Four first sentences people say before getting out of bed

A prayer said while still lying down is a rare thing: a fully formed ritual that assumes you have not yet decided to be awake. Four traditions have one, and they differ so much in belief that comparing them is more instructive than blending them. What follows is read from texts and secondary sources, not practiced, so I leave interpretation to the people who say these lines.

What is Modeh Ani?

A twelve-word Hebrew sentence, by my count of the transliteration, said on waking: “Modeh ani lefanekha melekh chai vekayam, shehechezarta bi nishmati b’chemlah, rabbah emunatekha.” In English, roughly: I give thanks before you, living and enduring king, for returning my soul to me with compassion; great is your faithfulness.

It is surprisingly young. The prayer is not in the Talmud or the Shulchan Aruch. It first appears in Seder haYom, a book by the sixteenth-century Safed rabbi and kabbalist Moshe ben Machir, first printed in Venice in 1599. Scholars do not know whether he recorded an existing custom or introduced one. Its place in practice rests on a technicality: it contains no name of God, so it can be said in bed before hands are washed.

What does the Islamic waking supplication say?

A single sentence in Arabic, recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (6312 in the common numbering) from the Companion Hudhayfah: praise be to God who gave us life after He caused us to die, and to Him is the resurrection. I count nine words in the transliteration, though counts depend on how the particles are joined.

The wording treats sleep as a small death and waking as a small return. That framing is at least as old as the narration. It does not tell the sleeper to do anything. It tells them to say something, and in doing so to re-enter the day.

What is the Hindu palm verse?

Karagre vasate Lakshmi, a Sanskrit verse for looking at your open palms on waking. Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, is placed at the fingertips; Saraswati, of learning, at the middle of the palm; and Govinda, a name of Vishnu, at the base. Some versions name Gauri or Durga at the base instead. A common reading is that the fingertips are where work happens, so the verse is a reminder that what you do with your hands is where the day’s outcome sits.

I could not trace it to a primary text. One site says it comes from the Vishnu Purana; I treat that as unconfirmed. What is certain is the practice: it begins with your own hands and a glance, not a screen.

What is Thich Nhat Hanh’s waking gatha?

A short verse from the Vietnamese Zen teacher, usually attributed to his book Present Moment, Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living, and one review places the same verse in his book Happiness. In essence, it asks you to smile as you wake and to treat the twenty-four hours ahead as new. He called such verses gathas, short lines to be said while doing an ordinary thing. The idea is that the first act of the day is a smile and a thought of the hours ahead.

Of the four, this is the one with the least doctrine attached. The verse needs no belief, only a decision to treat the morning a certain way.

What do the four have in common?

Three features, from my reading.

They are short. The two I counted run nine and twelve words in the originals, and the other two are a line or two of English or Sanskrit. They are short enough to be said by someone who is not yet fully awake.

They come before the first decision. None of them involves choosing, only saying. Whether to get up, what to wear, whether to open the phone: all of that comes after.

They name the day’s start as an event. Each in its own vocabulary marks the turn from sleeping to waking as something that happened and can be acknowledged.

Here is the claim I would defend: the usefulness of a ritual like this is not that it is religious. It is that it gives the first ten seconds a content other than the alarm and the phone, and it asks nothing of the person who has just woken up. The weakness of that claim is that I know of no study that has tested a spoken waking line against silence. A secular version exists as a matter of practice, and a short recipe for writing your own waking sentence turns the same idea into steps.

Two neighbors are worth knowing. The post on the pre-dawn Fajr prayer deals with the timed part of the Islamic morning, which these verses leave out. And the glossary entry on sleep inertia describes the groggy state these short lines have to work in.