3 Benefits of Morning Meditation for Your Mind and Body
If you’ve experimented with adding meditation into your routine, you may have noticed that once your day gets going, it’s much harder to ‘insert’ your meditation in your busy, non-stop schedule until late in the day. But here’s the challenge…by the time you’re free, you’re already past the point of exhaustion. You’re tired and ready to crash into bed and go to sleep.
Integrating a morning meditation into your schedule makes it much easier to consistently do every day. There are many benefits of meditation first thing in the morning, which we’ll list throughout this post.
Regardless of the style of meditation that you practice, the key to any meditation is to be consistent every single day to reap the benefits. And for the ultra committed, twice-a-day Vedic Meditation.
With Vedic Meditation, we meditate for twenty minutes first thing in the morning and twenty minutes in the afternoon. We’ll talk about the benefits of any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice in the morning, and then specify what benefits Vedic Meditation offers when you start your day off with it every day.
Benefit 1: Calm and Peace to Start the Day
A common report of meditators is that the morning reduced symptoms of anxiety and stress that often comes with preparing for the day ahead.
One of my recent course graduates, Robyn, shared this on the second day of her meditation course:
This morning after my meditation, I didn’t feel rushed as I usually do getting out of the house to go to work. Usually, I feel anxious about being late, getting everything ready…today it felt like time slowed down.
– Robyn B.The reason for this is that meditation turns the mind and attention inward, and allows us to notice what we’re feeling and give ourselves a calm space of our own before the day starts. When we consistently make time for ourselves and pay attention to our needs, we’ll feel better throughout the day.
Benefit 2: Focus and Performance
Meditation has the unique ability to expand our creativity, and some forms of meditation train the brain to concentrate. The forms of meditation where you focus on your breath, on your body, or on any kind of thought (or no thought) keep the mind active and do not allow as deep of rest for the body, but they can train the brain to concentrate.
A week after completing my Vedic Meditation course, Heather, an architect and consult, remarked:
Today, noticed a higher capacity of efficacy at work. The thing is, I had a long night working the day before, so I expected to be off my game. I was amazed at how could ride out the whole day with sustained energy, even after a long night of work. The morning meditation felt great. That was notable.
– Heather S.Vedic Meditation improves focus and creativity by releasing the stress in our bodies that causes anxiety, distraction, and jumping or whirring thoughts. When we practice consistently, the hypo-metabolic state of rest builds our reserves or willpower and focus that we can lean on throughout the day,
Benefit 3: Benefits of Morning Meditation for Sleep
It may seem surprising that an early morning meditation could assist with sleep, but when we think about the reason for poor sleep quality, it makes sense. The body struggles to sleep when it is overly stressed. Most forms of meditation create a sense of calm, and Vedic Meditation actually releases stored stress out of the body through our thoughts.
This means that when we lie down to sleep at night, our minds and bodies have less stress to process while we sleep, and we can fall into a deeper sleep uninterrupted by excess stress or excitation.
Vedic Meditation specifically allows our bodies to rest 5x more deeply than sleep, which means that when we do go to sleep for the night, the body will have less surface-level stress to release and can more effectively do the work of repair, digestion, and detox.
It doesn’t matter when we do our meditation in the day to get these benefits for sleep, though with Vedic Meditation we like to stick to a session when we wake up in the morning and a session in the afternoon before the evening’s activities begin.
How to Meditate First Thing in the Morning
One of the tricky things about morning meditation is that it can be tempting to either go back to sleep while meditating or sleep through our meditation time entirely. There are a few ways to skip these temptations and ensure an effective meditation even after you’ve just woken up.
First, it’s important to make time in your morning for an uninterrupted early meditation. This may mean going to bed 30 minutes earlier and waking up 30 minutes earlier to give yourself an easy window before you need to start your day.
Second, it’s important to make sure we’re actually awake before we start meditating. Get out of bed, wash your face and brush your teeth, and drink some water. You can meditate sitting in bed, but we want to make sure we won’t keel over and fall back asleep while we meditate, or we won’t get the same benefits of a wakeful meditation.
Third, it’s best not to consume caffeine before meditation in the morning. Caffeine excites our nervous system and prevents us from the rest and stress processing that the body can do during our practice. Drink hot water or decaffeinated tea when you wake up if you need to get going, and wait for your matcha or coffee until after your meditation is over.
Vedic Meditation in the Morning and Afternoon
With a Vedic Meditation practice, we sit for twenty minutes twice a day. When the Maharishi began teaching students to meditate with the Bija mantra, he tested the duration of meditations and found that most meditators had diminishing returns after twenty minutes. Vedic Meditation has two primary goals: to allow the body to release stress from the physiology and build adaptation energy (stress resilience) and to put our awareness in a place beyond thought where we can experience transcendence, or merge our awareness with pure Being.
When we meditate with a Vedic Meditation mantra twice each day, we’re doing the work of releasing all of the stress that accumulates each day– and more. The body is able to enter a hypo-metabolic state when we allow our thoughts alongside our mantra and we remain in a conscious state.
We’ll have thoughts as the stress releases, and the mantra slowly guides the mind beyond thought altogether. With two twenty-minute sessions of this mantra-based stress release, we’ll not only release the stress of the present day’s activity, but we’ll also start to release old embedded stressors from our cells.
As conscious, thinking, analytical beings who still have the instincts of self-preservation, our brains are processing and embedding stress triggers into our bodies throughout our lifetime. This means that there are stress memories in the body that color our actions and thinking, and prevent us from responding to situations in the considered manner we wish we could.
Our second afternoon meditation sitting is important to do each day to make sure we’re addressing and releasing these old stress triggers, so we’re free to act and think and respond to the situation before us and not to a fear based on a past experience.
Vedic Meditation and Thinking
Sometimes when we first wake up in the morning, our mind starts to immediately whir into action and think of everything we need to get done for the day. If you’ve found your mind is too busy to meditate or you have ‘too many thoughts during meditation,’ Vedic Meditation in the morning will still work for you.
Thoughts are allowed in Vedic Meditation, meaning that we don’t have to notice them, accept them, judge them, or avoid them. Even if they make us want to get up and take care of something outside of meditation, or we feel cranky in the middle of meditation wanting our coffee or wanting to go back to sleep… we can just allow those thoughts and return to our mantra, easily.
Thoughts can happen in any way they appear in our minds, and we can attend to them for as long as they hold our mental attention. Eventually, the mantra will float back into the awareness and we can effortlessly think of that meaningless sound. At times, the mantra and the thoughts arise at the same time, and we don’t have to ascribe any meaning to any of them.
Our thoughts represent the release of stress in Vedic Meditation, so we can let them pass easily and innocently, with no force or concentration involved. This is possible with the use of a personalized Bija mantra given to each Vedic Meditator by a qualified Vedic Meditation instructor.
So even if your mind is busy with thoughts in the morning, you can still use your Bija mantra and let them float into your head for the entirety of your meditation. It will still be a productive meditation where your body has been releasing stress and preparing you for your day.
Learn to Meditate
To receive your own Vedic Meditation mantra and start a twice-daily practice, schedule an intro talk with me, or sign up for my next Learn to Meditate Course. We’ll integrate a morning meditation into your day as a part of the course, and you’ll quickly see the benefits of starting your day with time for your own rest and rejuvenation.
