Daily Rituals - Good or Bad?



I have dealt with a lot of Addictions in my life, from Porn, Alcohol to smoking as the obvious ones. We have many addictions that we participate within, such as coffee, sweets and just spending money.
I have worked with Habits and patterns for the past few years of my life to deconstruct them and to understand them, to see who I am within my patterns and habit, why I formed them, how I formed them and if they are actually supportive or not.

I have found that 90% of my habits and patterns just like the obvious addictions and the not so obvious ones are not best for me or anyone else. in some cases they are supportive.

Yesterday I woke up and I once again in awareness walked through my morning within just waking up, I looked at the patterns and the habits that come up during my morning routine and why I do them, how I do them and what is it all for in the way I am waking up and going about my morning.
Within this the word Ritual came up, I noticed, specifically withing my morning routine that the patterns and the habits of the morning routine together forms a ritual. This brought me to a whole other level of understanding myself and not only how I do things but more specifically the WHY, as the believes and ideas behind the how.

Lets look at the noun for ritual
a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according 
to a prescribed order.

Now, here we have to take into account the definition of prescribe as well, as understanding this word within Ritual brings quit a bit to the surface.

Definition of Prescribe - state authoritatively or as a rule that (an action or procedure) should be carried out.

Within the word prescribe we can also simply use IMPOSE, Each morning when I wake up I have a set of patterns and habits that I am imposing onto myself to LIVE as my ritual, as I believe doing things a certain way will make me experience myself a certain way, and this has some truth to it, except it is in reverse. We believe that HOW and what we do changes who we are, so we create certain patterns and habits that forms a ritual that we live to change how we experience ourselves and thus how we will take on each day.

The problem I have found with this is that the ritual becomes a dependency, and if we for some reason can not fulfill the ritual then the magical powers we receive from it will not be there and thus we will experience ourselves differently.

In my morning ritual after getting out of bed, I MUST first Drink water, if I do not have that first cup of water then I have the believe that I will have a dry mouth all day, that my body will be tired and not feel strong. Even if this is true and practical to have a glass of water each morning first, what compromises such practical point i the FEAR attached to it of if we do not do it, thus this practical point has now become a ritual of polarities, where we do one thing to avoid the other, and if we should ever compromise this ritual then we access that fear and we live the polarity. Thus we create the problem and enforce the ritual/belief and limit ourselves to this polarity designs.

I used to have it that if I wake up in the morning I MUST wash my face off with water first thing in the morning, or I will feel tired during the day, this ritual activity was enforced by the negative fear point of being tired, so I wash my face each morning out of fear of being tired, confirming to myself that I am tired each and every morning by living this action, and the same goes for drinking water the first thing in the morning, by drinking the water from the starting point of fearing being dehydrated and if I do not drink it, made me wake up every morning with a dry mouth and feeling dehydrated.

I used to use lip balm, to keep my lips soft and moist. I would carry a stick of lip balm with me everywhere I go. Ever few hours I would pop out y lip balm and I would start putting it all over my lips, while I am doing that I would think to myself, YES, keep it nice and soft, moist. what was behind that thinking was that I feared having dry lips that ends up cracking and looking ugly, as I had a believe behind that, that I naturally had dry lips, weak lips, different lips t others, or that the climate does not agree with my specific and special body. So I used lip balm for years, always enforcing the believes within the actions I took, the rituals I participated within, thus the things I IMPOSED onto myself, such as I am always dehydrated, I am always tired, I always have dry lips, and thus I created these rituals to have a positive change so to say, yet I never realized that my rituals were actually making all the things I believed of myself so, to be so, to be true, keeping it and creating it.

I have stopped using lip balm about 14 years ago, and I have never had dry lips again, I have stopped splashing my face in the mornings with water for years now, and I have realized that I can simply be awake, I just had to drop the believes I had of myself, the ideas and opinions I was imposing onto myself, I did these things gradually as to not compromise myself, I obviously did condition the body, so I simply had to unconditioned them and realize that everything has got to do with WHO I AM and that determines what I do.

Let me explain a bit more, currently we have the mentality that we are defined by what we do, and what we do gives us value. which is the same as saying that a Seed of a tree must first be a tree before it has the value of a tree, yet the seed is created and born with that value already, it did not have to become a tree first to have that value, it is naturally the value of the seed. The same with humans, we are BORN with the value of LIFE, we have it, it is us, we do not have to DO all these things before we have value, we simply had to realize we are the value of life ad then LIVE that, it is all in revere.

Because we have revered everything where we now have believes, ideas and opinions of ourselves within our minds about ourselves, we are constantly living in self-comparison with yourself of being worthless or not, and we try to change these believes and ideas and opinions about ourselves through the things we do, and thus we create addictions, habits and patterns and eventually we have rituals. instead of realizing that we need to STOP the beliefs, ideas and opinions we have of ourselves and realize ourselves as the value of LIFE which we inherently are/have. Thus we can GROW from that as LIFE just like how a tree grows from the seed naturally.

So, take a look for yourself, what Rituals do you have that you believe you must perform each and everyday day during your days to be a certain way, to exist a certain way, to experience yourself a certain way, and here I want to be clear, they can be positive or negative rituals, some enjoy negativity and some positive and both are of the same coin.

Because these rituals are keeping the opposite things in place, they impose conditions and are not what they are believed to be. It takes some practice to see deeper dimensions, to see what things are in reverse and to understand what they are actually imposing, creating and keeping in place.

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