My Morning Meditation Ritual as a Senior Software Engineer

I've been running a new meditation practice for the past several months and it's working great so wanted to share.

Morning Pages

My meditation practice is morning pages adapted from The Artist's Way. I've never read it but researched the practice after several recommendations at Recurse Center where they run a small morning pages group.

How it works:

• Write 2-3 pages of thoughts (1-1.5k words)
• No edits
• No stopping
• Just write

Why I like it:

• Clears mind - Gets your thoughts on paper. Often focuses on / uncovers underlying stress or baggage from the previous day / week.
• Simple + portable - Takes 5-10 minutes and can do anywhere - in your journal, on your laptop, on your phone. It's interruptible so okay if you miss it in the morning or don't finish the whole thing, can come back later and finish it up.
• Leads to action items - I often uncover some baggage I've been carrying and can come up with quick followups to close out those threads. Sometimes the journals themselves become small drafts for posts like these. It also gives me a nice lookback on how I was feeling on a given day and I feed these into my personal ai assistant to help uncover larger patterns and recommend action items for resolving those.

How I do this in practice:

• Use a Morning Pages section of my daily note in my Obsidian vault
• Do this when I have time - usually after my morning workout, family breakfast, and getting baby ready for the day before work. Sometimes it slips to after work.
• Type it out on my computer though sometimes will do it on my phone if on the go or following the crawling baby around
• I have a morning pages feedback AI skill in my vault which tells the AI to read today's daily note, the past week of daily notes, my values doc, and my plans for the week / month / year and give feedback, action items, and recommend any creations that I could spin off

Why not just talk to your computer? While I think this will be a much more common phenomenon in the future, I still think writing is thinking and for a practice whose point is to reflect and think, writing does it better than talking.

Next

So that's how I'm meditating these days. It's not perfect and I probably could benefit from some more clear-minded time but this practice has been really helpful and easy to stay consistent with so working for me.

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