The idea of having a daily practice where we can each find our sanity and center again is a huge theme in my life at the moment.
For starters, I began mentoring six women last month through what I call the Awakened Living Master Class, which takes place over two months and consists of weekly group calls, journal prompts and readings.
The goal is that each person find their own daily practice so that they can pull back the lens of their life and gain a broader view of how they’re feeling, living and being in their world.
I started my own daily centering practice a few years ago. I remember waking up one day and turning to my husband, Marc, and saying, “I’m wasting my life.”
I know that sounds extreme and to most people who knew me at the time, completely inaccurate. From the outside, I had a full, happy and productive life, both personally and professionally. But on the inside I felt totally asleep. I had this big, beautiful life that I wasn’t actually experiencing. I hadn’t cultivated any skills that would have me be present, in any given moment, to the joy that I had created.
To borrow a phrase from Socrates, I was living an unexamined life.
In ancient Greek times, philosophers spent lifetimes using their minds to make sense out of the world.
For Socrates, the good life was one where we each strive to come to know and understand ourselves, and find the meaning or value in our existence.
Without this anchor, we’re just sailing around wherever the currents and the wind blow us. We have no navigation, no course, and for me, no purpose.
So, it was from this realization that I felt the shocking truth that I was wasting my life. I was asleep at the wheel. On total autopilot. Living from my defaults, my old wiring and ways of being that were completely unconscious to me.
It’s actually perfect to say that this was my “wake up” call. Because not only was I starting to come awake to how asleep I had been, I was starting to realizing that I needed a way to be more awake more often, like every day. And maybe, after enough practice, all day.
So, here we are a few years later and my daily centering and grounding practice is firmly rooted in my life.
When people find out about my morning ritual, they’re often flabbergasted that I can get up every day at 5am (yes, 5am!) to spend this time with myself. For some, the response is an immediate and full body no. But more often than not, people are really curious about why and how I have this daily devotion to conscious living.
And, I think it’s because they have the sense of what I was feeling years ago… feeling a little untethered, maybe a little lost, or that they don’t really know who they are or what this is all for.
I created today’s episode for these people: for anyone who is curious about what’s possible if they just came back to themselves for just 20 minutes every 24 hours.
We need to come home to ourselves and take ourselves off autopilot. With love, compassion and zero judgement, we need to wake ourselves up.
For me, a daily centering practice is an amazing wake up tool.
Until next time,
