Adding Rhythm to the Day

Love is the motivating force that makes all things possible.
Given that you have focussed your vision of the long term aims and goals of this life that you have chosen to live, given that you have discovered your zest and delight in embarking again on an embodied experience, all or any of the exercises, commitments and activities below can be done out of the care you wish to provide for the self that is yours for one lifetime.
Done out of love, all the exercises and disciplines below will warm and balance your soul, warm and balance your social life and allow the Christ love to flow through you into the world.

• In order to make optimum progress in development, a student could consider adopting a rhythm of inner work that reflects the pulse of day/night consciousness.
• On waking in the morning, you might collect yourself in the awareness of has been gifted to you in the night. Gathering in your appreciation the refreshment, the deepening, maybe any dreams or images that are present in your soul that you might not have noticed. Paying attention to any moods without becoming possessed by them. Maybe 2 – 10 mins
• Then, turning your attention to the coming day, notice what there is to look forward to and offer up a feeling of prayerfulness around anything that may appear with dread before your feeling inner eye. Suggested, 1 – 5mins
• Next, arise from your bed and experience your uprightness. Choose a good position to meditate and gather yourself to focus on your chosen morning meditation. The four stages of this may occupy 10 to 30 mins (or longer)
• After washing and dressing, turn your attention to the exercises in hand. Collect your imagination of how the grounding theme of the day-of-the-week might be managed and included in the day. Give your attention to the exercise of the month in the temple-building accessory exercises. Some of these require 10 mins or so, others can be prepared as something that will occur or will run through the day. In the latter case seeing ahead the completion of the exercise and the satisfaction gained from that completion is a helpful way to focus your attention on having it happen.
• Finally, a half hour or so of study. This might be a reading of a full chapter, or it might be a paragraph or two that you then ruminate on in order to deepen your understanding.
• If this means rising two hours before breakfast, you might consider this as a monastic practice. To combine the inward-focus of the priestly life, with the outward focus of keeping one’s work flowing well, is a worthy challenge for one who has studied, life after life in the temples and centres of contemplation of our developing cultures. If you are presently engaged in a caring work such as mothering and have no partner to alternate and or share the involved and the quiet times with then this morning practice may not be so fully available to you. Many in such a role have found the eight-fold path helpful. I have not practised this particular path in any depth but, like the 7 steps of the Grounding Exercises, it is based in an attitude to each day and can be prepared and reviewed, morning and evening, in as little as 5 mins.
• During the day there are moments when a moment’s reminder of this day’s activity, or of the day-cycle you are involved in, are helpful. Having a noon-time meditation also helps to balance and focus you. Each day has distinct moods, with the rising and the falling sun. There is a kind of summer solstice at noon, and taking this moment to sit for five or ten minutes and commune with your purpose and direction is valuable.
• Before sleep, in the evening, it is valuable to give a similar period of time to your development. If study is not possible in the morning, this might the time for it.
  • The next stage might best be done after preparing for bed so that little disturbs the transition from inner work to sleep. It is valuable now to review the day as an exercise in thinking. If you can track the day backwards, remembering first your most recent engagement and then what happened before that, etc, this reverse order creates freedom from the process, as well as a flexibility in your thinking, that few people develop. You can increase this by selecting one event and imagining in detail how a task such as cooking, painting or driving looks when played fully in reverse, EG: the exhaust gathering itself into your tailpipe and rushing into the engine to be converted to fuel…
    Introducing gratitude into this practice can be a pleasant way of deepening it.
  • After this, your evening meditation prepares the soul for the deep-instruction your guiding beings wish to give you in sleep. Many of Steiner’s given meditations have related morning and evening verses or you could choose ones that meet the mood, EG John, Chapter 1, 1-5 for mornings and 6-18 for the evening.

During the night your consciousness leaves the body, travelling with the astral and ego to subtle realms where your spirit guides help you to integrate the day’s experience into your longer-term plans and development. Then they prepare you for the day and days ahead with images and impulses that can play out helpfully as events approach you. This journey through recent time, the fullness of your past, into timelessness and back into the long term, then the near future, is a nightly reminder of who we are and what we are doing here that should be sinking into our unconscious as we wake. All of this process is to a greater or lesser extent interrupted by screens, intellectual obsessions, over-focus on work/entertainment, poor food, and lack of attention on our part. A good part of the inner work we do is designed to make this nighttime, higher-instruction more effective and more present to our daytime consciousness.  If your sleep is not easy and rewarding, you are in company with many in our modern age. One of the attacks of Ahriman is to diminish our connection with our spirit sources and guides. Among the many things you can do to make sleep deeper and easier, it may be worth trying some of these:

• Turn off all your screen-devices at least two hours before sleep.
• Reduce social media usage during the day to defined periods, maybe not more than an hour twice a day.
• Pay attention to the sounds of nature during the day, birds, wind, water, allowing yourself to merge with these sounds for repeated short periods of 30 to 120 seconds or so,
• Give yourself the gift of gratitude, as per 6th exercise in the Grounding series, but make it a focussed practice after the evening meal as the start-point to rounding off the day.
• When you are ready for sleep, imagine yourself drifting into an expanded state of silent awareness, attentive to the spirit guides that seek to lift you.
• Use the Lord’s Prayer to centre and quiet any errant thoughts, slowly repeating, and feeling, the cycle of each section in your feelings.
• Ask others in the group if they have practices or techniques that help them.