In your childhood you must’ve heard over and over again ‘morning shows the day’. Maybe your caregivers were just like my parents who understood the importance of being an ‘early riser’, and tried to install this good habit in you.

I don’t know if it was a smooth for you, but for me it was a challenge. I have always enjoyed being lazy in early hours of the day and to spend time under a warm blanket in the winter mornings.

Life took a 360 degree turn when I went to ashram. For the very first time I was not forced to wake up early, yet I was waking up every morning earlier than 4 AM; eventually it did became a habit that I cherish a lot till date.

So the alchemy that worked to bring this transformation was not any ‘short-lived-inspiration-or-motivation’ rather simply ‘yogic science’ which was strategically applied to the body and mind.

Whether you will wake up fresh and energetic largely depends on the your evening rituals.

Here are three simple ‘evening rituals’ if you truly want to be the architect of your mornings.

Body

Relax your body. I mean not just lazing in the couch and scrolling social media, or Netflix-ing! I am talking about 10 mins of mindful physical stretch/ couple of simple yoga postures to loosen up the exhausted body parts. This is must do in the evening, all the more on the days you totally exhausted to move your fingers.

Mind 

A distracted mind is never a relaxed mind. Mental relaxation is not distraction oriented. From my personal experience as a yoga student and as a teacher I have witnessed great impact of simple breathing practices/ pranayama. An investment of 5 mins on breathing practice can offer you a long lasting relaxation/calmness. (I will share the techniques in the following article)

Emotions

Never ever take unprocessed emotion lightly. My evening ritual includes few mins of ‘processing/ contemplating’ time of any ‘undigested emotions’ that I gathered during the day. This is usually the last thing I do before I start enjoying my horizontal time!
(Again more on that technique in another post).

When I started doing these three simple rituals I noticed my sleep was deep and I didn’t crave for longer hours in bed.
There are several other tools to hack the code for better sleep which I cover in my the workshops and courses. Just note till you don’t understand the your unique configuration of body-mind-emotion you will find life transformation as challenging. Just like if you try to operate a complex machine without reading the manual first you can have unpleasant surprises!