Tired meditation

When I imagine myself doing meditation, I see myself almost leaping out of bed with boundless energy, followed by a full and focused period of breathing exercises. Nothing could be further from the truth. Right now I'm working through the Discovery Series on Headspace and it's focusing more on looking at your body and how it feels. Now, a lot of what the meditation suggests is, is to use focus to alleviate the negative feelings that occur in your body. This is great and it does help a lot but I have a fairly recurring and distracting problem when meditation.

You see, because I see meditation as a fundamental habit I always start my day with it. The problem is that a lot of the time I feel like utter crap getting out of bed. I'm not the type to leap out of bed, it's a struggle. When I'm sitting and focused internally I notice each and every miserable feeling my body goes through at the start of the day. Say I haven't gotten a good nights sleep, my eyes feel like they're on fire, I get random pains everywhere or sometimes I want to throw up. Oh, and my entire body just wants to slide back to being horizontal just for a few more minutes. This is the ugly side of meditation you don't imagine when you conjure up the image of a yogi sitting cross-legged focused intensely on nothing.

My tactics for this are really straight-forward, before I start on the fundamental habit, I now do two things. A few quick stretches for just a minute or two and I wash my face. It sounds so simple but the effects are drastic. It seems to start the waking cycle a little faster, I'm that little bit more alert and awake. The focus of the meditation moves from post-bed pains to the more of the legitmate pains/pleasures I'm more likely to feel during the day. On top of that, the combination builds up more of the relaxed focus that meditation tries to teach you. So if you're struggling with meditation in the morning give that a shot. Also, if there's persistent pains that occur during meditation and they can be alleviated, do so.

It may be worth going to see a physio/doctor and if you're really struggling to alleviate pain. Sometimes the solution can be a yoga routine, which is simply another form of meditation. Focus is all well and good, but when solvable problems take over your meditation completely, it's a no-brainer. Solve them and move onto other more difficult issues.