If you could build any ritual for yourself, what would it be? Would you spend some time in nature, or get your workout done in the morning? Would you start with a coffee and a book?
Perhaps you read the news or do a quick brain game. Maybe in the evenings you unwind with a book and a cup of tea, or an episode of your favorite TV show.
It’s easy to get stuck in patterns and routines without even taking notice. Sometimes we need time away from everyday life to recognize how to intentionally reconnect with it.
When you don’t have the luxury of waking up in your own space, or don’t have all of your usual comforts around you, it becomes much more clear how you have very intentionally set up your life.
[The Art Of Breathwork In Martial Arts]
Life in ritual
Take a moment to think about how you start your day. Do you roll out of bed and immediately plug into your phone?
Do you do a big stretch, put the coffee on and hop in the shower before consuming any electronics?
From how we color our lives with food, art, and clothes to choosing what to surround ourselves with, our daily lives provide us plenty of opportunity to engage more intentionally with our choices and decisions.
By paying attention to our habits and daily patterns, we can maximize their quality by infusing them with meaning and purpose – turning them into rituals.
If you want to create more intention through ritual in your life, but don’t feel a strong pull, tune in by looking at where who you are on the inside meets who you are on the outside. How can you move through the world in a way that’s most beneficial and authentic to you?
How can you reflect the cozy corners of your mind into the outside world around you?
You don’t need a crazy morning ritual to build a foundation for the rest of your day. You just want to put some thought into what you can affect before the unexpected elements of the day come into play.
Set your alarm (or don’t)
Think about how often we roll right from weekday to weekend without changing up the pace. We may like to go with the flow, but just as too much rigidity confines our possibilities, too much flow can unravel into chaos.
Think about what you really want to do with the time you have. If you want to build more time into your schedule for a hobby, make it a priority. Set parameters for how often you spend time with it, and make them unshakeable.
This can mean setting the alarm a couple hours earlier than usual to ensure you fit everything you need into the day. Even if you sleep in for self-care, give yourself a different form of self-care for a while in the shape of setting and crushing a small morning goal.
On the other hand, if you need a dedicated day for rest and recoup, turn your alarm – and phone – off. Rather than just falling into tired, dense oblivion the night before, take a moment to remind yourself why you won’t be waking up early tomorrow.
You’ve worked hard, your mind and body feel the wear and your bones sink with heavy gratitude.
Tomorrow, you’ll replenish your cells, nourish every muscle, and you’ll stretch, roll and breathe. You’ll read your book and moisturize. It’s going to feel great.
[Training Hard? 6 Ways To Recover]
Reevaluating your approach to food
Even when we’ve had a solid relationship with eating rhythms, life changes so rapidly and constantly that we can get thrown off at any point.
No good habit looks perfect – nor will it ever, probably. Rather than aiming for perfection, just strive towards a constant state of growth.
Once we accept that our relationship with food can and will shift as we seek constant equilibrium, it gets a lot easier to feel less mad at yourself.
Similar to forming rituals, we can learn a lot about our system by noticing our crests and slumps with food. Why do we develop certain patterns? Why does food sometimes inspire curiosity and experimentation, while other times just serves to shove a little monster away?
Sometimes to reconnect with our digestive system and eating rhythms, we just need to shake things up. Try a 12 or 24-hour fast to reset, or get strategic about when and how you fuel.
Build moments into your day to pause and consider what has gone into your body, and what you want to add. Just these moments alone will create gaps of peace amid the frenzy and help you re-center and reassess.
[Kick The Sugar, Optimize Your Training Fuel and Feel Better]
Visual vibes
One of the easiest ways to play with life’s choices comes down to what we like.
Perhaps you’ve never felt able to think about fashion or décor, but it’s really not about spending; it’s about seeing. What do you want to see? How do you want yourself, and your space, to look and feel?
Do you want more blank space here? More cozy there? Do your eyeballs feel better when they have something fun to look at, or when they have somewhere empty to rest?
Same goes for clothing. Do tight black clothes feel secure, powerful and dominant? Or do they feel constricting and gruff, so you prefer flowy things that feel light on your skin? Colors, textures and materials make a difference on many sensory levels.
Not saying throw out your entire closet or living room set in lieu of the next most aligned palette, but you can transform the way you approach your collection process to ensure everything you buy moving forward goes through a certain vetting process.
You may have to change up some of your rituals to make it work – like cutting the daily fancy coffees in lieu of a home-machine so you can commission your friend’s ceramics – but by making more thoughtful choices you will start to feel a grounding sense of calm and control over how you compose your life.
An intentionally curated home doesn’t have to break the bank. If you avoid unnecessary splurges and build your collection one bit at a time, you can create an environment that fits your needs and makes you visually happy.
Journaling
Writing anything down feels inherently intentional – especially today. Where most people live by their Google calendar and their notes app, and do most of their work from a computer or web document, few things feel as impactful as putting pen to paper.
You don’t have to spill your guts; journaling can look like anything you want.
Maybe before you can get to the point where you dump your entire brain out, you need to warm up. Sometimes I write because I have stuff to say; other times I write because the circulating motion feels good to my wrist, my hand as it moves along the paper.
Journaling can help relieve some of the pressure from your head valve. It can also help you lay your brain out on paper – look at projects big and small and visualize how life could look. Sometimes you have to write things down to see them clearly – like making lists and plans.
Usually, people know early on if they like journaling or not, but it never hurts to check in with that side of ourselves – perhaps we’ve let the habit slip away and want to restart. Or maybe we want to get more serious about it.
A good way to start is the three-page approach to journaling. Just fill up three pages in any way you want – words, sentences, doodles, brain goop. There are no rules. Do this for a week, check in with how you feel. Do this for a month, see where it goes.
Get some movement in
Anyone who has a dog knows how important daily exercise and walking is. We’d never skimp on their routines; we want our pooches to live the happiest, most fulfilling lives they can have. Why don’t we always treat ourselves with that much love?
Would we still wake up early every morning and walk ourselves before work if we didn’t have our furry friend to tend to? I think about this a lot.
Integrating movement is especially important if your job or lifestyle involves a lot of sitting. Getting up from our desks, or outside into fresh air, becomes critical to break from long hours of staring at a computer screen or being hyper focused on any project.
If you don’t have time for a walk, you can still take a break to do some shoulder, neck and eye exercises, or get up and do some forward-folding!
Stay with it
Beyond just setting out to move through your day more intentionally, how can we make it work for us? Can we take advantage of our mornings and our nights to further us along our ultimate goals, instead of just blandly keeping up?
While we should never become prisoner to any routine, or fear life beyond it, taking the time to mindfully create one can help you form a sense of peace and calm amid the chaos.
Your routine doesn’t even have to look much different than it does now. So long as you’ve considered it, you keep the power, and you bend time to your whim.
What you choose to do with it is up to you, but as long as you approach it thoughtfully and with consideration, you’ll subconsciously feel more settled with whatever you select.
We all get the same number of hours in a day. How do you spend yours?
