by Jay Shetty
TRY THIS: A NEW MORNING ROUTINE
Every morning make some time for:
Thankfulness. Express gratitude to someone, some place, or something every day. This includes thinking it, writing it, and sharing it. (See Chapter Nine.)
Insight. Gain insight through reading the paper or a book, or listening to a podcast.
Meditation. Spend fifteen minutes alone, breathing, visualizing or with sound. (More about sound meditation at the end of Part 3.)
Exercise. We monks did yoga, but you can do some basic stretches or a workout.
Thankfulness. Insight. Meditation. Exercise. T.I.M.E. A new way to put time into your morning.
THE EVENING ROUTINE
At the ashram, I learned that the morning is defined by the evening. It’s natural for us to treat each morning like a new beginning, but the truth is that our days circle on themselves. You don’t set your alarm in the morning—you set it the night before. It follows that if you want to wake up in the morning with intention, you need to start that momentum by establishing a healthy, restful evening routine—and so the attention we’ve given the mornings begins to expand and define the entire day.
There is “no way” you have time to wake up one hour earlier, but how often do you switch on the TV, settle on one show or another, and end up watching until past midnight? You watch TV because you’re “unwinding.” You’re too tired to do anything else. But earlier sleep time can put you in a better mood. Human growth hormone (HGH) is kind of a big deal. It plays a key role in growth, cell repair, and metabolism, and without it we might even die sooner. As much as 75 percent of the HGH in our bodies is released when we sleep, and research shows that our highest bursts of HGH typically come between 10 p.m. and midnight, so if you’re awake during those hours, you’re cheating yourself of HGH. If you have a job that goes past midnight, or little kids who keep you up, feel free to ignore me, but waking up before the demands of your day begin should not be at the expense of good sleep. If you spent that ten to midnight getting real rest, it wouldn’t be so hard to find those hours in the morning.
In the ashram, we spent the evenings studying and reading and went to sleep between eight and ten. We slept in pitch darkness, with no devices in the room. We slept in T-shirts and shorts, never in our robes, which carried the energy of the waking day.
Morning sets the tone of the day, but a well-planned evening prepares you for morning. In an interview on CNBC’s Make It, Instagram Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary said that before he goes to sleep he writes down three things he wants to do the next morning before he talks to anyone besides his family. Take his cue and before you go to sleep, figure out the first things you want to achieve tomorrow. Knowing what you’re tackling first will simplify your morning. You won’t have to push or force your mind when it’s just warming up. (And, bonus, those tasks won’t keep you up at night if you know you’re going to handle them.)
Next, find your version of a monk’s robe, a uniform that you’ll put on in the morning. I have a bigger selection of clothes now, and to my wife’s relief none of them are orange robes, but I favor similar sets of clothes in different colors. The point is to remove challenges from the morning. Insignificant as they may seem, if you’re spending your morning deciding what to eat, what to wear, and what tasks to tackle first, the accumulating choices complicate things unnecessarily.
Christopher Sommer, a former US National Team gymnastics coach, with forty years’ experience, tells his athletes to limit the number of decisions they have to make because each decision is an opportunity to stray from their path. If you spend your morning making trivial decisions, you’ll have squandered that energy. Settle into patterns and make decisions the night before, and you’ll have a head start on the morning and will be better able to make focused decisions throughout the day.
Finally, consider what your last thoughts are before going to sleep. Are they This screen is going blurry, I’d better turn off my phone or I forgot to wish my mother “Happy Birthday”? Don’t program yourself to wake up with bad energy. Every night when I’m falling asleep, I say to myself, “I am relaxed, energized, and focused. I am calm, enthusiastic, and productive.” It has a yoga-robot vibe when I put it on paper, but it works for me. I am programming my mind to wake up with energy and conviction. The emotion you fall asleep with at night is most likely the emotion you’ll wake up with in the morning.
A STONE ON THE PATH
The goal of all this preparation is to bring intentionality to the entire day. The moment you leave your home, there will be more curveballs, whatever your job may be. You’re going to need the energy and focus you cultivated all morning. Monks don’t just have morning routines and nighttime routines; we use routines of time and location every moment of the day. Sister Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun I’ve already mentioned, says, “People living in the cities and suburbs… can make choices about the way they live, though most of them don’t see that, because they are conditioned to be on the go all the time.… Imagine for a moment what America would look like, imagine the degree of serenity we’d have, if laypeople had something comparable to the daily schedule of the cloistered life. It provides scheduled time for prayer, work, and recreation.” Routines root us. The two hours I spend meditating support the other twenty-two hours of my day, just as the twenty-two hours influence my meditation. The relationship between the two is symbiotic.
TRY THIS: VISUALIZATION FOR TOMORROW
Just as an inventor has to visualize an idea before building it, we can visualize the life we want, beginning by visualizing how we want our mornings to be.
After you do breathwork to calm your mind, I want you to visualize yourself as your best self. Visualize yourself waking up in the morning healthy, well rested, and energized. Imagine the sunlight coming through the windows. You get up, and as your feet touch the ground, you feel a sense of gratitude for another day. Really feel that gratitude, and then say in your mind, “I am grateful for today. I am excited for today. I am joyful for today.”
See yourself brushing your teeth, taking your time, being mindful to brush every tooth. Then, as you go into the shower, visualize yourself feeling calm, balance, ease, stillness. When you come out of the shower, because you chose what you were going to wear the night before, it’s not a bother to dress. Now see yourself setting your intentions, writing down, “My intention today is to be focused. My intention today is to be disciplined. My intention today is to be of service.”
Visualize the whole morning again as realistically as you can. You may add some exercise, some meditation. Believe it. Feel it. Welcome it into your life. Feeling fresh, feeling fueled.
Now visualize yourself continuing the day as your best self. See yourself inspiring others, leading others, guiding others, sharing with others, listening to others, learning from others, being open to others, their feedback and their thoughts. See yourself in this dynamic environment, giving your best and receiving your best.
Visualize yourself coming home at the end of the day. You’re tired, but you’re happy. You want to sit down and rest, but you’re grateful for whatever you have: a job, a life, family, friends, a home. You have more than so many people. See yourself in the evening; instead of being on your phone or watching a show, you come up with new ideas to spend that time meaningfully.
When you visualize yourself getting into bed at a good time, see yourself looking up and saying, “I’m grateful for today. I will wake up tomorrow feeling healthy, energized, and rested. Thank you.” Then visualize yourself scanning throughout your body and thanking each part of your body for helping you throughout the day.
When you’re ready, in your own time, at your own pace, slowly and gently open your eyes.
Note: Life messes up your plans. Tomorrow is not going to go as you visualize it. Visualization doesn’t change your life, but it changes how you see it. You can build your life by returning to the ideal that you imagined. Whenever you feel that your life is out of alignment,
you realign it with the visualization.
In the ashram we took the same thirty-minute walk on the same path at least once a day. Every day the monk asked us to keep our eyes open for something different, something we’d never before seen on this walk that we had taken yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.
Spotting something new every day on our familiar walk was a reminder to keep our focus on that walk, to see the freshness in each “routine,” to be aware. Seeing something is not the same as noticing it. Researchers at UCLA asked faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Psychology whether they knew the location of the nearest fire extinguisher. Only 24 percent could remember where the closest one was, even though, for 92 percent of the participants, a fire extinguisher was just a few feet from where they filled out the survey (which was usually their own office or a classroom they frequently visited). One professor didn’t realize that there was a fire extinguisher just inches from the office he’d occupied for twenty-five years.
Truly noticing what’s around us keeps our brains from shifting to autopilot. At the ashram we were trained to do this on our daily walk.
I have taken this walk for hundreds of days now. It is hot, but not unpleasant in my robes. The forest is leafy and cool, the dirt path feels soothing underfoot. Today a senior monk has asked us to look for a new stone, one that we have never noticed before. I am slightly disappointed. For the past week or so we’ve been asked to look for a new flower every day, and yesterday I lined up an extra one for today, a tiny blue flower cupping a drop of dew that seemed to wink at me as if it were in on my plan. But no, our leader is somehow onto me and has switched things up. And so the hunt is on.
Monks understand that routine frees your mind, but the biggest threat to that freedom is monotony. People complain about their poor memories, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem. By searching for the new, you are reminding your brain to pay attention and rewiring it to recognize that there’s something to learn in everything. Life isn’t as certain as we assume.
How can I advocate both for establishing routines and seeking out novelty? Aren’t these contradictory? But it is precisely doing the familiar that creates room for discovery. The late Kobe Bryant was onto this. The basketball legend had started showing his creative side, developing books and a video series. As Bryant told me on my podcast, On Purpose, having a routine is critical to his work. “A lot of the time, creativity comes from structure. When you have those parameters and structure, then within that you can be creative. If you don’t have structure, you’re just aimlessly doing stuff.” Rules and routines ease our cognitive burden so we have bandwidth for creativity. Structure enhances spontaneity. And discovery reinvigorates the routine.
This approach leads to delight in small things. We tend to anticipate the big events of life: holidays, promotions, birthday parties. We put pressure on these events to live up to our expectations. But if we look for small joys, we don’t have to wait for them to come up on the calendar. Instead they await us every day if we take the time to look for them.
And I’ve found it! Here, a curious orange-y stone that has seemingly appeared out of nowhere since yesterday. I turn it over in my palm. Finding the stone isn’t the end of our discovery process. We observe it deeply, describe the color, the shape, immerse ourselves in it in order to understand and appreciate it. Then we might describe it again to be sure we’ve experienced it fully. This isn’t an exercise, it’s real. A deep experience. I smile before returning it to the edge of the path, half-hidden, but there for someone else to find.
To walk down the same old path and find a new stone is to open your mind.
CHEW YOUR DRINKS AND DRINK YOUR FOOD
Monk training wasn’t just about spotting the new. It was about doing familiar things with awareness.
One afternoon a senior monk told us, “Today we will have a silent lunch. Remember to chew your drinks and drink your food.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We don’t take the time to consume our food properly,” the monk said. “When you drink your food, grind the solids into liquid. When you chew your drink, instead of gulping it down take each sip as if it is a morsel to be savored.”
TRY THIS: SAME OLD, SAME NEW
Look for something new in a routine that you already have. What can you spy on your commute that you have never seen before? Try starting a conversation with someone you see regularly but haven’t ever engaged. Do this with one new person every day and see how your life changes.
If a monk can be mindful of a single sip of water, imagine how this carries through to the rest of daily life. How can you rediscover the everyday? When you exercise, can you see the route that you run or feel the rhythms of the gym differently? Do you see the same woman walking her dog every day? Could you greet her with a nod? When you shop for food, can you take the time to choose the perfect apple—or the most unusual one? Can you have a personal exchange with the cashier?
In your physical space, how can you look at things freshly? There are articles all around our homes and our workspaces that we have put out because they please us: photos, knickknacks, art objects. Look at yours closely. Are these a true reflection of what brings you joy? Are there other favorites that deserve a turn in the spotlight and inject some novelty into your familiar surroundings? Add flowers to a vase or rearrange your furniture to find new brightness and purpose in familiar possessions. Simply choosing a new place for incoming mail can change it from clutter to part of an organized life.
We can awaken the familiarity of home by changing things up. Have music playing when your partner comes home if that’s something you don’t usually do. Or vice versa, if you usually put on music or a podcast when you get home, try silence instead. Bring a strange piece of fruit home from the store and put it in the middle of the dinner table. Introduce a topic of conversation to your dinner companions or take turns reporting three surprising moments in the day. Switch the lightbulb to a softer or clearer light. Flip the mattress. Sleep on the “wrong” side of the bed.
Appreciating the everyday doesn’t even have to involve change so much as finding value in everyday activities. In his book At Home in the World, the monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “To my mind, the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them.… If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert or a cup of tea, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert or my tea when I finally have them.… Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane.”
TRY THIS: TRANSFORM THE MUNDANE
Even a task as quotidian as doing the dishes can transform if you let it. Allow yourself to be in front of the sink, committed to a single task. Instead of putting on music, focus all your senses on the dishes—watch their surfaces go from grimy to clean, smell the dish soap, feel the steam of the hot water. Observe how satisfying it is to see the sink go from full to empty. There is a Zen koan that says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” No matter how much we grow, we are never free of daily chores and routines, but to be enlightened is to embrace them. The outside may look the same, but inside you are transformed.
EVERY MOMENT OF THE DAY
We’ve talked about taking an ordinary, familiar moment and finding new ways to appreciate it. To take that presence to another level, we try to string these moments together, so that we’re not picking and choosing certain walks or dishwashing episodes to make special—we’re elevating our awareness of every moment, at every moment.
We’re all familiar with the idea of being in the moment. It’s not hard to see that if you’re running a race, you won’t be able to go back and change how fast you ran at Mile 2. Your only opportunity to succeed is in that moment. Whether you are at a work meeting or having
dinner with friends, the conversations you have, the words you choose—you won’t ever have another opportunity just like that one. In that moment you can’t change the past, and you’re deciding the future, so you might as well be where you are. Kālidāsa, the great Sanskrit writer of the fifth century, wrote, “Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.”
We may all agree that living in the present makes sense, but the truth is that we’re only willing to have selective presence. We’re willing to be present at certain times—during a favorite show or a yoga class, or even during the mundane task we’ve chosen to elevate—but we still want to be distracted when we choose to be distracted. We spend time at work dreaming about going on a beach vacation, but then, on the beach, long-awaited drink in hand, we’re annoyed to find that we can’t stop thinking about work. Monks learn that these two scenarios are connected. A desired distraction at work bleeds into unwanted distraction on vacation. Distraction at lunch bleeds into the afternoon. We are training our minds to be where we physically aren’t. If you allow yourself to daydream, you will always be distracted.