Continue my marvelous, sensational morning routine

I sort of give up on this, if only because my mornings are now my most precious time of the day, and if I feel like watching Law and Order well then yay for me – I deserve such a harmless luxury. I sit at my desk, basking in the glow of the heater and twinkle lights, sipping green tea. I check e-mail and 43T during commercials so it isn’t like I’m not doing something!

Morning pages, exercise and meditation are still hugely important to me/my emotional well-being, so in no way am I abandoning any of those practices, but I can (and have been) keeping them up whenever possible. For now though, at least while I’m in school and busting my ass all over the place, I want to treasure every blessed morning moment, routine be damned.

Last night, after my having gone on and on about how much I love Law & Order earlier in the day, I came to find out that there was a TWO-HOUR SPECIAL !!! Actually, it turned out to be two one-hour shows, but I didn’t care – I still thought it was a sign! I settled into the corner of the couch with my softest, coziest throw and single-scoop vanilla ice cream cone. The thought crossed my mind that the universe was gifting me these two hours as a sort of send off, since I wasn’t planning to watch L&O in the mornings anymore.

Because the show ran until 10 p.m. and my bedtime is usually between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m., I was too tired to get right up this morning. Instead, I decided to snooze through the 4:45 a.m. alarm. I figured that part of the universe’s plan to support me in my effort to ‘quit’ my a.m. L&O habit was to keep me up late, making me too tired to get up and watch today’s episode. Seemed to make sense to me then, at least, in my groggy, half-asleep state. So I snoozed ‘til 5:15, thinking that if I just miss enough at the beginning of the show, I’d resist turning the t.v. on at all.

You already know, don’t you? Yep, I flipped it on this morning while I waited for M to back out of our driveway (we park the cars behind the house, and every morning I kneel on the couch at the front of the house, and wave goodbye and blow him kisses out the big living room window). It seemed so harmless!! I thought “I’ll just see which episode it is while I wait to see M’s car appear”. I don’t know WHY I thought I’d be able to turn the show off again at all, but when I discovered it was an episode I hadn’t ever seen before, well, there was no hope. I had to watch it through to the end, _{by which time I was seriously pissed at myself for sleeping through the beginning – on purpose, no less!!}

Thank goodness for tomorrows :o)

I love the television series Law & Order (I’m a traditionalist though, and really only watch the original series. On occasion I’ll watch Elliot & Olivia on SVU, but I refuse to watch that blow-hard on CI) (I feel very strongly about this :o).

I could probably recite word-for-word the oldest episodes, with ADA Stone and his assistant Paul Robinette, then Claire Kincaid, then Jamie Ross … ah, the good ole days. But I digress…

During my recent two-year depressed slump, I discovered that Law & Order airs at 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday through Saturday mornings on Bravo. Very often just the thought of missing the show was enough to drag me out of bed at that dark, sleepy hour. I’d make coffee and savour both my strong java and my much-loved show for that first hour of each new day. Unfortunately, one can’t be at the gym or at work or productively tackling much else whilst watching television at 5:00 a.m. so I had to kick my a.m. Law & Order habit in favour of healthier habits. And I did it too. Took some adjusting, but eventually I was up and washing dishes at 5:00 a.m. instead. Then I’d write for a while, maybe get in a short meditation, and then dash off to meet D for a short jog. And I was so happy! I was using my time wisely and caring for my body and spirit far better than I had been previously doing with my coffee & t.v. ritual.

Why the long-winded story about this? Well, partly because I’m avoiding work here at work, but also because over my Christmas break from work, I took up watching Law & Order again at 5:00 most mornings! It was great – loved it, loved it, loved it. I certainly don’t regret the indulgence over my holidays, but now that I’m back to work and charging forth into this new year with the best of intentions, I have to kick the habit again. This morning I went down to my computer, as usual, and reflexively clicked on the t.v. and turned it to channel 40. Doh! I did my best to not watch it, but truth be told, I had at least one eye and one ear on the boob tube most of the time.

I will try again tomorrow to resist the urge to watch, opting instead to care for myself through exercise, meditation and morning pages, but this is a tough one for me. I’m a junkie!

I hadn’t been writing my pages for weeks, until this morning. I actually wrote a single page yesterday afternoon, a little ‘pep talk’ to myself about how important that practice is to me and I reset my intention to resume and keep it up. This morning, in keeping with my renewed commitment, I sat down to write for a while, but eek! The well was desert-dry. I think I wrote the same insipid thought, in only slightly different ways, three or four times. I managed only two painful pages of drivel before I gave up.

I’m not going to panic – if I recall correctly, back when I first started TAW and the morning pages, it took me a few mornings to ‘warm up’. Just goes to show though, that if you don’t use it, you can in fact lose it!

I’m thankful that starting Saturday (five more sleeps!) I’m on holidays from work and can WILL grant myself the mornings for writing pages and meditation, as I used to.

Last week I was up early and wrote maybe a page or two per day, but D and I met to go jogging four mornings, and then I had to come in to work early to type reports for Dr. Leave-it-to-the-last-possible-moment-to-dictate-so-that-typist-girl-has-a -gun-to-her-head!!! Grrr… But for now he’s all caught up so I can’t blame him for this week.

No, this week I’ve been up at 4:50 and off to the gym – which is great! But... obviously going to the gym takes away my ‘free’ morning time. Since I really want to continue going to the gym, I think I might have to shift some things around. Perhaps I could meditate and write pages in the evenings, and do my sun salutations at the gym in the mornings. The only problem with that plan though is that I often get lazy in the evenings… I guess I’ll have to do a one or two week trial and see how it goes.

Didn’t have time writing pages, sun salutations or meditation this morning, because I was too busy making a Tangerine Chiffon Pie for this evening’s Survivor Night…. ooooooo… ahhhhhhh…..

I’m bitter – it’s Wednesday morning and for TWO DAYS NOW I’ve not had time to write pages or do any of my MSMR activities. Phooey! It’s just such a busy week – I have something to do every evening such that by the time we sit down to eat and relax, it’s 8 p.m. or later, so we stay up closer to 10 p.m. to digest and unwind, and then 5:00 a.m. just comes too soon!! AND I have to be to work by 7:00 each morning because I’ve got heaps of typing to do, so my lovely two and three hour morning windows of ‘me’ time have been swallowed up by sleep and work… yeah, I’m bitter about that.

Yesterday morning I made the clever decision to meditate FIRST, before doing my pages. I thought it might be interesting to see how, if at all, my writing changed after a centering exercise such as meditation as compared to my usual right-out-of-bed, still yawning pages.

I didn’t detect any difference at all really, but I’m willing to try this a few more times to give it a better go. Plus, it guarantees that I get my meditation in, which I’m more and more convinced will be my salvation.

I also did sun salutations before I started writing pages. It was especially lovely because I plugged in the Christmas lights that we leave strung around the entire room all year long, and I played this upbeat but soothing piece off of my new Yoga Salon CD. The music helped me maintain perfect cadence, and I think by the time the song ended, I had done well over ten sets, and I was feeling very alert, limber and fresh.

Because I’ve been jogging every other day, and I can’t really fit ALL of my morning pleasures in, I’m planning to meditate and do the sun salutations on alternate days to the jog days.

Well, I’m still pretty faithfully writing my morning pages, and some days I knock my own socks off with what I reveal on paper – stuff that MUST have already been rattling around in my mind but that I couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge until my hand and pen brought it to the surface.

Unfortunately, the sun salutations and meditation always seem to get pushed back and back until I run out of time and have to leave for work. I’m not giving up though – I went to a 90-minute yoga-for-runners class last night, got all rubbery and stretched, and reminded myself once again how wonderful yoga feels. And of course, having recently acknowledged a possible problem with anxiety, I really must make meditation a priority!

Wrote my pages (choppy though they were) and performed my sun salutations this morning, but didn’t have time to meditate. I FINALLY get an evening at home this eve, so maybe I’ll try later. While I’m at it, since I didn’t exercise this morning either, maybe I’ll have a go with my BodyWedge21. Eventually I’d like to work that into my MSM routine too.