My Practice: Morning Pages and Ayurveda

In “My Practice,” we share personal routines that create wellness and happiness from spiritual teachers, yogis, nutritionists, and more, in hopes to inspire your own healthy rituals.

Devoted to the Vedic sciences, Laura Plumb, is a practitioner of Ayurveda, Jyotish and Yoga Sadhana. Here is Laura’s practice:

“In the early morning when I first wake up, I like to lie in bed for a moment and listen. Silence, bird song, dawn breaking, the day coming alive is always revealing itself in new and loving ways. I take a few deep breaths, feel myself alive, and feel this new day breathing through me. I love this time of day in that numinous placeless place between sleep and wakefulness, dream and presence.

Some days, by inclination or necessity, I reach for a notebook and write. My "morning pages" are an important part of my daily practice helping me tune in, connect, and clear any cobwebs that remain clinging in the corners of my soul. It is Satya. It is Ahimsa, if we can define Ahimsa as loving kindness. It is Saucha, as it purifies my subconscious mind, freeing me of those insistent nigglers who so often just need their say in order to be released.

I almost never go back to read what I wrote, but when I do I am surprised by the intimacy, honesty and true human feelings that present themselves through those early morning scribbles.

Once upright, I stretch and head to my sacred daily rituals of "dinacharya" – eye rinse, nose wash, face, ears, and body oiling. Then I make a cup of warm water with lemon, sometimes with Aloe, and step outdoors, into our garden, to say good morning to the day.

Once showered, it is time for Yoga: Asana, Pranayama, Mantra and Meditation. Chanting the Hanuman Chalisa has been a central part of my morning practice for years now, to which I include a few "medicinal mantras" to fortify me to respond openly to the challenges of our times, and to remind me that my mission is love. Love must be my choice no matter what. Love.

At the end of each day, I pull out my harmonium and play. Sometime I do restorative Yoga, Tratak, or I go gaze up at the night sky. As a lover of Jyotish, it never ceases to utterly astonish me to look at the stars and know that we are each the coming alive of that starlight, cosmic patterns at play in our deep and glorious humanity.

My day closes with meditation, sometimes with Yoga Nidra. Before I go to sleep, I review my day, asking where I hurt, offended, or failed to love. I feel into the feelings that surface, allowing them to resolve and clear. I ask forgiveness, considering how my thoughts and actions can be integrated back into the wholeness that I am, that we each are. I invite the Divine Mother to hold me and I fall asleep imagining myself in her arms.

I dream with the night, and in the morning, begin again. Ayurveda teaches us that in a ceaselessly cyclical, persistently dynamic world, there is no pause button. There is no getting off the wheel of life. For peace, for rejuvenation, for a full energy and presence, we must align with the rhythms of nature set forth by the rhythms of the cosmos. Each day is a new day, to find ourselves once again alive in this teeming, bustling, demanding world where we are at once great and faulty, and where nature is always here to support us, if only we can listen and love.”

Laura Plumb offers classes and coaching on sacred, sumptuous living. You can find her at lauraplumb.com

Do you have a practice you’d like to share? Comment below or email us at [email protected].