A long, long time ago, on a bookshelf far far away, used to sit a book. And this book has a title that is rather audacious. “The 5am Miracle” sounds like a sardonic quip. Like sure, it’s a miracle for me to drag my ass out of bed at 5am. Still, I bought it and it sat on my bookshelf until I wound up fleeing from Colorado to Canada. Okay, that’s not exactly true, I think I read… most of it? I say “most” because I don’t remember if I finished it or not but I do remember starting it. But this morning, it’s 5:37am and I’m on my laptop writing a blog post. Probably not the healthiest iteration of this plan. In fact, I haven’t taken my meds yet. Be right back.
Intention
Okay, ten minutes to Resh and my meds are taken. Let’s get back to the plan and how I’m hoping to make this healthy. It’s less about the hour and more about intention and discipline. You see, I have a fairly recent template for a rather intentionless person who wound up waking up at 5am himself. My soon to be ex-husband. Unfortunately, he was reliant on his mother to give him rides to work. So, most days, he needed to be up at 5am so that he could be ready for work at 6am. He could sleep in until 6 only when his mother wasn’t driving in, and weekends and stat holidays were pure bonus sleep.
However, he never put intention into this. He would go to bed at around midnight instead of trying to go to bed and give himself enough time to get a restful night’s sleep during the weekdays. And that’s no way to live.
5 minutes to Resh? Be right back.
Discipline
Okay, I’m back. And I just said Resh. But doing Resh? That’s going to be a bit more work. And I think that this requires the discipline that has been lacking from my own life. Because I didn’t assume the sign of Ra when I just did my morning adoration. Further, what form of meditation should I perform? I could just say that I’m a particularly shitty magician… and I know the facts certainly wouldn’t disagree. I’ve been out of practice for roughly a decade. My light for Thelema only got rekindled recently. I found a new love for the Law of Liberty after escaping an abusive marriage that featured coercive control. But, I want to share an idea.
When I did a meditation retreat at the Shambhala meditation centre in Boulder, Colorado, I learned a couple of things about myself. The first being I love Celestial Seasonings’ Morning Thunder tea. The second being that I hate what most people think of as meditation. Sitting on a meditation cushion, back straight (and hurting), being silent? Boooooooooring.
Maybe she’s born with it? Maybe it’s AuDHD.
What was more useful for me to help me centre myself was years later, when the Thelemites of Denver finally rebuilt from the ashes of Ad Astra Oasis and created Crux Ansata Encampment (now Crux Ansata Oasis). Shortly after Crux Ansata launched, I was finally able to attend a Gnostic Mass for the first time ever. And it was the sounds, the smells, the tastes… it was the sensory overload that helped me to centre myself.
So, the answer isn’t to not meditate. The answer is to find a means of meditation that works for me.
Reading and writing… the arithmetic wasn’t adding up
One of the things I’m hoping to achieve with this is becoming more intentional with my writing. Last night, I think I killed my streak on my Postbox account.1 Which… I’m at peace with. Over the last week, I’ve had more nights than not where I hastily write something like this on Sprinter2 to keep the streak alive.
Fuck, another evening without writing something towards a novel. This is no bueño.
The night before last night, I wrote this.
Unfortunately, I’m writing another entry that is a whole lotta nothing, but this time with a bit of hope. I’m writing it right before taking a shower instead of just minutes before midnight to keep a streak alive. I hope this bodes well for getting back into a healthy writing habit.
On streaks… and numbers that lost their meaning.
I kinda had that feeling Dexter Morgan had at the beginning of season two. His routine, his mojo was disrupted. And honestly, mood. I don’t feel like the same woman who wrote 89,000 words in 24 days. How do I get back to her? But, y’know, better because a couple of the supporting characters in that novel were a bit flat.
So, I broke the streak… but I think the intention was broken a bit before now, so at least the broken streak count is keeping it honest. I know I wrote yesterday. Hell, I wrote a post about a mechanical horse at Hougen Centre last night on my non-author blog. I wrote roughly 5,000-ish words across that blog and here about a legal brouhaha I’m gearing up for with IRCC. So, it’s not like I didn’t write. It’s just I didn’t write what I’m hoping to build a career writing. It’s the writing that fills me with dread because it’s about something I’d rather not have to do but feel a sense of duty to do. I can’t shirk my duty but I’m not going to lie and pretend like it’s the work that fulfills and sustains me. In fact, this particular duty is draining.
I said… something about arithmetic? Where are the numbers?
As someone getting back into occultism, I know damn well numbers have meaning. They should. It’s easy to brag about writing 5,000 words in a day. But there’s something different about these numbers.
Unlike the numbers for writing Project Ouzel, I’m not proud of yesterday’s 5,000+ words. Because that’s not a story I really want to be telling. It’s a story I have to tell because I’m gearing up for a legal battle I can’t shirk away from. My mind is turned to Crowley’s own essay on duty. I feel in preparing for this battle with IRCC, I am fulfilling my duty to bring the actions of Government to order. But in so doing, I am taking time and mental space away from the work that matters. In this state, I am failing at the seventh duty I have to myself.
Never permit the thought or will of any other Being to interfere with your own.
Be constantly vigilant to resent, and on the alert to resist, with unvanquishable ardour and vehemence of passion unquenchable, every attempt of any other Being to influence you otherwise than by contributing new facts to your experience of the Universe, or by assisting you to reach an higher synthesis of Truth by the mode of passionate fusion.
Last night, when I wrote the post about the mechanical horse, I observed that communiqués from IRCC tend to be harbingers of bullshit. The question is finding balance in the work I do. Doing enough of this so I’m sincerely prosecuting the duty I have to my fellow man while advancing the work that improves and edifies my soul. And that’s where the math ain’t mathing. The words I’ve written over the past two weeks are more about practical shit than creation. I need to get back to that.
Though, I still need to do that sorta-but-not-really-editing work on Project Ouzel so that I can set it aside and give it the six weeks it’s due. I still need to plan which of my other novel projects is gonna be worked on next. Writing blog posts is nice and all, but I need to do the things that are actually going to lead to me eventually becoming a published author in my own right.
Resh, what works? What doesn’t?
This is the harder question and honestly, I don’t have easy answers right now. I know I should meditate afterwards, I just don’t know how to do that. Thankfully, I do have the Internet and even though it is irritating as a means of distraction, it could help me find other AuDHD people… hell, maybe even other AuDHD occultists, who have found a way of meditation that has worked for them. Also, one other thing I notice is that my space could definitely be more set up for the intention that meditation requires.
But the one thing I’m not going to do is let this just hang as a “to-do”. I’m going to try out a few things, see what works and what doesn’t. Hell, doing some yoga might not be a completely terrible option to directly follow Resh while I’m figuring out what might work better. If there’s one thing we can learn from that Sears ad (I mean, apart from the impermanence of all things because Sears), you shouldn’t just “call later”. Do it now.
So, I’m saying that today’s objectives are going to include researching the experiences of other AuDHD occultists and finding out how they meditate and what works for them. Maybe try out a few of the suggestions for myself and see what works for me.
The other things? Like practising the god signs and memorizing the words? Those will come with time and practice. But I need to know the things that aren’t as clearly laid out. The things that will make Resh not just something I’m doing but an integrated, embodied part of my practice.
Rest
Last night, I admit that I didn’t go to bed at the time I was aiming for. I wound up hopping in the shower around 9pm, the time I should have been in bed trying to sleep. Ralph Wiggum would be so disappointed in me. Sleep is definitely not where I’m a viking… yet.
However, I think this is where I might have the easiest time exercising my discipline. That, and getting my ass out of bed the second the alarm hits 5am. Sure, I might be awake, but I think getting my ass up and out of bed, even if I’m just moving a couple feet to the couch to read, would set a much more powerful intention. And maybe that’s the core message here? Trying to work on the behaviours and patterns to choose more that tend to suit me and advance my goals than ones that don’t?
And that’s probably the bigger lesson of the 5am Miracle. Probably. Because I left Colorado back in 2019, so it’s been at least seven years since I read that book. I definitely should buy another copy and give it at least one proper read through. No, I swear this post is not sponsored.
Embracing ritual, building a routine
You see, the thing is, I did wake up at 5am. I did Resh… kinda. But it’s 6:30 in the am as I write this paragraph and what have I truly done? I’ve checked my phone a bunch of times, I played a YouTube video and sure, I’m writing this blog post and I’ve said Resh. Maybe I’m beating myself up too much over this but I’m hoping in the coming weeks and months, I build more intention into my routine.
In my ideal form of this, I’ll have spent the first 45-ish minutes of my day reading, taking my meds, taking notes… fairly as analog as possible. Mostly as a way to try to centre myself for the day ahead. When I do Resh, I’ll be reciting the words and doing the signs from memory, not having sacred-texts.com’s copy of Liber Resh open on my laptop right in front of me. Afterwards, I pull out my Hemingwrite and freewrite for 30 minutes to an hour. That’s my ideal version of this. Distraction-free and intentional.
And this? This is the part that’s gonna take some time. But that’s kind of the point of the 5am Miracle. Waking up at 5am is relatively easy. You set your alarm, you wake up, you get out of bed even when your body wonders if you’ve truly gone mad. But making it mean something? Building a life with intention? That’s the part my soon-to-be-ex-husband never caught on to, even though he wakes at 5am more often than I do. I know for myself that I don’t want to get stuck in that trap.
In conclusion
So, this is me. Signing off at 8am after writing a three hour autopsy on how my new-ish morning routine is shaping up (TL;DR version: poorly, but I can see the room for improvement). Because sure, I woke up at 5am today. But there’s still a long gulf between here and the 5am miracle.
- For those of you here for my occult-ish witterings instead of my writerly witterings, I have a couple of Freewrite devices. I have them for distraction-free writing, and they sync to a cloud service called Postbox. [↩]
- Sprinter is a web-based application that allows you to do some distraction-free writing in your browser. So, not 100% distraction free like my Hemingwrite or Traveller, but fairly distraction free. [↩]
Be First to Comment