The morning rehearsal from the Hagakure, dictated in Saga between about 1709 and 1716 by a retainer who never saw combat and was forbidden by law to die the way he said everyone should. One form a day, held for a count, written down. Nothing about how it felt.
Before the first morning. Rehearsing your own death is an old practice with no modern evidence behind it, and for some people, especially anyone carrying a recent loss or a history of wanting to die, it is the wrong instruction and can reopen what it touches. If that is you, close this page. If you are in danger now, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line. This page records a date and a form. It cannot see you.
This morning
counts
30
Sit or stand still. Picture it in the one form named, plainly, without decoration, and hold it for the count.
The forms are the ones Tsunetomo lists. The page rotates the suggestion each day; you may pick another. It records the date and the form and nothing else.
The record
The honest limit, stated first. Yamamoto Tsunetomo was born into the fourth generation of Tokugawa peace and never fought. The book that tells you to die every morning is a bureaucrat's nostalgia for a war he missed, dictated by a man the shogunate had forbidden to follow his lord into death, and it was fringe even in its own domain. The warrior code it was later folded into was written in English, in Philadelphia, in 1900, by a Quaker for American readers, and was repatriated and militarised by people who despised the author's politics; it was handed to young men in the 1940s who were then sent to die. Say all of that, and the morning practice inside it is still a good one: a fixed minute with the one fact everyone avoids. It has no evidence base and it does not make you brave. The page never uses the word samurai as a compliment.