A Spiritual Night-time Routine: Meditation, Intentions, and Frequency

 A Spiritual Night-time Routine: Meditation, Intentions, and Frequency.

Nourish the Night

• The potential for my day to flourish is contingent on how much I nourish the soil of the previous night. I strive to make this time meaningful and rich; usually I am exhausted by the end of the day. My social battery longs to be recharged and urges me to nestle into bed. Much to the dismay of my heavy eyes this exhaustion is to be ignored. What must come first is intention setting, meditation, and frequency music. The ritualization of my bedtime routine has become the greatest investment for my perfect morning. 

Set Intentions

• Intention setting: The day is over, classes are finished, and I settle into my bed. I fight the urge to mindlessly scroll through Tik Tok… I usually lose. I plan on writing an entirely different blog post about my love-hate relationship with Tik Tok; but for now, I’ll stick to today's agenda regarding my bedtime routine. 

Its Okay To Get Distracted !

• Like I said before Tik Tok abducted my train of thought and steered it off course…. Sometimes I lie in bed for an embarrassing amount of time. Scrolling past what my brain deems as uninteresting and unworthy of my current attention, liking what my confirmation bias suggests, and saving posts that I delusionality promise myself “I will come back to”. Once the thumb flicking and flashing lights no longer rob my reward system, I put my phone down. Only for a moment as I lie flat on the bed, welcomed by the simplicity of an all-white ceiling. The stark contrast between the chaos of Tik Tok and the vast “nothingness” of my ceiling is enough to make me chuckle. So, I do, I giggle and reminisce about my day, my mind recalls laughs and rewinds memories. This recall is not a pointless waste of time either, it's the complete opposite, and I have found it to be a great segway into my Intention setting.

REFLECTION

• Reflecting on the joyful aspects of my day allows me to raise my vibrations and feel any preferred state of mind. I found that it is easier to stick to my intentions if I am already feeling the intended emotion. For example, If my intention is to feel gratitude during my meditation, then before I start the meditation, I will remember scenarios that remind me of gratitude. This wakeful active recall is insanely helpful in establishing peace and mindfulness during the motion of your day. People typically only talk about intention setting during meditation, which is great and lovely but how are you to feel calm when not meditating?

• Meditation offers a legal escape from reality, meditation is the practice of entering the darkness, or lightness of your mind. When you meditate you close your eyes and remain as still as possible in a comfortable position. What this does is retract your senses. How are you supposed to see visual stimuli with closed eyes? How do you feel when you're not moving? Meditation is the greatest robber; it robs you of distraction and leaves the soul as a guide.

Meditation

• When you meditate all, you are left with is your thoughts and consciousness, however, even with that being said you are not your thoughts. The only thing you are is pure consciousness. You are nothing but your ability to think, you are not your thoughts you are the observer of your thoughts.

• To further this idea I’ll say this, if you were to have an empty mind, to think and ponder absolutely nothing…. Then what is left? What is left to affirm the idea that you are alive. Consciousness is left; if you were your thoughts then you would die in the absence of thought. The reason you don't perish the minute you stop thinking, is because you are so much more than the arbitrary and fleeting totality of your thoughts and emotions. You are the “entity” that gets the privilege of experiencing said emotion, but they are not you. To say that you're sad, angry, or even happy is a misdiagnosis. YOU cannot be any of those things, you are not your sadness…. You feel sad. You are not your happiness, you feel happy. Making this distinction is incredibly necessary before one start meditating. Understanding that you are not the intrusive thoughts that blur your meditative focus, is essential for the success of the practice. It is also helpful to understand that even though you may think something, it doesn't have to be true. 

Trust Your Gut

• There is great worth in trusting intuition and listening to your gut, however, listening to your gut doesn't always mean blindly following every thought. There is a certain level of discernment that has to be established and cast upon thought. If people truly believed every single thing they thought, and acted on said beliefs, I'm positive that every single person reading this would be in jail! A less dramatic example of this is the night before a test, let's say you have a chemistry exam, you are an A plus chemistry student and you've studied all night; yet the day the exam is given to you, your brain is flooded with negative thoughts that you are going to fail, that your dumb, stupid, that you are incapable. These thoughts are not true, you are not dumb, nor stupid and these thoughts are to be ignored. These thoughts are the product of anxious self-doubt, thoughts that are detrimental to yourself worth, thoughts that are unnecessary and corrosive are allowed to be ignored in most circumstances. 

• Obviously, everyone's circumstances may be different, and this is where self-discernment makes its way to the spotlight. It is a practice, a skill, to consciously sift through and decide what thoughts can be discarded. The confidence in knowing what to delete, archive, and sometimes save is one that takes time and effort. Practices that help build this self-assertion and confidence include meditation and mindfulness. When you meditate the focus on emotional and soulful energy is enhanced. It becomes easier to sort through emotional baggage and trauma. It becomes easier to learn yourself and identify repeating or negative thought patterns. 
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Self-Awareness of Thought

• For example, if you meditate and with eyes closed, body unmoving- and yet still you automatically think “I am so ugly”, then that is a repetitive, negative, deep rooted and buried insecurity. This is similar to saying that the day is bleak and ugly without ever stepping outside. This example of feeling ugly or feeling worthless without looking at yourself, without doing a single thing. Means that the belief is internal, that with eyes closed or open you hate your state of being. That in the presence and absence of a mirror you are not enough. We often think that we can run from feelings like this, that we can ignore our insecurities, but meditation forces the feeling to catch up with us. 

• Mediation wins the race we forgot we signed up for. Meditation forces you to home in on the true root of the problem. Why do you feel ugly with no mirror to hold? How come in your stillness you feel worthless, hideous? With enough time and practice the very meditation that birthed these questions can produce a solution. When you are quiet with yourself and your mind, the answers arrive. As you sit there, eyes closed, diving into the feeling of worthlessness…. Letting the misery and bad feelings run its course…. That's when the answers will come. You will remember the day your mother and sister called you ugly, the memory that you tried not to feel. You will remember being teased for not dressing the same way as your peers. In stillness comes recall, and in recall healing happens. To unpack and face the traumas we fight every day to forget and avoid, meditation is key. I meditate every day because every day you are reborn, every day you face a new set of challenges and triumphs that your brain will process in whatever way it deems fit. I spend every day quieting my mind in order to sort through what my brain has chosen to file. 

Brain Hacking

• What my brain has placed in painful categories becomes known to me, what my brain has fit into the happy box is appreciated and sought after. It is your brain's job to make quick assumptions and executive decisions all day.  It is how humans continue to function and stay alive; But, with that being said, it is your job as the entity enclosing your brain to sort, approve, and decline the decisions that your brain has made.

• If you felt ashamed early in your day because your boss yelled at you, then that means that while the scolding took place, without you even realizing, your brain has conveniently tucked that into the shame and embarrassment folder. It is your job to open up the folder and unpack it in whatever way you see fit during mediation. The human has every right to click, drag, and delete that file. Allowing the shame to dissipate into nothingness and dissolve the embarrassment all together. Meditating is like going to the headquarters of your own mind and making decisions for how things are to be done. You are the boss, you are the CEO, you have control. 

•  With this distinction placed, all you truly have during meditation is your consciousness. The thoughts that arise during meditation are nothing but computer files to be dealt with accordingly. You, the consciousness, are the ability to click the file. In a funny way I guess you could say that the computer in its wholeness and entirety…. Is the human. A combination of consciousness, programming and physical body to create a vessel to navigate life.

Digging Deep Into Meditation

• This is why when you meditate it is best to set intentions before, an example would be to meditate with the intention of feeling gratitude. This prepares your subconscious mind to send you all the files that include gratitude. Similar to preheating an oven you are preparing the device to do what you want it to. During the meditation to feel the gratitude that you desire it is best to think of things that make you feel grateful. Once you have thought about these beautiful things, it is wise to focus on the physical feelings of gratitude. What does it feel like in your toes, legs, fingers, arms? Can you feel the warmth and electricity associated with appreciation? How long can you embrace the feeling? What does it feel like as it slips or let's go? This focus on internal sensation will deepen and strengthen your meditation. 

• After Mediating for however much time you deem necessary (for me 15 minutes to a 1 hour), it is beneficial to add frequencies to the night routine. When I am done meditating, I open my eyes and try to cling to the peaceful feeling for as long as possible. At this point my body feels whole yet sleepy, I know it's time for rest as my mind and body has been prepared. I will then pick up my phone and play chakra frequency music or healing hurts.

•  I will write an entire blog post on the legitimacy of frequencies, but for now I will say falling asleep to the soothing sounds has been game changing. Frequency music aids me in falling asleep quicker and for a longer period of restful sleep. I allow the frequency music to play throughout the entire night. I wake up feeling refreshed, grateful, and even excited. Once I wake up it's time to put a pen to my gratitude journal, set intentions, meditate, and head off to my classes…. I know that the explanation of my morning routine is brief, but don't worry, I have a lengthy post describing my morning routine coming soon (:

-Peace out, Mel