A short instructional YouTube monologue by Phil Powis teaching a nighttime mindfulness exercise (likely from a Hindu tradition) to increase presence and clarity: lie down, close your eyes, and mentally rewind the day from sleep back to dawn, observing moments neutrally. The practice can help "unclutter" the mind and — if desired — present a persistent problem to one’s higher self for guidance; users often report waking with clearer insight.
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If you're like so many of us, it's very easy to get on autopilot, to go about your day, to get lost in your thoughts and realize that when you get to the end of the day, you haven't been present for so much of the experience. You're just going with what's showing up and just losing yourself in the process of going about your daily mask. We teach a pretty structured approach to reviewing your days, your weeks, and your months within our programs in Sacred Business Flow. But today I want to talk to you about another exercise that I've been doing the last few months that I found to be super, super helpful for staying present. And I believe it comes from a Hindu tradition. But essentially the idea is when you go to lay down at night to go to sleep, what you want to do is just make yourself comfortable, lay down, and then you'll close your eyes. And essentially you want to start to, in your mind's eye, rewind the day. So going from that moment when you laid down all the way back to dawn when you rose, right? And so you want to almost imagine like you're watch each moment that you've experienced throughout the day pass by on a movie screen. And you can do this actually quite quickly, but you can also really take the time to savor the moment and really connect with that experience as you move backwards throughout your day. And what you want to do is you don't want to necessarily create too much commentary in your head or start pondering the things that you feel perhaps you did right or you did wrong or really to give too much thought to anything, really. You just want to stay neutral and be with that experience so that you are reliving it in your mind's eye. And you'll be amazed if you go through this process, you'll start to unravel these kind of knots or unclutter your mind. Things will become much more clear for you, and you'll start to notice you're much more present for your life. And there's one last piece of this, which is if you've experienced any sort of challenge or problem that you've been thinking a lot about during your day, you can also, at the end of this exercise I've just shared with you, you can present that. You can present that to your higher self, your soul, your subconscious, whatever you want to call it, just ask for guidance. You can say, hey, this is what I'm dealing with. I would love to have the answer for this. When I wake and rise in the morning, you'll be amazed. I can't tell you how many times I'll get up, I'll hit the door to go for a run, or I'll go to jump in the shower. And I'll have so much more clarity on whatever I've been struggling with just by doing this exercise. That's it. I highly recommend you try this out if you find your yourself often lost in your thoughts, finding yourself a little bit overwhelmed, perhaps just not being present, being in autopilot in your days, and I'd love to hear how this works for you. All right. Much love.
