Opening and completing your day…

“Opening and Completing Your Day,” is a set of morning and evening guided imagery meditations that I created and recorded to give you a way to frame your day, that give you an energetic container for your day. In our busy lives, with electric lighting and 24/7 access to everything we have lost our connection to sunrise and sunset, lost the sense of a real container that frames our work lives, personal lives, and our time for rest and turning inward. 

To me, containers are sacred vessels that give necessary form. It becomes so easy to just keep moving from one thing to the next without that delineation…now I am beginning my work, now I am completing it, now I am feeding myself, now I am resting… 

How often do you eat a meal without doing something else at the same time? Watching TV, reading your mail, driving your car… somewhere in this world of time-saving devices, we have lost our boundaries. 

The first track of this new work is called “Opening to Your Day,” and is a 15 minute morning meditation to ground and center yourself and move into your busy life with a sense of intentionality and peacefulness. I dedicate it to a lovely woman who lived down the road from me years ago, she was in her early 90’s and had grown up somewhere in the mountains in Europe. I used to see her early on a spring morning when I was walking my dog. She would be walking barefoot on the lawn in her bathrobe, and cheerfully told me she was “dew walking.” Where she grew up, they believed that the morning dew had healing and invigorating properties, and that you if you took the time to walk in it before you started your day, you would have a beautiful and healthy day! 

For those of us who cannot dew walk each morning, and for the months when it is just too cold (!) a few minutes of meditation can go a long way toward creating a day of peace and possibility. I never thought to ask her how she ended her day, what ritual she followed to turn toward rest… but I love the idea of an evening ritual, a time to find peace with all the events, challenges, all the stuff of the day. A time to look back over the day with gratitude and compassion, and put it to rest so that you can truly REST! 

“Completing Your Day” is that evening guided journey inward, to the place of clarity, gratitude, acceptance and peace that lies deep within your center. I dedicate it to my beautiful dog Chiaro, an Italian mastiff who had the most grounding energy of anyone I’ve ever known, and taught me more about real relaxation and peacefulness than any other teacher. 

I really loved this project, and loved working with the remarkable composer and musician Gus Mancini. Gus likes to immerse himself in the ‘vibe’ of the work and let the music intuitively flow, so I created and recorded the narration for the first meditation, “Opening to Your Day,” and then Gus tuned into the energy of it and channeled his musical genius to create a live, spontaneous soundtrack. Then we did the second cut, “Completing Your Day” and he created another beautiful soundtrack that flows from the first, but with a slower, end of the day feel. I am looking forward to creating many more pieces with him.

You can find any of my guided imagery meditation mp3’s at www.carolrobin.com. I’d love to hear how you create the container for your day…

Carol