Backwards Review of Your Day - The Ruchshau

A very freeing, healing and strengthening exercise is the Ruchshau or the backwards review of your day.

Each night for five or ten minutes before you fall asleep, review your day backwards. Begin at the present moment and run the fill of your life on that day in reverse. Review the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions and interactions of all the hours of your waking day. You can focus on the central experiences or put some effort in to noticing the peripheral experiences. Here are a few examples:

I walked into town and passed a woman pushing a stroller but did not look at the baby.
I ate a hamburger and french fries for lunch - the fries were salty.
I worked on my big project but checked my email 3 times during the session. I felt restless.

The Ruchshau unwinds your experiences before they get rigidly consolidated into memory during sleep. This frees your soul from the weight of the earthly as it enters into spirit while your body sleeps.

I once heard a wise man share he would go backwards through the day and recall what he was doing at 10 minutes past the hour. If I have been in public, maybe at the grocery store, I will remember five faces I saw - this is a peripheral memory release.

All of us will sleep better physically and spiritually if we create and follow a nightly rhythm of sleep preparation. Consciously chosen rhythm is deeply nurturing to our being. Without rhythm we become prey to distraction and indulgence, to stress and anxiety. Make the nightly backwards review part of your bedtime ritual.