Day 15 (Tuesday 7.5.22)
It seems everywhere you turn there’s a new “5-Step Morning Routine for your BEST life ever.”
And everyone wants to know what the biggest brains are routinely doing each morning in a hope that somehow following those same steps to the letter will magically elevate our day too.
Don’t get me wrong.
Routine is great for efficiency.
But, Ritual — Ritual stokes the soul.
Routine is linear and leaves little room for all the beautiful color that exists between black & white, the full spectrum of experience between right and wrong.
Ritual is rhythmic, allowing us to tap into the cycles of the natural world around us.
Though they may look the same from the outside, the difference between the two is vast and a distance bridged only by presence, attention, and the intentions underlying our actions:
Would you rather learn how to efficiency complete the tasks on today’s to do list?
Or are you seeking an enrapturing embodiment of the highest vision for your life?
Ritual is routine made sacred.
When I think of my practice as merely a routine, it becomes obligatory, heavy. And I never seem to have “enough time” for it.
I’ve found that elevating my daily practice from routine into ritual is helping me heal my fractured relationship to time.
Through ritual, we allow ourselves to loosen our attachment to commonly-held understandings of time.
That …
It goes by too fast (or too slow, depending on what you’re doing or waiting for — “are we there yet?”).
It’s sped up by deadlines.
It’s weighed down by regrets about time passed.
It’s divided up into schedules and calendars and time tables and action items.
It’s marked only by milestones or somehow lost to the rote nature of tasks and duties.
That pandemic time is a whole wild whacky clock of its own anyways …
If you’re still trying to find your groove with 40 EM, ask yourself if this distinction helps you reframe it.
LEAVE A COMMENT — After the holiday weekend, Who’s REcommitting to 40 EM as a daily ritual or routine today? (I Am! ;)
One more day to choose — create your ritual or routine with either day 11’s “one-and-a-half-minute thing” or day 12’s “3-simple steps.”
And don’t forget the evening wind down these 10 days — its ritual embodied and a powerful one at that.
You’re doing beautifully,
Cath
DAY 15: Early Morning Meditation — your ritual / routine to choose!
OR —