A worship ritual in the morning can be simple yet authentic and fit the busy schedule of today’s life. Let us review the steps leading to the worship ritual and the ritual itself. The simple steps described below cover pancha kala kriya. In other words, the set of five activities for a practicing Hindu.
The Daily Practices articles cover the spiritual intent of each of these steps in detail. This article is a preview and summarizes all of them. You can revisit this article after you go through each of the steps.
Cleansing and Preparation (The first and second set of activities)
- Start the day with physical and mental cleansing (abhigamana)
- Waking up
- Morning Ablutions, Bathing
- Morning Invocation
- Prepare for the worship ritual (upaadhanam)
- Getting the offerings of worship ready (flowers, fruits, water, etc.)
- The lighting of the lamp
Worship (The 3rd set of activity)
With the pre-requisites of cleansing and preparations completed, you can worship through the simple steps below: –
- Invocation: Contemplating on the personal form of the cosmic person, mentally prepare for worship. A variation would be to chant hymns (see the hymns in footnotes). Light the lamp.
- Ceremonial bath (abhishekam) – A few drops of water are poured on the personal form of the divine or vigraha.
- Dressing and decorating (alankara) – Use flowers to decorate or keep a flower near the deity.
- The offering of food (naivedyam) – Keep a tumbler with water, some fruit, nuts, or any fresh food near the deity.
- Chanting of hymns (mantra asana) – In this step, one would chant their choicest hymns. It could be one hymn or many, there is no fixed rule.
- Gratitude and Grace (prasadam) – Sipping water from the tumbler thrice acknowledge in an inner voice that the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep state is the grace of the divine. Any food offered as naivedyam is now eaten as prasadam.
So far we have covered the 3 sets of activities. The remaining 2 sets are svadhyaya and yog. These can be done at any time of the day or evening.
- svadhyaya covers the practice of continued spiritual learning
- yog establishes a conscious body and mind connection.
Spirituality on its own does not need any rituals. A worship ritual helps condition the body and develop a mindfulness discipline. Through worship, faith in the divine increases, fear diminishes or completely extinguishes.
Hymns to be chanted during invocation or mantraasana
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The simple morning worship ritual is a recommended practice and falls in the category of ijya (engaging in the mode of worship)