Blessings, Balance, and Gratitude

One of the services which I offer as a healer is what I like to call a Blessing and Balancing Gratitude Ceremony. It is a way of honouring old habits, old messages, old ideas that may have served us in some fashion in the past, but they are now holding us back from growing and moving forward in our lives.

What are Your Rituals?

As we move through each day, we have little rituals that we do. Routines that have become so much a part of our day that we don’t even see them as rituals.

I know that for me one of my internal nigglings is on the need to incorporate more ritual into my daily life. I get so focused on the idea that ritual must have a solemn, blatently religious or spiritual focus that I lose sight of the little daily rituals that I already do.

Do you start your day with a cuppa?

Many people begin their day first thing by flipping the kettle on to make a morning cup of tea or coffee. They will then cleanse themselves, get dressed, make beds, eat breakfast, perhaps read the morning news or check their phone/email.

Should they need to start their day without that morning cup though, their whole day feels off.

Makiing a drink that cup of tea or coffee has become an important part of their morning ritual.

Instead of trying to squeeze in rituals with a spiritual focus, perhaps I could make my daily rituals more spiritual.

A ritual is anything that we do the same way day after day, that becomes so ingrained that we can do it without actually thinking about it.

Modern ideas such as mindfulness training ask us to simply (but not necessarily easily) think about what we are doing in those daily rituals. Focus on being fully present and focusing entirely on the steps of each task and ritual.

When you bring your thinking fully onto whatever you are doing, whether it be making a cup of tea or knitting or washing dishes or lighting a candle or weeding the garden or any of the other hundreds of tasks you do throughout a day, it becomes a spiritual ritual.

So, rather than worry that I am not creating ritual by sitting in front of my altar each day with incense and candles, I will focus on making the tiny rituals I do each day part of my spiritual practice.

Waiting for my tea to brew becomes a moment to breathe deeply and inhale the oils being released.

Cleaning my body becomes a moment to release any unwanted energies I may have picked up through the day.

Housework becomes a way of honouring the spirits of the hearth and guardians of my home.

Walking becomes a way of reconnecting to the Earth.

Eating becomes a time to fill my physical body with those foods it needs to be healthy.

My body becomes a holy temple in more than just words but also in actions.

100% isn’t mandatory

I know there are going to be days that I oversleep and barely have time to open my eyes before I’m heading out the door. There will be times I get to the end of the day and realise that I haven’t thought in any way about the rituals I have been doing.

And that is okay.

Image credit: Milk clouds in tea by Xavier Snelgrove (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons