Morning meditation: My new daily ritual

By Michelle

Every morning, work permitting, I rise at seven thirty and have a quick shower, feed my cat, make a coffee, and join a Zoom call at eight for fifteen minutes of meditation.

If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have struggled to get up this early as working from home I don’t need to.  Poor mental health in the past had made me lazy and disorganised, and it’s not something I’m proud of. As well, for quite some time, I’d been feeling a little lost spiritually and unsatisfied in life.

The steady rhythm of get up, work, eat, read a book or watch a video, go to bed becomes a hard habit to break. I might have practised some self-Reiki or stolen a little time in the evening to meditate before bed but sadly this had become less frequent. 

That brings me to morning meditation. For other reasons too complicated to share I knew I wanted more connectedness, both with other people, and also with the Universe around me. I did what a lot of us do: I used a search engine to help me find the answers, and in this search I discovered Open Sanctuary.

After several hours looking at their website, I sent an email asking if I could join. My first conversation with an Open Sanctuary community minister seemed to me like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Here was someone who validated my spiritual journey, and didn’t try to evangelise or question my beliefs.

Instead, I was spoken to with respect, there was an acknowledgement that the god or gods of our understanding might be different, and they were, but somehow that quickly became exciting and an opportunity to share and hear another person’s view.

I remember coming off that call thinking 'I’m going to set my alarm and I’m going to join the morning mediation'. Thankfully I did!

You see, morning meditation is now a daily ritual for me. I join a small group of people and every day a different minister reads an affirmation. For a few minutes we sit in silence. I have learned to quiet the multiple intrusions in my head and for those minutes I feel connected.

When I describe morning meditation as a ritual, I mean that by intent I am surrounding myself with love and light and taking a moment not to be in charge of my thoughts. In practice, I am now also allowing solutions to problems the chance to enter my consciousness unbidden.

As you can probably tell from my style of writing, my mind is often made up of streams of thought that take me in directions I didn’t start thinking of. The ritual of morning meditation has given me respite from this. These worries are often mundane, and certainly not end-of-the-world problems that require deep attention, yet they take up valuable time with low-level worry and stress that is tiring.

Perhaps that is what meditation had always intended for adherents. Everyone joining the call is invited, if they so choose, to share their intention for the day. For me, this often means I will keep in my thoughts the positive message of the affirmation I’ve heard, though when a solution to a problem pops in, my intent may change to resolving that problem.

My morning meditation gives me a moment of peace to share a connection with some of the loveliest people, and I feel I have developed better morning-ritual habits. Strange as it seems, it’s affecting my whole day. I’m eating better, giving more attention to my health, becoming better organised, and feel that these rituals have improved my life.

From small seeds, grow large trees.