Every recurring activity, be it brushing your teeth in the morning or the annual Christmas party, is a ritual. We may not always be aware of this, but we build a lot of ritualized behavior into our lives and always do certain things the same way. Why actually? Well, we don't realize how important rituals are to us until we can't perform them.
Structure & order
You don't have to be an orderly person to realize that fixed structures of all kinds are useful to find your way around more quickly, whether at work or in everyday life. When you see certain crash barriers, paths that we can follow often become visible almost automatically. It is easier for us to get from A to B than to look for the next destination in the chaos.
These guard rails are recurring events, tasks, and activities that we encounter on a regular basis. They help us create a structure in our lives that allows us to focus on doing and spend less time reorienting ourselves.
Custom & security
If we do something over and over again, then we always bring aspects of our own personality into the corresponding actions. This helps us turn what might have been a chore into a habit. Something we are familiar with creates security. This reduces the amount of new events in our lives and traditions arise, e.g. B. the morning routine, which for many involves washing up, eating breakfast and watching the news in the morning.
Independence & resilience
We often feel uncomfortable when our routine cannot go as usual. As a result, we feel attacked in our usual security and have to find a way to deal with it and react flexibly, e.g. B. by adapting our rituals and routines accordingly to short-term and long-term changes. This in turn allows us to maintain our security and makes us more resistant to further changes and upheavals of any kind. At the same time, of course, this also means that what recurs in our lives also makes us self-reliant and independent. Because when we feel safe, we dare to do new things. We can build on a strong foundation, on a solid foundation we can build the house of our lives in a self-determined manner.
Self-confidence & freedom
Self-determination is fundamentally a very important factor in our lives. With a higher degree of felt and actually experienced freedom, we can better make our own decisions. This in turn helps to accept things that we supposedly cannot change and to integrate them into our lives. In this way, a duty that is perceived as purely necessary becomes a responsibility that is lived out confidently and proactively. Of course, we always have a choice, regardless of any consequences - even in morally inescapable situations, it is still ultimately our decision to face them, even if we think there is no other way. It is a confident, self-determined act of our actions. And even so, annoying things in our lives can become rituals. Often these things don't change at all, but their meaning and power for or over us differs massively depending on how we perceive and classify them or, in other words: our own attitude makes the difference.
Health & well-being
Accepting positives and negatives, as well as the gray area in between, goes a long way towards how we feel. Everything is a question of attitude, of perspective. Consequently, our rituals and their design on our part are not just symptoms of our world view. They are also important pillars of our mental, emotional and physical well-being. We wouldn't feel so uncomfortable when our everyday structure gets out of joint if it didn't have an impact on our health. Of course, the effects are rarely dramatic, but it's important to remember that even frequent, small stresses can quickly add up to a mountain. In this respect it is important that we are aware of our life structure.
Awareness & mindfulness
A conscious approach to one's own life can be enormously helpful. First of all, it helps us to get to know ourselves better and to understand what is good for us and what is not. In turn, we can use this knowledge to adapt our own behavior and our living conditions accordingly, as far as possible, and to increase our quality of life in a self-determined manner. A mindful experience of our regular rituals and routines also helps to determine when it is time to make adjustments there as well, e.g. B. because our tastes have changed, we have evolved or just want to try something different. After all, changes are always opportunities and you don't always have to wait for them to fall out of the sky, we are absolutely capable of opening up new possibilities for ourselves. Bearing all this in mind, one can say in a nutshell that one can certainly create a pampering moment out of the most tiresome duty if one knows exactly how and why one finds something good or less good in his individual case.
Time out & relaxation
Speaking of pampering: rituals are not necessarily only active or activating actions in the broadest sense. We should also ritualize downtime and recovery phases. To a certain extent we all do this, e.g. B. have vacation from time to time. However, this does not help much in everyday life. It is important to give yourself a small break every now and then. It can be yoga, meditation, a full bath or a midday nap, it doesn't matter, the main thing is that it helps us to gain some distance from everyday life and to recharge our batteries. After all, we all learned at school that regular breaks are very nice.
Rigidity & stubbornness
For all the positives that rituals bring, we still need to remain sensitive enough not to stubbornly and rigidly adopt and hoard behaviors without allowing for change. Openness is important in order to develop further and traditions of any kind can harbor the danger of cementing yourself windowless in your comfort zone.
Conclusion
Conscious rituals are important because they mean security, resilience and more control and self-determination in and about one's own life. Habits create points of reference in everyday life and beyond. Every ritualized behavior contributes to our mental and physical health, and by being mindful of our behavioral patterns, we can tease out more relaxation from our stressful everyday life. Despite all the good things, prudence is always required so that one does not eventually cling to the outdated. In this respect, there is only one call to you at this point: stay open and celebrate your rituals!
Do you already know our two? The shower ritual and the washing & brushing ritual look forward to being discovered by you!
