I don’t want to discourage anyone; if you’re doing a good job of consistently meditating in the evening, but you haven’t managed to implement a morning meditation practice, no worries – you’re doing fine. This post is not for you.
However, if you’re an irregular meditator and you find yourself many days putting it off because you’ve got “more important” things to do, and the days rolls along and pretty soon it’s the end of the day and you haven’t meditated… and you feel a little guilty but you push it aside and settle down on the couch with Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones or whatever your drug of choice is… keep reading.
Meditation builds willpower – but that takes time. Until you’ve established meditation as part of your daily life, then it REQUIRES willpower to meditate. You need to make a decision to do something different. You need to bump out of the rut that you’re in and follow another track.
Such decisions are easier in the morning. Why? Because you haven’t been forced to make too many decisions yet.
This article from the Harvard Business Review talks about a proven technique that the author claims successful people all employ: You put the important parts of your life on autopilot.
Barack Obama is said to wear only grey or blue suits because that way, he has fewer decisions to make when getting dressed in the morning. Routine is your friend.
(Of course, I’m very likely to be posting at some other point on this blog about how you have to break up routines, get out of your rut, go do something new! but that advice will be relevant only after you’ve added meditation to your everyday routines… 🙂 )
You have a finite store of energy. Meditation will increase that energy, but in order to gain that benefit from meditation, you have to do it. Sounds obvious, right? Well, it requires energy to make the decision to meditate – and meditation is going against the grain. It’s likely that few people in your life meditate. Certainly meditation is becoming hip these days but it’s still relatively counter-culture (not nearly like it was just 20 years ago! but not common). No matter what, if you haven’t been a regular meditator before, then starting to meditate regularly now is a change. A big one. You are hopefully inspired after coming to a meditation class and learning about how awesome it is, but it still requires the day-to-day decision to sit down and do it.
If you set up the morning as your meditation time, then you are setting your chances for success in actually meditating that day much higher.
If you say that you will meditate in the evenings, then you’re putting that decision at risk – despite your good intentions. If you don’t already have the established pattern of an evening meditation going on, then by the time your meditation appointment with yourself rolls around, it’s possible that you’ll just be plum dry on the decision-making abilities. Your reservoir will be empty. Even if you want to meditate and know that you “should” meditate, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to actually do the meditation at that point in the day.
So. If you’ve decided that you want to give this meditation thing a try, then I highly recommend making the commitment to doing it in the morning.
And that’s not even taking into account all the fabulousness that comes with a morning meditation!!!
But you’ll just have to try it yourself to find out. 😀