Waking at sunrise can be a challenge. For our grandparents it probably wasn't: their day began with the light, and they hardly gave it a thought. We often go to bed late, and getting up comes hard. Yet on the mornings after a night when you fell asleep earlier, the day tastes different. You wake with an appetite for life and feel the pull of the Sun, of the whole of nature, which seems glad to be able to express itself again.
In The 5AM Club, Robin Sharma calls waking early “the mother of all habits.” The tradition I write about here adds a nuance: the hour that matters is sunrise in the place where you live, and it does not fall at the same time every morning. When you wake before the light, you enter the cadence of nature and no longer spend the same effort. Attention holds more easily, and the day starts from its natural place.
The first gesture of such a morning can be very simple: after washing, you notice which nostril the air passes through more freely as you breathe out. There are days when the breath seems out of phase, and the day turns restless, with reactions more compulsive than usual. There are mornings when you try, by force of will, to change the active nostril and fail, whatever method you use. Those days hold together badly: you are more subjective, more stubborn, and things do not fit. We usually blame tiredness or mood, although, looked at closely, those days follow a rhythm that can be recognised.
What makes the same action easy to carry out at one moment and so hard at another?
This question opens what I call the quality of time: the character of a moment, as it arises from the meeting between the rhythms of the world and the state of the person living them.
The clock was built to answer a different question. It measures duration, and measures it the same way for everyone: the hour between seven and eight is as long as the hour between three and four. That equality is useful for coordination, and it leaves out precisely the difference between one morning and another.
I began looking for that difference at around twenty-four, when I was studying astrology and practising yoga intensely. I sensed that everything happening in nature rests on the dynamics of a fundamental rhythm. Over time I came to see it as a symphony: many rhythms, with different periods, that still keep the same key. The svarodaya tradition, on which the Elemente app is based, gave me a language for that intuition: time itself has a character, which changes in a regular order and can be recognised. For me, the quality of time means its frequency, because time is energy. To recognise it, you first need words for the way anything unfolds.
The order in which a thing is made
Take an idea you want to carry through. At first, the idea needs space. You do not yet know what it will become, and you have to be able to stay with the question for a while without rushing it. Then things start to move: associations, conversations and possibilities appear. From among them you choose a direction, and the choice changes the shape of the idea. To go further, you connect the parts and find the thread that holds them together. In the end, the idea takes a form that can last.
In this process, and almost in the order in which they appear, the five principles can be recognised: Ether makes room, Air sets in motion, Fire transforms, Water binds, Earth gives form. Their names are most useful when the work gets stuck. You may rush the form while the question still needs exploring, or keep opening new possibilities when the idea already calls for a choice. Either way the effort grows, because your gesture answers a different moment from the one you are in.
I have come to believe that our intentions need a medium through which to travel, just as sound needs air to reach someone. The quality of time is that medium, and the value of the elements lies in making it visible.
The day, then, has an order, and the svarodaya tradition reads it in the same sequence, from Ether to Earth.
The day, read from sunrise
The day begins at sunrise. Midnight only changes the date on the calendar, while sunrise changes the landscape. Its time depends on place and season. At the equinoxes, the sun rises in Constanța, on the Black Sea, almost half an hour earlier than in Timișoara, in western Romania, although both cities keep the same official time. Read from sunrise, time recovers its bond with the place where you live.
From this threshold the five tattvas follow one another, tattva being the Sanskrit word for the elemental principles. In the model used by Elemente, each principle has its own interval, and a full cycle lasts two hours, repeating twelve times until the next sunrise.
What does each interval mean? We learn it from the Śiva Svarodaya, the tradition's reference treatise, which links each principle to a kind of action. The Earth interval is recommended for things made to last: a foundation, a long-term commitment, work that requires stability. The Water interval supports actions that need to adapt and flow. Fire accompanies intense actions, those that transform something or change its status, while Air accompanies movement, travel and rapid change. About Ether the treatise is unusually categorical: its interval does not support worldly action and is reserved for meditation, introspection and analysis.
Signing a long-term contract and having a conversation in which you must say something difficult are equally important, and they call for different kinds of participation. The first asks for stability and would find support in an Earth interval; the second asks for firmness and a decision, and would find support in a Fire interval.
The treatise does not say how this difference feels, so I began to track it myself. For a while I noted the times at which certain events happened and set them beside the intervals of the elements. Disputes and quarrels fell almost without exception in Fire intervals, and so did accidents, especially those involving fire as a physical element. Hunger came most often in Earth intervals, and when I ate then, digestion was easier and my whole metabolism seemed to follow the same rhythm. From those notes I understood that the elements describe something real in the way a day unfolds, and that breath is the place where this reality can be observed most easily.
Breath, the closest reference
Air usually passes more freely through one nostril than through the other, and the dominance shifts several times a day. Physiology knows this as the nasal cycle. The tradition calls it svara and relates it to the tattvas and to the synodic cycle of the Moon: at sunrise, the dominant nostril should correspond to the lunar day, the tithi. When my breath did not correspond, actions that required attention started with difficulty, and the result was slow to come.
Before you decide what your state means, you can observe it. How are you breathing? Where do you feel effort? How much of your attention is available for what you have to do, and how much is still caught in yesterday's conversation?
This is where the calculated reference and observation meet, and the order in which you consult them matters.
You start from intention, from what you have to do. Many people skip the observation. They do not yet trust what they perceive, so they open the app and look at the reference nostril before they have felt their own breath, to see whether they “got it right.” That way the essential is lost: experience, the only thing that helps you understand the rhythms of nature from within. The app does not measure your breathing. It shows the nostril that corresponds to the natural rhythm, and the comparison only makes sense if you have something of your own to compare.
If you observe yourself first, the observation stays yours, and the reference in the app then comes to confirm it or to call it into question. Matches and mismatches are worth noting. The Agenda in the app also serves as a journal for them, alongside its role of organising time in the rhythm of the elements.
With these two references, one calculated and one lived, you build your own ground for observation. You can begin tomorrow morning, close to sunrise. For a few minutes you follow your breath without changing it, noticing which nostril the air passes through more freely and how your body feels before the first activity. You note what you perceive, together with the time of sunrise, and during the day you note the moments when something went unusually easily or unusually badly. You come back on other mornings and allow each one the right to be different. Over time, matches and mismatches draw a pattern that belongs to you and that, in my experience, often agrees surprisingly well with what the sages of old left us.
Where intention comes from
I placed intention at the beginning, and it deserves one more question: where does it come from? Each time I have asked, I have arrived at the same place, a silent space from which thoughts arise before they have a form. For me, this is Ether, the first of the principles, and I feel it as the ground of my own consciousness. When I take the question “who am I?” further, I enter a mystery I have not been able to penetrate.
From this place, intention does not resemble a desire that forces things. It carries the history of the soul, karma, and its direction, dharma, which stays connected to the source. Kashmir Shaivism calls this first impulse icchā and places it at the head of three powers of consciousness: from icchā arises jñāna, knowledge, and from knowledge kriyā, action. Desire, resolve and deed come after this impulse, as stages of the same path, from Ether to the form of Earth.
Action that does not disturb the moment
A car battery does not run down during a journey: the alternator recharges it from the car's own movement, and the battery supports the process instead of being used up. I believe we work the same way. When our terminals are connected correctly to those of nature, positive to positive and negative to negative, action charges us instead of draining us. The Emerald Tablet, the text attributed to Hermes, says that what is below is like what is above. It has been left to me to discover this in my own day.
This is what I mean by resonance: the possibility of taking part in a rhythm by recognising its character. It is cultivated by returning to observation every day, and it holds even on days with a fixed schedule, when something must be finished whatever the interval. Here the tradition adds an important point: what matters most is the beginning. An action started in accord with its time keeps its direction, and from then on what remains is to sustain the attention that keeps it flowing. Such an action does not disturb the moment in which it takes place.
On the days I started this way, I felt that I was taking part in the symphony I spoke of, that I was a part of nature. This integration brought me great joy and a sense of belonging to everything, and for me it was the clearest revelation of what lies at the origin of creation: God. Perhaps this is what it finally means for something to come in its own time.
Further reading
The next article in the series The rhythm of time looks in detail at the threshold from which everything begins: why the day starts at sunrise, and what changes when you move your reference from midnight to the light of the place where you live.
In Elemente
The Elemente app makes the calculation described here for the place where you are: it shows the element of the current interval, the cycle of the five principles starting from local sunrise, and the reference nostril at sunrise and sunset. The guide inside the app explains every reference on the screen.
References
Śiva Svarodaya, a traditional treatise on breath, the tattvas and choosing the right moment for action. Online English translation attributed to a practitioner: https://ecology.yoga/swara-yoga/
The triad icchā–jñāna–kriyā, the three powers of consciousness in Kashmir Shaivism (Pratyabhijñā).
The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina), a Hermetic text known from medieval Arabic and Latin versions.
Robin Sharma, The 5AM Club.
Measurement and characterisation of the nasal cycle, a study published in PLOS ONE: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5053491/
Photo: Laurence, Unsplash