Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

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