Week 3 of my challenge to become an early bird, I am waking consistently at 5 a.m. – but it hasn’t been a straight line. Week 1 was successful. Week 2 was shaky. Then came a month of angst and inconsistency as I struggled to not totally fail this challenge. Now in my final week, I serenely rose sans alarm clock at 5 a.m. every morning with complete assurance, pleasure, clarity and energy. How? Continue reading

Sometimes a bullet of earth shattering wisdom will reach across all triviality and, as the poet Rilke wrote, “You must change your life.” I’ve long debated the merits of living a freeform creative life versus a structured, scheduled one. Having never heard a really convincing reason for why scheduling my life is awesome, I’ve been fancy free instead. Yet all of a sudden, here’s a good reason. Continue reading

After fifteen years of failing to wake early, week one of my 21-day Dalai Lama self-challenge surprised me with some success. Most days I rose at that ungodly hour of 5 a.m. – and it felt pretty darn godly. That is, as long as I started from scratch and stopped pretending that I knew myself. This pre-dawn creature disguised as me had a separate identity and other ideas on what constituted quality of life. I had to play by new rules to get what I wanted. Continue reading

If week 1 was concerned with how to get up at 5 a.m., then week 2 asked, how do I best use that time? Notice how “best” sneaks in with its unconscious standard. No surprise, I started to panic. My struggle for precious unstructured time, already nervous at the edges, was falling into the trap of structure and productivity. The culprit, I now realize, was my left brain. Continue reading