Waking up for 101 sunrises

Hello beautiful people,

I want to share with you my experience that I had this year where I watched 101 sunrises in a row.

I never started out with the intention to watch 101 sunrises – this happened almost by accident. It all started with me making a decision to do a 40 day Mantra practice.

Now if you have never heard of this before, a Mantra is a set of words that you repeat over and over, similar to a prayer, or affirmation phrase. The words that I chose to use for this practice come from the ancient language of Sanskrit and each of the words in the mantra embody within them powerful and magical energy. The idea with a mantra is repeat the set of words over and over – 108 times to be exact, each day for 40 days. You use a set of beads (a mala) to help you keep track of where you are at. The beads and the counting are a way to occupy your logical and egoic mind so that you can shift into a deeper level of consciousness.

Repeating the mantra in this way brings the powerful energy of the words into your life in a magical and transformation way.

I have done a few 40-day mantra practices over the years, and I have found them to be absolutely amazing and definitely very transformational. This time though, I wanted to up the anti a little. I now have a deeper understanding about energy and about powerful energy spaces and times and I wanted to bring all of these together to create an extra powerful practice. I also wanted to make a bigger commitment to myself.

The space where the land and the water meet is a liminal space, and the time between night and dark is a liminal time. Both have a higher energy vibration and therefore are both quite powerful. By combining my mantra practice with these liminal elements I could only wonder at the level of powerful and magical energy that I could bring to the mantra mantra practice.

What would manifest into my life as a result of this?

I started with the 40 days and as this begin drawing to an end I realised that I was really enjoying watching the sunrise and having a practice at the waters edge and that I didn’t want to stop. I ended the 40 day mantra and took up a 7 day practice around connecting to my guides and when that ended, I took up another practice of connecting to my spirit animal. By this stage I had watched over 50 sunrises and began wondering how amazing it would be like to watch 100 sunrises in a row.

A commitment of 100 days was more than I had ever taken on before.

A 100 days is almost one third of a year, and so, as you can imagine the usual business of life is guaranteed to come up. When I started the practice it was at the beginning of winter, and so the chances of finding an excuse to not get up were seriously stacked against me. After all, who wants to wake up in the dark and jump out of bed in winter? Who wants to go and watch the sunrise when it is cloudy or even raining? During this time I also traveled to events, took a road trip, and ran a six week live coaching program. There were so many things going on, that it would be easy to come up with a reason why I shouldn’t get up, why I should just skip this one day.

Despite all the possible reasons or excuses to give up this practice, there was this sense of determination within me. I really wanted to make a commitment to myself and to see this practice through and so I kept going.

As I began nearing the 100 days I must admit that I began really looking forward to a sleep in, yet at the same time I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stop watching the sunrises. On day 101, the first day that I would get to sleep in, I had made sure may alarm wasn’t set so that I could enjoy my sleep in. You will never guess what happened! My car alarm just randomly started going off and it wouldn’t turn off. I had to get out of bed and spent about 15 minutes trying to get it to turn off. Once I had eventually sorted it out, I looked at the time and realised that I could still make the sunrise. Ok, universe I said, I get the message, I will go and watch another sunrise.

That was sunrise number 101!

I have never before committed to such a regular and intentional practice. I’ve always had a practice, but not at this level. The experience of doing this has been so transformational and magical for me. It has been a wonderful experience and has definitely taken me deeper into my spirituality. It helped me to connected to my soul. I understand more about me and have been able to connect to my energy on a deeper level.

I put in a lot of effort but received amazing rewards.

When undertaking a practice like this, it is a good idea to have some way of being held accountable, as it makes it so much easier to make it to the end. What I decided to do for myself was to post a photo of every sunrise onto my personal Facebook page. This was enough for me to stay committed to the practice. It also turned out to be a beautiful record of what I had done. When I look back over the photo’s that I took, I can often remember what was going on for me at the time and where I was at in my journey.

I now have these beautiful memories to keep of each of those magical sunrises. I never realised how different every sunrise would be, and I almost became a little bit of a sunrise snob. I began trying to predict what type of sunrise I would see based on the weather conditions and cloud cover for each day. I learned so much! While each of them had there own beauty, I must admit that some of them were jaw droppingly magnificent.

I love the energy of the sunrise and even if I had not doing a mantra or any of the other meditations that I did, I believe there would have been so much magic that would have entered into my life.

One of the things that I didn’t expect, but absolutely loved was how so many people commented on what I was doing and how some people got inspired to watch a few sunrises too.

I never started this practice for anyone else.

It was a commitment to me and to my spiritual journey. I would absolutely recommend something like this to everyone. To find something that lights you up and brings magic into your life. That starts your day off with a bit of sparkle and enables you to connect to yourself on a deeper level. Finding and connecting to your sparkle, to your heart and to your soul is something that only you can do. No one else can do this for you. It does take work, but it is definitely worth it!

In the past two years in my work as a psychic healer and coach, I have realised that if you do nothing intentionally, something will fill your space. You need to be actively making space for the things that light you up and connect you to yourself on a deeper level. If you don’t the space will be filled, that’s guaranteed, and more than likely you will become dissatisfied with how your life is going.

You need to proritise and make you and your practice important. I choose to have a practice because I know how amazing I feel when I do it. I know how aligned and connected I feel. From this space I can bring amazing sparkly energy into my life, into the world and to the people that I interact with. It makes my life feel fun and playful and there is a gorgeous lightness to the energy in my space. I feel joyful from the inside out. I love it and wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is so important to create your own practice, one that works for you. Use this time to get to know you better, to understand who you are and what you truly want in this life.

I would love to hear your stories. Get in touch and share your practices, and the magic that has come into your life as a result of them.

Here is the full gallery of all the 101 sunrises.