Chinmayee Manjunath

It is my firm belief that when you are meant to learn or experience something, everything related to it keeps coming into your life/world/consciousness in one way or the other. Case in point: I wrote about my struggle with mornings on Friday, and I’ve written about it earlier, too. I spent much of Friday night, and the weekend thinking about it and, as I tend to, disappearing into a bit of a black hole about it in my mind.

And then, last night, I happened to start listening to an episode of Danielle Laporte’s podcast about her tricky relationship with mornings. She talks about how she had to retrace her feelings about mornings to her childhood, and then correct her own story in order to reclaim the start of the day.

Look, I know this might all sound like a huge (self-indulgent) waste of time and, to some people, it might just be. But, for me, my uneven, conflicted, approach to mornings has been difficult to come to terms with. I constantly feel like I take one step forward, and three backwards. All very frustrating.

In various bits of the podcast, Danielle says, “Morning mindfulness is how you activate your superpowers. Your steadiness and strength. And your connection to the sacred—everything we need on the graceful and the challenging days…. Habits and rituals are effective, but we need to get them in the right order (I’ll just tell you now, rituals need to come before habits.) But even before we jump into optimization mode, we need to look beneath the surface, into our psyche to examine what’s really up when we wake up. And that’s what most productivity methods miss—our history with mornings.”

So I began to think about my own memories about mornings. I am not someone who likes to wake up before 6.30, but I used to have to get up much earlier to make it to school. And what did not help was that my parents loved the early hours of the day which meant that I was the odd one out. They never slept in on weekends, so I somehow never did either even though I don’t think I was ever told I couldn’t. It was just easier to wake up and get on with the day when everyone else was.

Even now, both my mother and my husband are get-up-and-go people, while I like to linger and introduce myself to the day more slowly and quietly. In a family of three, if one person goes against the household routine, it can feel very lonely. And because my essential nature is to fit in, in a way, I have this enormous amount of push and pull about how I start my day. I feel like I should be rushing off, too, to walk or a workout class, or whatever. Or that I should have meditated, journalled, chanted, and drank something healthy within 30 minutes of waking up.

It’s a constant game of trying to meet standards no-one has set for me. Listening to Danielle was liberating. Does this mean that I have it all figured out and from tomorrow my mornings are going to be invincible? Absolutely not. But I am going to give myself permission to start crafting mornings the way I want to. Not trying to adhere to unwritten rules. Or catch up. Or imitate. Just be, and let myself learn.

Image via Danielle Laporte