Day 307 - Falling Back to Sleep

Today marked the second day of experimenting with my morning boot up process. The investigative intention that I held today was slightly less charged than it was yesterday (interesting to note).  Still, I was mindful and taking careful notice of what went on in my head. I half rolled over to quickly check my emails on my phone, but there was a pretty persuasive energy drawing my head back to my pillow. I allowed it, BUT under the condition that I would be paying even closer attention to how I move within its effect. I even cracked a smile as I submitted to the energy with intention, trying to justify the act as further investigation, though while also aware that by laying back down = exactly what the energy's purpose is.

source

Realizing this kept me alert enough to not actually fall back to sleep. In under 5 minutes, I willed myself upright and I tried to clear that strong feeling of go back to bed / lay down with breathing. It wasn't as magical as I had hoped. I struggled a bit, but I was up and moving before I was completely cleared of the head fog.

I titled this post Falling Back to Sleep because my day was overall less productive than the day before. It reminded of one of those past days of sleeping in and waking up with no intention/direction. My first thought as I sat down to write today was, "why?" and I associated it to how I woke up and gave into the energy while trying to circumvent the consequence through an "upgraded" justification. I believed that waking up in that groove of mindfulness with submission, flowed out into the rest of my day. But, during this writing, I also realized that my physical to-do list was not filled out for the day. In contrast, yesterday I had filled up my to-do list with more than I was able to complete the night before.

That 'slightly less charged' intention energy that I had noted at the top, that must be related to my empty day. I didn't give myself any direction the night before. To test this, I will try planning my day the night before and compare it to how effective I am by applying an intention the night before to plan my day when I wake up. I already know that when I don't know my day plan for tomorrow, I can easily continue to "not know," and my whole day lags, similar to how today went. This will be a test of self-honesty within intention, planning, and follow through. Creating a heightened sense of continuity between days has been a goal of mine. Glad to be working the angles on this point.

So, I'm pretty sure that I've narrowed down a critical relationship that needs to be purified. Join me tomorrow for a brief wake-up report, and I'll dive into how I've related to the word 'intention'. Note: I have written down morning plans, starting with 7:30 yoga.

Intense-ion

In-tents-e-on

Intent-see-on

Points to investigate

• Setting intention
• what is the starting point / the why
• Following through on intention
• resistance > intention?
• intention < self-agreement?
• Who am I without intention
• directive / responsible vs. aimless / carefree / ?

Day 306 - Morning Mind Play

Continuation of:
Day 305 - My Earliest Written Blog Post Yet
Day 304 - Morning Boot Up

Cool. I had a nice opportunity to play with my mind, and what did I find? The morning wasn't kind.

Seriously though, I made some interesting participatory observations. Here's a brief walk through: Alarm goes off, wasn't expecting it, but I adapt. I turn it off during a feeling of heavy wake-up resistance, head straight back to the pillow. Mind reminds me to exercise my breathing application to dissolve the resistance feeling. Slowly, my breathing turns into ego/thought, fail. Recovered 45 minutes later. I realize I can't be laying down in the most comfortable position ever if I want to wake up.

Solution:
One breath   > upright position. Continued breathing until stable. Direct self to begin the day.

Also, reporting on how the rest of my yesterday went after posting my earliest blog ever :
- Got more done.
- Felt like I still needed to be writing during the 10th and 11th hour of the evening
- Bottom line: When I start my day with self-supportive actions, like writing, I continue my day in a relatively more self-supportive way.

So, here I am now, typing up another morning post. It's freeing. It even seems like the day lasts longer. In addition to waking up earlier, I also don't have a looming responsibility that I've put on hold the entire day. The key difference is that instead of wanting to spend my time distracting myself from whatever I am procrastinating, I am free to move on to the next responsibility, effectively accomplishing more in a day.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to delay responsibilities and not realize how I'm amplifying my inefficiency by expelling effort within the delay/procrastination suppression.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to justify sleeping in within the domain of my mind while under the influence of morning tiredness energy.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fight within myself as the various voices/backchat that are back and forth "do I get up/do I just sleep" not realizing that participating in this inner dialogue IS within the design of the resistance energy that pulls me back to my pillow.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that I am choosing to place my head back down on the pillow through accepting and allowing that resistance energy to direct me.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realize and stand as one and equal with the energies of my mind, taking full responsibility for my actions, instead of blaming my actions on a mind in separation of who I really am.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame my mind for my behavior.
--
When and as I see myself delaying a responsibility, I stop I breathe. I realize that if I initiate damage control by trying to hide from my decision to postpone a task, I am being dishonest with myself and creating consequences that I don't want. I commit myself to assist and support myself when operating within a delay, to either face the resistance and do the 'dreaded' task, or engage in other prioritized tasks within an agreement with myself to accomplish the delayed task at a specific time frame.

source

When and as I see myself debating and justifying why I should go back to sleep in the morning, I stop I breathe. I realize that in this state of mind, I am unfit to make a stable decision. I commit myself to sit up and breathe until the resistance energy is not the sole director of my decision. As I consider all that I could be doing with my day and as the resistance is no longer overwhelming, I will allow myself to go back to sleep if that seems needed. For now I am on a probationary period of one month. If this point becomes an issue again, I'll make adjustments.

When and as I see myself blaming my mind for my behavior, I stop I breathe. I realize that I am the mind, that there is no separation, that no one but me alone is responsible for my behavior. I commit myself to assisting and supporting myself to identify each relationship point of blame/separation  between myself and my mind, so that I can and will walk the correction. The solution as standing one and equal with one's own mind, accepting the responsibility of one's own reactions, even though it seems out of our control, it isn't. I commit myself to accepting the responsibility for myself and in so doing, showing others that they can too: Operation Disband Victim Culture.

This isn't over yet. In fact, it's good practice to not think that any of my transcendence points are over because if I do, then I'm probably wrong. The desire to be done is a more potent thought generator than the absolute silence of true transcendence. I commit myself to persist in demystifying the resistance of self-change so that I & WE, equal as one, may walk this self-corrective process more effectively. Thanks.

Day 304 - Morning Boot Up

source

Most mornings when I do not have to awake suddenly, I allow myself to go through a noteworthy boot-up process. Thoughts that are enticing...they draw me back into my pillow and off into dream world. Actually, this is the primary if not only way I remember my dreams. It's kind of like a morning nap that I choose to do after waking up "too early." I haven't spent too much time considering the effects and ramification of this behavior until recently. Even as I recall the recent times that I was practicing morning thought/behavior awareness, I see that I would become defeated and submit to the strangely powerful force of tiredness.

This is my mind consciousness system booting up.

This morning, I went through this process with an added level of attention. I was even considering blogging about it first thing, but I backed down into my comfortable routine of waiting until the late night to blog. I've been thinking about it all day, which goes to show the detriment of delay. So, I have two points here that I want to investigate. Firstly, how does this boot up process affect my daily routine? Secondly, what would go differently in my daily routine, if I wrote first thing in the morning?

Right now, I'll focus on these initial thoughts about my boot up process:

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to go back to sleep in the morning from a thought-based starting point excuse/justification, including but not limited to: "no one else is up," "it's too cold," "there's no reason I need to be up right now" - this backchat is not comprehensively considerate of my plans for how I would ideally be spending my time.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to pay no attention to and take no responsibility for the decision I make when I go back to sleep in the morning.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to play victim of tiredness energy.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to forget that I create the tiredness energy in my mind.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to submit to and empower this sleepiness energy instead of realizing my oneness and equality with it, my own creation, myself.

When and as I see myself about to go back to sleep, I stop I breathe. I realize that this is a critical decision moment of who I am. I commit myself to asking myself this question, and being extraordinarily mindful of the excuse/justification/backchat that comes up within resistance to waking up.

When and as I see myself waking up after I've gone through an extra nap cycle in the morning, I stop I breathe. I realize that I am again faced with a decision of who I am. Will I continue my day in the absence of of willpower, or will I stop and decide to be the directive principle throughout the rest of my day? I commit myself to write in the mornings. This requires that I bring my laptop with me the night before with an intention set.

I commit myself to consider my daily responsibilities and ideal workload capacity before I simply return to my pillow.

I commit myself to realizing myself as the creator of my morning tiredness, and thus responsibility to awake / move.

I commit myself to getting my life back from the slumber-zone!

To be continued tomorrow ASAP > ASAIA (As Soon As I Awake)

Day 300 - Correcting Sleep Patterns

For as long as I can remember, I've spent the majority of my nights in a silent fight with myself. The basic idea was to postpone falling asleep as long as I can, to make full use of my time at night. Why was the nighttime special to me? It was time I had to myself.

Primarily in a family setting when this habit formed, I enjoyed social interaction during the day, but when the late evening arrived and everyone is doing their own thing, I would go into learning and work mode. It seemed the best way to use my time, and through this I developed an emphasized value on the late hours of the day. The results: Many late nights due to saving / delaying my work until the night & I utilized these late nights for self growth and understanding. It was opposite of how I perceived my peers and family to be. This inflated my ego superiority through "I am investing my free time into understanding whatever I am curious about." In college, most of my free (night) time to myself disappeared, and I doubled up on social time. This caused me to react and subtly define social time negatively as "social distraction." Now, I am for the most part free of obligated time structure, so I have full responsibility of my schedule. For the first time, I get to observe myself spending time throughout the entire day without anything to blame but me.

What have I found? I haven't made the changes I want to see with any amount of consistency.

What do I want? To spend my day time effectively and start respecting my sleep cycle.

How? Through self-corrected living application of course!

Why? Because fighting sleep usually means unpleasant mornings that can put  my whole day in a slump.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I do not need to sleep very much and thus can afford to postpone sleeping.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize the connection between how/when I fall asleep and how/when I wake up.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think "I'll sleep when I die."

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am special because I can get by with less sleep than others.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am cool and special because I can stay up the latest and rise the earliest.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to compare myself to others.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to value the nighttime hours more than other daytime hours.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not take ownership of and be responsible for how I spend my time in every moment, through blaming others for my daytime social preoccupation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to tell myself that I utilize the night hours best in being the most productive then, when the reality is that I am not always productive in the nighttime.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to limit myself by maintaining a routine of mental alertness and increased work ethic only at nighttime.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to reserve only the nighttime for self-introspection and self-growth.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that it's too difficult to blog during the day because I am not forced to do it just yet. This is a subtle delay justification that I'm not very conscious of, but nonetheless, has a powerful effect. This one point of delay justification has been defining me too heavily and I will not continue to allow it to dictate how I do what when!

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not investigate my sleeping habits until now.

--

I commit myself to begin watching when/how I fall asleep and when/how my wake up commences.

When and as I see myself postponing my blog/work until nighttime because "I don't have to do it yet," I stop I breathe. I realize that I am compromising myself, my process, and so the entire process of the human race, in that one single moment of "I don't have to do it yet." I commit myself to assist and support myself to no longer utilize this excuse design of putting off work and abdicating self-responsibility in each and every moment.

When and as I see myself fighting with myself to stay awake longer, I stop I breathe. I realize that sleeping might be whats best for all, for providing myself adequate time to rest will allow me to be fully ready to walk an effective day tomorrow. I commit myself to embodying the realization of continuity between days and respecting the sleep cycle as an equal and one value of time spent. Till here no further do I hide the connection of my tomorrow from my today. No more do I allow myself to distract myself instead of going to bed.

From here forward, I will be mindful of my sleeping habits, and I commit myself to on the fly correction when and as I see myself abusing my nighttime.

picture credit