But I find early morning a wondrous time for formal meditation. No one else is up. The world’s rush hasn’t launched itself yet. I get out of bed and usually devote about an hour to being without doing anything. After twenty-eight years, it hasn’t lost its allure. On occasion it is difficult to wake up and either my mind or my body resists. But part of the value is in doing it anyway, even if I don’t feel like it.
One of the principal virtues of a daily discipline is an acquired transparency toward the appeals of transitory mood states. A commitment to getting up early to meditate becomes independent of wanting or not wanting to do so on any particular morning. The practice calls us to a higher standard – that of remembering the importance of wakefulness and the ease with which we can slip into a pattern of automatic living which lacks awareness and sensitivity. Just waking up early to practice non-doing is itself a tempering process. It generates enough heat to rearrange our atoms, gives us a new and stronger crystal lattice of mind and body, a lattice that keeps us honest and reminds us that there is far more to life than getting things done.

Discipline provides constancy, which is independent of what kind of a day you had yesterday and what kind of a day you anticipate today. I especially try to make time for formal practice, if just for a few minutes, on days when momentous events happen, happy or distressing, when my mind and the circumstances are in turmoil, when there is lots to be done and feelings are running strong. In this way, I am less likely to miss the inner meaning of such moments, and I might even navigate through a bit better.

By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of constancy, wisdom and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves. Making the daily choice to wake up early to practice is an embodiment of this perspective. I sometimes speak of it as my ‘routine’, but it is far from routine. Mindfulness is the very opposite of routine.

If you are reluctant to get up an hour earlier than you ordinarily might, you can always try half an hour, or fifteen minutes, or even five minutes. It’s the spirit that counts. Even five minutes of mindfulness practice in the morning can be valuable. And even five minutes of sacrificed sleep is likely to put you in touch with just how attached we are to sleep, and therefore how much discipline and resolve are required to carve out even that little time for ourselves to be awake without doing anything. After all, the thinking mind always has the very credible sounding excuse that since you will not be accomplishing anything and there’s no real pressure to do it this morning, and perhaps real reasons not to, why not catch the extra sleep which you know you need now, and start tomorrow?

To overcome such totally predictable opposition from other corners of the mind, you need to decide the night before that you are going to wake up, no matter what your thinking comes up with. This is the flavour of true intentionality and inner discipline. You do it simply because you committed to yourself to do it, and do it at the appointed time, whether part of the mind feels it or not. After a while, the discipline becomes a part of you. It is simply the new way you choose to live. It is not a ‘should’, it doesn’t involve forcing yourself. Your values and your actions have simply shifted.

If you are not ready for that yet (or even if you are), you can always use the very moment of waking up, no matter what time it comes, as a moment of mindfulness, the very first of the new day. Before you even move, try getting in touch with the fact that your breath is moving. Feel your body lying in bed; straighten out. Ask yourself “Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don’t really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?”

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me……We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture or carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look….. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.


[Published with glad permission of the author. Dr. Joan Kabat-Zinn is the founder Director of the Stress Education Clinic of the University of Massachusetts. He is one of the most effective teachers of MIND-BODY HEALING and MINDFULNESS MEDITATION in USA. –