Daily Meditations: Opening and Completing Your Day

As we move into a new year, we tend to think of the structures we can bring into our daily lives to help us care for ourselves better. I’ve always like the idea of having a daily ritual – a daily meditation or exercise or something that starts your day off with good intentions. And I think it’s very important in any kind of healing work to have a clearly delineated beginning and ending – an energetic container for the work.

I’ve often thought about creating a guided imagery meditation that would provide that container, and my new CD and mp3 “Opening and Completing Your Day,” a set of morning and evening meditations is the product of that idea.

In our busy lives – with electric lighting and 24/7 access to everything – we have lost our connection to sunrise and sunset, lost the sense of a real container that frames our work lives, personal lives, and our time for rest and turning inward.

To me, containers are sacred vessels that give necessary form. It becomes so easy to just keep moving from one thing to the next without that delineation…  now I am beginning my work, now I am completing it, now I am feeding myself, now I am resting…

How often do you eat a meal without doing something else at the same time? Watching TV, reading your mail, driving your car…  somewhere in this world of time-saving devices, we have lost our boundaries.

The first track of this new work is called “Opening to Your Day,” and is a 15 minute morning meditation to ground and center yourself and move into your busy life with a sense of intentionality and peacefulness.

I dedicate it to a lovely woman who lived down the road from me years ago, she was in her early 90’s and had grown up somewhere in the mountains in Europe. I used to see her early on a spring morning when I was walking my dog. She would be walking barefoot on the lawn in her bathrobe, and cheerfully told me she was “dew walking.” Where she grew up, they believed that the morning dew had healing and invigorating properties, and that you if you took the time to walk barefoot in it before you started your day, you would have a beautiful and healthy day!

For those of us who cannot dew walk each morning, and for the months when it is just too cold (!) a few minutes of meditation can go a long way toward creating a beautiful and healthy day.

I never thought to ask her how she ended her day, what ritual she followed to turn toward rest…  but I love the idea of an evening ritual, a time to find peace with all the events, challenges, all the stuff of the day. A time to look back over the day with gratitude and compassion, and put it to rest so that you can truly REST!

“Completing Your Day” is that evening guided journey inward, to the place of clarity, gratitude, acceptance and peace that lies deep within your center. I dedicate it to my beautiful dog Kiaro, an Italian mastiff who has the most grounding energy of anyone I’ve ever known, and has taught me more about real relaxation and peacefulness than any other teacher.

I really loved this project, and loved working with the remarkable composer and musician Gus Mancini for the first time. Gus likes to immerse himself in the ‘vibe’ of the work and let the music intuitively flow, so I created and recorded the narration for the guided imagery meditations,  and then Gus tuned into the energy of it and channeled his musical genius to create a live, spontaneous, inspired soundtrack.  I am looking forward to creating many more pieces with him.

I’d love to hear how you create the container for your day…

Yours in Peace,

Carol