Question: Guru, what can we do if we feel sleepy and don't feel any inspiration? How can we wake up and be alert for meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: Please get up a little bit early for preparation. Before you start to run, you take all kinds of exercises. We call them limbering up exercises in athletics. For meditation it is also good to do preparation exercises. If six o'clock is your meditation time, feel that at six o'clock the Supreme will fire the starting gun. So before that, if you are not ready, you must take all kinds of spiritual exercises. You can do a little bit of japa, read some of my writings or sing some spiritual songs. If you try to start your meditation the moment you wake up, you will have difficulties. Like a runner who doesn't do preliminary exercises, you will be stiff and slow at the beginning. It is not possible to run the fastest if you have not first stretched your legs and done some limbering up.

Please feel that six o'clock is the time for the race to begin. So if you can get up at five-thirty and spend at least half an hour doing preliminary spiritual exercises before you start to meditate then you will raise your inspiration and aspiration to a satisfactory point and you will be ready to run at six o'clock. Otherwise you will feel inertia and for fifteen minutes or half an hour after you start you will still be half asleep. Then when the referee blows the whistle at the end of the race, you will still be staggering.

This is why it is good for the disciples to meditate at the Centre before I arrive. That is the time for you to warm up. Then when I come it is the time for you to run the fastest. Before that you can prepare yourself inwardly.