The Distinction Between Routine And Ritual

I love words. I often find myself exploring my choice of words to convey a nuanced meaning. Different words can communicate subtle distinctions and sometimes not so subtle distinctions. The terms routine and ritual recently captured my attention while reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem. While he described “growth routines” for developing your ability to settle your body, I found myself wondering what a routine means to me versus a ritual.

Growing up I liked neither the word routine nor the word ritual for different reasons. Routine to me was just plain boring. I could feel a sense of monotony of daily, routine activities and a sense of purposelessness of life when it was routine. Partly I felt this way as I watched adults including my parents engaged in routines that seemed necessary but not always by choice. And I always craved choice and variation. For instance, when I was old enough to drive I always liked to take different routes to places. I also enjoyed variation in food, even though I had favorite dishes that I didn’t find routine or boring.

Ritual was completely inaccessible to me growing up. I associated ritual exclusively with religion and there was no way that had any meaning to me having grown up in an atheist environment. The thought of ritual was almost scary to me. I remember a few times I went to church or synagogue for holiday events invited by a friend or because I was in a choir doing a performance there. Most of those experiences were fairly secular and party-like. However one time I was in a church with a catholic friend and I watched with an uneasy and confused feeling as people took communion. The foreignness of that ritual didn’t make me curious just left me weary of ritual. Curiosity about ritual was buried until much later in my life.

In my 20s and 30s I liked the concept of routine to make sure that I got things done. By creating a routine I was more assured of completing all the tasks I needed to complete in my busy work days. Routines were also a way to create helpful habits. That perspective led me to consider the word routine more favorably though it was a fairly rigid definition. The sense was more like a regiment than anything else. I didn’t think much about the word ritual through these years.

Ritual took on a different meaning when I became a life coach in my late 30s and even further when I became a wedding celebrant in my late 40s. As I received my training in both of these disciplines I was exposed to rituals, both religious and non-religious. Through this education I began my journey into understanding and exploring how to be more present in each moment and how ritual is helpful in that path. I created rituals for myself and also for others for their wedding ceremonies that I officiated.

Working as a coach and celebrant also opened up my ability to see the word spirituality in a different light. As a kid, spirituality meant religion and therefore something I shouldn’t touch. I will never forget when the word spiritual first took on some personal meaning. I was on a call with one of my life coaches when he reflected on what I had just told him. He took a deep breath and stated, “You are very spiritual.” I was stopped in my tracks and became silent. I had never thought of myself as spiritual before. That single moment of someone seeing me as spiritual had a profound impact on me and prompted my further explore of spirituality. Ritual was part of the route in

Through my coaching and celebrant work I experienced how ritual helps to grow and sustain self-awareness and presence. And my view of both ritual and spirituality deepened. Ritual became one avenue from which to celebrate and understand the beauty and wonder of life. And I began to recognize that my exploration of the inner landscape of human experience and inexplicable connection to all the world is spiritual. Life coaching and celebrant work gave me a way to connect with the meaning of ritual and spiritual that makes more sense to me. I believe I have always been very spiritual though I would never have used that term. The deep connection with and awe I feel for animals and nature is so profound and was present even as a child.

I no longer see the word routine as boring. I have found how to make routines more meaningful. Unlike ritual which conveys to me that I am present, conscious and with great purpose, routine feels unconscious and less embodied—though it gets the job done. But I’d rather not just get the job done. I could be doing the routine activity mindlessly and disconnected from my body. Or I could bring greater awareness to the routine activity as I do with ritual so that I feel more grounded. Through my meditation work in recent years I am practicing doing routine activities like washing the dishes being more present to the task. It’s still a routine and not a ritual to me, but being aware of my body and mind shifts the experience and makes it more connected to life. And I feel more freedom of choice. I like flexibility in my routines. I meditate daily but not at the same time each day. I move my body most mornings but don’t have a specified activity that I must do at a certain time. I have created routines that jibe with my need for variety.

The more I ponder these two words the more the distinction between ritual and routine becomes less meaningful and very nuanced. And I realize that this distinction isn’t true for everyone. Perhaps you experience routine just as alive and awake as you experience ritual. Maybe you use the words interchangeably. Food for thought—hopefully with plenty of variety.

xoxo Rachel

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My Life Journey Is To Question Everything

We are all on a journey through our own experience of life. Lately I have been experiencing a great sense that an important part of my developmental path is to reveal how much I connect with questions of mind, body and soul. Call it spiritual, call it whatever you like, I am outing myself as someone who is woo-woo (if you haven’t already figured that out from my other blogs ☺).

Growing up I never felt comfortable with religious inquiries because I was never educated in it so it felt foreign and made up to me. From my limited exposure I though religion only meant that you believed in some humanoid male figure in the sky called god. As I understood, it was not grounded in human experience. That made no sense to me and so I never explored religion in any shape or form. However, as an adult I drifted towards awe and wonder of the natural world. And my academic interest included intuition and heart-focused thought. There is no doubt I was drawn to my career as a psychologist because of my interest in how and why we perceive and interact with the world the way we do. I always questioned. I have always been spiritual even if I didn’t identify it as such. It’s not religion. It’s my huge need to keep learning and exploring what it means to be human, what it means to think, feel and experience our conscious life.

As part of my reflection and exploration of my spiritual life journey, I am seeking clues in my past. And there are many connections throughout the years. Early ones are fainter in my memory but it should not be a surprise that I wanted Tarot cards which my mom gave when I was about eight. I adored those cards and kept them safe all these years. I wish I still had my Ouija board. In terms of practices and beliefs it is clear that peace and equality were important to me from an early age. Children’s liberation, recycling, woman’s equality and peace marches are anchors in my childhood memories.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl was an important book to me when I started college. And though I probably could articulate in my twenties that my personal search for meaning was through my academic and scientific psychology work, at its core, my search has always been deeply philosophical and spiritual. In my thirties I was so focused on my career that I have few memories of seeking spiritual knowledge. I did, however, have numerous moments of questioning the purpose of it all. I felt great dissatisfaction with work even though there was much to enjoy. I had existential crises often. That led me to life coaching—a way to connect my longing for personal life meaning with work to help others. As part of my training as a life coach I was exposed to Native American and Buddhist philosophies. My training as a celebrant more recently brought ceremony and ritual into focus for me and stretched me in new directions. All wonderful additions to my quest for more discoveries about my humanity.

This past year my journey into veganism has reconnected me to my great love of animals. And I feel closer to all of nature through nourishing my body with plant foods of the earth. It is all connected and feels so grounded and on target for what I am looking for. Woo-woo implies a more frivolous and airy image and that is not it at all for me. Yes, I do love to go up into the clouds to get the big-picture view of things. I love to ponder and hypothesize and wander and explore in my head and my heart. And yet it is very grounded in the earth and in the natural world. I certainly did not choose Love Beauty Peace as my mantra without reason. Those three images are very clear aspects of how my spiritual view of the world manifests. Love connects me with everything including other beings and myself. Beauty is my awe as I energetically connect, often through gaze, at the wonders of the world. And peace is both my immense desire to see peace among all people as well as that inner calm that I feel when I experience gratitude for my life. Those concepts have not just been with me as an adult. They guided me every step of my life through my formal and personal education.

As I see it now, I have always had a deep need to find personal meaning and that is in itself so very fulfilling to me. Even as I grasp that I may never fully understand and will always be looking, it is in that practice of my own growth that I am so deeply rewarded. There is absolutely no end goal in my mind. I don’t really care as much about the absolute truth as I do about the relative truth for me. The truth as I can make sense of it. The truth as it reveals itself to me. Even if I try to articulate what I believe, it doesn’t really matter whether others understand my perspective. Even if I could articulate it well enough for others to understand, it is my view alone, just as your view is yours alone. Sure it is possible that you were taught a particular worldview. We all were. But even if you followed a strict canon, it still is your interpretation and that brings in your own personal slant. I am getting greater comfort with the concept that it doesn’t really matter what it is that I believe specifically, but rather how I comport myself in this world, how I am, how I treat others, including animals and the natural world. Love, beauty, peace fits me well and I am realizing that I came out of my mom’s womb with those words scribed into my body, heart and soul.

xoxo Rachel

Dancing Among Angels On Earth

This past week I attended Fabienne Fredrickson’s Mindset Retreat in Ft Lauderdale, FL. The event was part of her yearlong Boldheart Academy program that is designed to help small businesses and entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The Mindset Retreat was focused not just on work but on all facets of life and how to conquer limiting beliefs that hold us back from taking actions and getting what we want. The content of the program was very helpful and very empowering. And the people in attendance—well, they are some of the most magnificent people I’ve met! Together we danced an awful lot and found ways to get into our personal place of power as we tackled some really difficult personal development stuff (check out my post on finding your own personal power). It is so easy to get stuck in the muck that holds us back from doing things in life to reach our big goals. In our working sessions we thoroughly articulated what we want from life and then committed to taking action. Much of moving through limiting beliefs requires taking leaps of faith as we go for what we truly want to accomplish. So it is not surprising that the type of people who are attracted to the mindset program are very spiritual and very loving, kind and open. So every day of the retreat I felt like I was dancing among angels on earth!

Many of the people I met are involved in light work such as life coaches, spiritual coaches, health coaches, angel practitioners, massage therapists, psychologists, professional organizers, musicians and artists. And there were also doctors, nurses, construction contractors, authors, and many other areas that aren’t typically associated with the spiritually inclined. But I can tell you that they were all very angelic beings! They opened their hearts and shared their passions for creating their own awesome lives while being of service to others so that their clients can create their own awesome lives. What a very motivating and positive energy group of people to be around! I learned so much from each person I talked to because we didn’t stop with simple pleasantries of introductions. In our conversations we went deep into why we do what we do and what we are striving to accomplish in our lives.

One of the best parts of my getting involved in the coaching movement way back in 2001 has been the amazing people I have been honored to get to know. Over the years I have met so many talented coaches and people in other professions who are very warm and kind and also extremely dedicated to making changes in the world. They are not afraid to speak frankly about what they are passionate about and in general tend to be passionate about a number of different things. They are multi-passionate like me. And they are highly spiritual—not necessarily religious. I suppose that it isn’t surprising that I was drawn to also become a celebrant a few years ago because that training and the practice of marrying couples allowed me to make ceremony and honoring of passages in life a big part of my why. And I met other celebrants who also tend to be very giving and generous souls in the world. I am sure that if I called any of them angels to their faces they would smile from ear to ear and exude their natural sparkly brilliance.

What I have been finding to be true for me more and more each day is that I cannot hold back from publicly sharing—through my blogs—how I look at the world. Whether in this Love Beauty Peace blog, my Wondrance Coaching blog, my past Magical Moment Mondays (that I will be bringing back soon in a new form), or my Wedding Wednesdays and Flower Fridays blog, I am constantly outing myself in terms of how I view life. Although I am not religious and rarely directly discuss my spiritual perspective of life, I identify with the angelic realm because it speaks to seeing the natural and brilliant beauty in everything surrounding me: flora, fauna, trees, clouds and people. Every moment is magical when you allow yourself to feel the wonder and joy of existence. I believe that owning and taking responsibly for creating your own magical life is critical to change the world. And I believe that it is happening for so many people already and will keep spreading. As we all become angels on earth, dancing and creating joy and sharing our unique and brilliant talents, we will experience personal abundance and proliferate peace.

xoxo Rachel

A Nature Child Of The 60s In Small-Town USA

Although it is easy to wax poetically and over-romanticize one’s childhood while looking back decades, my childhood days really were glorious. I lived in a tiny town of about 1000 people located in one square mile of New Jersey, very much in farmland. Roosevelt is located in central Jersey where relatively large areas of undeveloped land remain and there are still farms left. Sure, there are tract housing developments near my hometown now that did not exist when I was a kid, but it is still a wooded borough surrounded by plenty of nature.

I got to thinking about my experience with nature as a child because of a book that I just read for my book club, Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I have been in one book club or another for more than 20 years. This time I have rejoined a club that meets at the library in my new small-town—new in the sense that I have only been living here full time for about 5 years and part-time for only 20 years. A club member, Annie, who works in ecological education, suggested the book. She also happens, coincidentally, to be married to the son of Becky who I grew up with in my hometown of Roosevelt. Although it is possible that knowing Annie’s connection to my town primed me to recollect these nature experiences, the book on its own was remarkable in how much it elicited my memories of being a child of nature in the 60s.

One of the themes of the book is that children raised before the early 70s had a different relationship with nature than most children do now or during the intervening years. As I read the book I realized how lucky I was to roam the small streets and woods of my town and commune with nature. My whole perspective on life, in retrospect, was influenced by nature when I was a girl. To me, being in nature is paradise—heaven on earth. I assumed everyone felt that way and I am sure many do. But I actually did live in Paradise. Well, it was once.

Roosevelt was originally Jersey Homesteads and before that is was an area named Paradise. I have the map to prove it!  In winter I often sled down Paradise Hill, a steep paved road that was the only remaining nod to Roosevelt being Paradise. In the adjacent woods, if you dared, there was a path through the woods called “Steeple Chase” where you had to dodge trees as you speed down the slope. I think the first time I tasted Jack Daniel’s—just a sip—was on a cold evening as a teenager sledding on Paradise Hill. My mom grew up in the same town and during the early 50s, she sled there too (though I have no idea if she sipped whiskey).

So many of poignant childhood memories are outdoors somewhere in town. Near our school there were many great opportunities for outdoor exploration. In “the enclosure”, a tree and grassy square lined by hedges, friends and I played many different games including hide-and-seek. Even though that area was relatively manicured compared to the woods, I loved running around and under and sometimes climbing through the big trees or just lazing on the grass in the enclosure blowing blades of grass to create sounds.

I was devoted to the paths in town (I walked many paths outside of town too—see Walking Around A Lake). There was the formal path between the school and Tamara Drive where I even found wild asparagus growing. I can almost taste the raw thin sweet stalks to this day. I often walked along the path beside the creek that ran through town. The creek meandered and crossed roads at several locations including Tamara Drive, Rochdale Ave and an unpaved road that we simply called “the path”. I loved stopping on any of those overpasses to play with the creek. I’d place a leaf on the upstream side of the road so that I could watch it float under the road and pop out the other side. What quiet joy!

I wandered all the paths in town alone or with a friend or my brother any number of times just to explore. Or to use as a shortcut. That was a common word I used to describe the routes on paths I found between places in town. I took a shortcut through people’s backyards, front yards, or the woods—all ways imaginable including just about going through someone’s house—to get between my home and somewhere I wanted to go. I took shortcuts to school. I took shortcuts to my best friend Peri’s house that was across the street from my grandmother Coco’s house so therefore a shortcut to her place as well. And I took shortcuts to my great Aunt Ellie’s house. Most of the shortcuts were through the woods on hardly what you’d call a path in some places. They were more just routes through bramble and prickly bushes, some with blueberries or raspberries, or slimy rock lined routes with colorful moss.

Moss stands out prominently in my love of nature. Very close to my house, above the Pine Valley Swim Club, was a path into the woods where I made a secret hiding spot in a moss-covered embankment. I kept a metal box that held—I don’t know what—tucked under rocks and moss. I loved to go there and sit and think and smell the earth around me. I’ve apparently known forever that flora sights and scents are essential to my livelihood. Not that I didn’t like bugs. I really liked bugs a lot! Whether playing with lighting bugs by putting them into jars as lanterns, or pulling off the lighting part just when they flashed on and squishing them on my finger to imitate a diamond (gross), or collecting bugs as specimens for a science classification project, I definitely was one with bugs.

So now when I think of Coco’s and my great grandmother Hani mama’s vegetable garden and the sweetest peas imaginable from the brightest green pods possible or I remember the wonderful feeling of my hands pulling carrots from the earth or I envision dancing around Ellie’s cherry trees and gooseberry bushes and the baked goodies that we created with them, I recognize how much my childhood was chock ‘o block with good times in nature. And I recognize that those good times in nature have influenced what I consider good times now. I’ve been a flower gardener from the time we bought our home 20 years ago to today. Now that Andy built us a vegetable garden, we are also vegetable gardeners. I often dream of that wild asparagus in Roosevelt, so much so that I am considering planting some in our garden even though it needs lots of space and years to establish. And not surprising, one of the first things I did when bought our property was create paths (and a labyrinth—see Revealing the labyrinth on our land). I need only step outside to be surrounded by our 3 acres of woods to regain the calm and quiet joy that I have known since childhood.

Several years ago I rambled on about how nature soothes my soul to my life coach. From the clouds above (see Cloud Hopping) to the earth below and all the flora and fauna in between, I spoke of my sense of awe and love for nature. He paused and thought about what I said and then characterized me as deeply spiritual. I had a momentary confusion having been raised non-religious. Me spiritual? I never learned anything about religion so what does spiritual mean? I was unable to fully reconcile my feelings of transcendence when I commune with nature with what I think of as religion. But now I recognize that through nature I was first exposed to the sense that there is something more than me as an individual. In nature, as a child and now as an adult, I feel connected to all forms of life and I have a need to use my hands to connect with my evolution on earth. This isn’t a theological perspective but rather a personal spirituality perspective. Now I understand that to me nature is a perfect place to get replenished because it embodies love, beauty and peace. I will always be a nature child of the 60s.

XOXO Rachel