How to Meditate in the Morning for Positive Energy
There’s no better way to start your day off than to build in time for reflection or meditation in the morning. A great morning routine can determine the satisfaction and success of your day, and help you to enjoy the day no matter how many demands come your way.
The best morning meditation is one that is consistently a part of your schedule, so you can habituate a more centered, peaceful morning. Rushing through your morning to get out the door starts your day off with stress, and throws you into life’s demands without preparing your mind and consciousness properly.
In this article, we’ll talk through the benefits of morning meditation, along with a few strategies you can try to normalize meditation into your daily routine.
Choose the type of meditation that fits your needs
There are many kinds of meditation that each serve different purposes. Before you start building a morning meditation routine, you’ll want to be clear about how you’d like to feel. If you’d like to boost your ability to focus, you might try a concentration-based meditation. If you’d like to visualize a great day or practice gratitude in the morning, you might try using an app or looking up morning meditation music tracks.
If you’d rather avoid the frustration of trying to ‘not think’ as soon as you wake up, you may find Vedic Meditation creates the most ease and peacefulness in your morning.
Vedic Meditation is a style where the meditator repeats a meaningless sound, their Bija mantra, while thoughts effortlessly come and go in the mind. You can receive your own mantra by learning Vedic Meditation with a qualified instructor.
The main benefit of Vedic Meditation is that the mantra style and effortlessness of the practice (with no focus or concentration required) allow the body to rest far more deeply than sleep, even when the mind seems to be busy with thoughts. Those thoughts are simply embedded stressors releasing through the mind… so they’re actually a sign of your body releasing stress.
Vedic Meditation in the morning
Vedic Meditators sit for twenty minutes each morning and afternoon to deeply rest their bodies, release stress, and to follow their mantra to a place of transcendence in meditation, however brief that may be. That brief interaction with the field of Being, or Universal Consciousness, is transformational for our evolution and growth. In fact, it is that process of settling the mind down to its least excited state that brings about all of the benefits of Vedic Meditation.
Some of the benefits Vedic Meditators experience are greater creativity and resourcefulness, more positivity in their self-talk and interaction with others, greater resilience to stress, and deeper sleep.
In fact, Vedic Meditation is so effective as a mechanism to rest the body that many Vedic Meditators who have experienced insomnia or too little sleep will experience more restful and continuous sleep, or they notice that their body doesn’t need quite as much sleep to feel rested due to their rejuvenating meditations.
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Vedic Meditators start their twenty minute morning meditation right after they wake up. One of the secrets of keeping a consistent meditation practice is to avoid letting time pass in the morning before your practice and to get your first session in as soon as you wake up.
The best way to ensure you won’t fall back asleep in your meditation is to get up and wash your face, brush your teeth, and drink some water before sitting to meditate.
It’s important to avoid taking in any caffeine before meditation since the stimulation will disrupt your body’s ability to rest during your practice. Similarly, it’s best not to eat or take vitamins before meditating , because both could initiate processes in the body that require energy.
That extra energy of digestion or wakefulness from vitamins or caffeine can inhibit the body’s ability to rest deeply and can cause the mind to think so much that the mantra isn’t able to arise and calm our thoughts.
Where to sit to meditate
Though you can do your Vedic Meditations anywhere, anytime, it is important to be sitting upright with your head unsupported to get the most out of each session. Find a comfortable seat and settle in for twenty minutes of ‘you time.’
You don’t have to sit in the same seat for every regular meditation, and you can even meditate in your bed. So long as your back is at no more than a 45-degree angle and your head is not supported, you won’t be as likely to fall asleep and interrupt the unstressing process.
The best morning meditation routine
It’s recommended to wake up, use the restroom, drink some water (only), and then sit upright in a comfortable spot for your twenty-minute session. In Vedic Meditation we don’t use a timer that will buzz and interrupt our sitting, we just keep a clock nearby and keep repeating our mantra until 20 minutes have passed.
Often it helps to keep the eyes closed for an additional two minutes and let the mind wander, to ease into regular waking consciousness from our state of transcendence or active unstressing.
Vedic Meditators practice for twenty minutes twice each day because studies have shown that 20 minutes is a natural time period for the body to drop into rest before a natural readiness to move into activity. When we meditate in the afternoon as well as in the morning, we give our bodies a second opportunity to release the stress we’ve accumulated through the morning, and we follow our natural circadian rhythm that wants to rest in the afternoon.
What to include in a morning routine
After we finish our morning meditation, we can then do our workout, take a shower, drink our tea, or whatever else feels good to start the day. It’s certainly possible to stack mindful routines in the morning, like gratitude journaling or repeating affirmations, but we don’t want to do those things while we’re meditating.
Combining different modalities with Vedic Meditation keeps our meditation from being effortless, which keeps our bodies from deeply resting and our minds from experiencing transcendence. That’s why it’s important to practice Vedic Meditation on its own first thing in the morning, and then if you have time, add in any other morning practices that feel good to you.
Morning meditation for positive energy
It’s common to hear morning routines discussed in terms of ‘positivity’ or ‘getting in alignment.’ This can mean different things to different people. When you have a morning routine in place that helps you feel present and brings up appreciative emotions, you can set the mood for your whole day to one that is more positive.
With Vedic Meditation, in particular, you don’t have to rely on manufacturing happy emotions before facing your day. The more stress you release from your body, the more you’re able to adapt to changes in expectations and stressors throughout your day. This means that you don’t have to force yourself to feel positive or happy– you’ll automatically feel that way when you’re not letting your mind and emotions be overrun with stress.
There is a certain confidence and sense of self-worth that comes with protecting and keeping a morning routine that gives you energy, though. When we take the time to set our alarms earlier in the morning to make sure we can meditate and have an easeful morning, we’re shaping our experience of life intentionally.
Creating resilience through a morning meditation
Most people wake up and immediately check their phone for texts, emails, and notifications. Studies have shown that a barrage of notifications and media first thing in the morning can contribute to elevated stress and train your brain to wake up feeling stressed.
When you keep your phone turned off all the way through your meditation and morning routine and only power it on when it’s time to engage in the demands of the day, you can actually build the brain’s neuroplasticity and notice waking up feeling calm and ready for the day.
Morning meditation for wakefulness
If you notice that you feel sluggish when you wake up or hit ‘snooze’ multiple times on your alarm, your body might not be getting adequate rest even if you’re sleeping 7+ hours. When the body has too much accumulated stress, it’s harder to deeply rest and stay asleep all night. Vedic Meditation allows the body to rest 5x more deeply than sleep. So when we incorporate two meditations into our day, we’re effectively resting the body with as much as several hours’ worth of sleep.
Many meditators have found that they don’t need as much sleep to feel rested and wakeful in the morning, and they don’t rely on caffeine or stimulants quite as much to get them through the day. It can take many months or years of consistent practice to notice these benefits, but with Vedic Meditation, you can look forward to feeling more rested from your sleep and less tired or groggy all the time as you continue your practice.
Conclusion
When we allow our minds to settle into their least excited state through Vedic Meditation, we experience pure being or transcendence for moments at a time. These brief encounters with the field beyond conscious thought provide all the positive energy or impetus to our evolution that we could need.
We’ll notice that mornings don’t feel like so much of a drag, and we have more liveliness to bring to our tasks and relationships. When we can turn our morning meditation practice into a routine that we practice every day as soon as we wake up, we build a habit for expanding our consciousness and meeting each day with greater and greater resilience.
