Waking up early (shhh, secretly I like it!)

Do you ever notice how calming it can be to carry out your plans? Well, calm is how I felt last week (as I wrote) when I first decided to go to bed super early, set the alarm for 5:30am, and then wake up and go for a walk. I’m working on reminding myself about all the good things about taking early morning walks, because I am so apt to get carried away with fussy lazy selfish anxious reasons to skip it. But I did feel calmed last week, like I was soothing my inner fussy self. That was a nice feeling.
But the most important part is that I didn’t let myself get stopped by last Tuesday’s success! I got up and did it again the next day. Two walks in a row, on two ridiculously rainy and dark and miserable mornings, made bright and beautiful because I got to bop along listening to music and start my day refreshed and alive. Very nice.

My walks were interrupted on Thursday and Friday by some pretty awful lower back pain, though. Ouch. One chiropractic adjustment and one rest day later, I got up on a marvelously sunny Saturday morning and went walking again! Bad mood 0, Jesse 2.

It is lovely to be freed from the Magic Sloth Hour (9-10 pm) of lame tv and aimless web surfing. In the pre-dawn hours, the house is quiet and the neighborhood is sleepy, and I get to spend some time with my own thoughts and feelings. What it really feels like is a healthy dose of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps me stop eating when I am full, choose nourishing food over empty food, and feel my emotions instead of lashing out or using a pint of ice cream to “cope.” I like to think that my morning walk can serve as a waking-up meditation, getting to know the day and my mood and my body all at once. Even if I’m listening to melodramatic dancey Bollywood music (playlist du jour) and squinting at the rain, the physical work is good for my body and my mind, where all I have to focus on is putting one foot in front of the other.

I think I’m slowly coming to a realization about how change works for me. I can get excited about living healthy and make lists of good food, buy accessories and make plans, go to websites and track statistics, weigh every morning and generate a lot of noise about what I’m doing – create a trail of goals, numbers, ideas, and tools. This is great in the short term! I get excited about a shiny new thing, and hopefully, as a byproduct of shiny-newness, I make a few healthy choices along the way. This is great but it doesn’t always help me be more mindful about what I want. If I want change to work once the excitement dies down, I have to be willing to feed the contemplative side of me through mindfulness: not just planning and shopping and cooking the good food but eating it slowly, in a quiet kitchen with someone I love. Maybe this was the missing ingredient for me earlier this year when I started trying to make healthy choices and lose weight. Over the long term, the mindfulness has to be there to steady all the noise and actions that happen on the surface. So mindfulness is what I’m working on this week, though it has to be a mindfulness that connects to physical movement – like Yoga class and morning walks. Maybe I’ll come back next week and write something totally different, but this week my healthy choices are working because they’re connected to mindful acts of self love and self care.

If you’re reading out there, how does mindfulness fit into your life? What helps you to be mindful during the day?