Centring

Each morning I have to recalibrate my senses and reset my emotional baseline to neutral, that is to some sense of contact with an ultimate reality which allows me to connect with /surrender to it – or else my monkey mind goes busily about its whirling way, progressively confabulating probabilities into a spiral of planning & projections. (This is of course useful in its place.)
It isn't always possible to centre, for a variety of reasons: I may be excited about busyness that lies ahead, I may have had dreams that I have been unable to process – or indeed may not be consciously aware of, yet which are strongly colouring my subconscious mindset – I may have heavy food or alcohol in my digestive system that is governing my mental process and preventing me achieving clarity.
I refer to these circ~s as spiritual weather: sometimes it's sunny: sometimes it's overcast: sometimes it's stormy. During the latter I repeat my mantra: 'Sai Ram', invoking Sai Baba, the figure from whom I have drawn most spiritual empowerment. (I do not see him as an individual, who is separate from or in opposition to other spiritual teachers – but rather as someone whose energies are most present for me, and who thus becomes a lens throu whom I see to the depths of truth at which all traditions converge.) I also find invoking him really works when I am sleepless – it's a great use of what o/wise is 'dead' time.
The joke about meditation that 'the first 20 years are the worst' is absolutely correct – but the real benefit of persisting is that you come to experience your inner world in all sorts of different circ~s, and thus are able to form an overview of the dimensions of that world. Over such a length of time you are pretty certain to have visited some of the more extreme corners of your psyche and meditation gives you a tool with which to observe yourself as you go throu different kinds of 'weather'.
The day on which I wrote this was one on which I found myself led to put forward a contentious proposal within a group – and that too provided fascinating opportunities for self-observation.