LOVE THURSDAY

Last week Misti posted something on her facebook page about a night of bad dreams. What's weird is that all last week I fought demons in my sleep. There's a line in a Belly song that goes like this: "I had bad dreams. So bad I threw my pillow away". That song played in my head every morning to a point were I really thought about throwing out my pillow. Would that really fix things? Maybe. Who knows? But I suddenly became super aware of how many people I know, including myself, who struggle to get a good night's sleep. Every night I set my alarm with the intention of getting up early enough to do my meditation practice before breakfast and every morning I end up hitting the snooze to squeeze in an extra twenty minutes of sleep. I am still an early bird. I'm just not the earliest bird and I've been struggling with this. So I decided to flip things around. This week I started meditating before bed time and I've been using the yoga sutras for a mantra starting with the first sutra. I have it on the Life List to memorize the yoga sutras and there's something soothing in chanting them in their sanskrit form. But I've also noticed that it's helping to clear out all the gobble-d-gook in my brain. I used to shuffle off to bed only because it was what I felt was my bed time and then lay there, eyes wide open. The physical act of going to bed had become a habit, a script. So I changed the script.

The other night I dreamed of making cookies. Nothing fancy. No shapes or sparkly icing. Just a good old fashioned chocolate chip cookie. I recognized that I was dreaming about making these cookies and thought "Oh! What a good idea!". So then my brain flipped over to making a list of things I would need to make the cookies. I could see each item I would need so clearly. Butter, probably a new thing of baking powder, chocolate chips. It was all so vivid and clear and I woke up the next day knowing that I would bake chocolate chip cookies this weekend. I can't remember the last time I baked chocolate chip cookies and that means it's been too long.

I think the new script is working. Happy Love Thursday!