Her hands rested comfortably on her legs. That's something she learned from experience. Start the wrong way, even if it's not too bad at first, and it would eventually build into something so intolerable, she would have to stop.
She could hear the wind shaking her windows. If they were better windows, it wouldn't be so drafty, but the quality of her windows was not something she cared much about, nor could afford.
She started with her breath, intentionally trying to slow it down from the busyness of the morning. She closed her eyes and tried to feel her heart beating in her chest. It wasn't quite there yet. She went to her shoulders, making sure they were loose, relaxed. This was not very difficult since it's been something she's been doing for quite some time now.
Rain began splattering across her roof, but she took no note of it, having turned her focus inward. She decided to skip her heartbeat for the day, leaving her muscles behind, as her attention collapsed even further into her mind.
Her childhood disappeared. The mountain disappeared. She allowed the memories of her morning to drift away, downstream. Her future became increasingly hazy. Tomorrow was invisible, her evening a barely intelligible blur, quickly dissipating.
Even the present moment was falling away as her thoughts receded deeper into her mind. She had been conscious of the wind outside earlier, then the room she was in, then her body, and now only her mind remained.
Her thoughts became increasingly unfocused, a jumble of incoherent images and feelings that would take not insignificant effort to make sense of. But she made no such effort. The thoughts came and went, like dreams that could not be articulated using words.
In the brief moments when she regained self-awareness, she would not be able to remember what she was just thinking about. The thoughts and experiences were there, but they might as well not have been. But this was not enough. She continued to fall backwards, inwards.
The first moments of nothingness came in short irregular bursts. Then they began to fuse into longer stretches. She could feel the blankness become solid and large in her mind, but that was not enough. She didn't want to feel the blankness at all.
Eventually it all drifted away, even the words to describe it, and her mind receded into the void.
There was no alarm clock. There was nobody else who might wake her. She would have to emerge from the blankness on her own, if at all. One might call it sleep if she emerged, or death if she did not. She had no worries going in though. She was no longer ruled by fear. If death came, it came. If it did not, then it did not.
It has also been something she's done on countless occasions, and though she emerged naturally every time, she no longer placed any value on the relative merits of either staying in or coming out. Time had no place in her temple. The amount of time she spent inside was always indeterminate, and she would only judge how long she'd been inside by the position of the sun when she came back.
Eventually the blankness would begin to lift, like a mist clearing from her mind. She would become aware of her body and the thoughts she was just having, though her memory of these thoughts would fade almost instantly. She never bothered to try to remember them. She would then begin feeling sensations from the room again before she lifted her eyelids.
She could make out the sun, low in the sky, its heat slightly warm on her skin. She would pick herself up from the floor as she's always done, and open the door.