Discovering The Rituals For Fulfilment
A lot of “ways to live your best life” are rituals. Morning routines. Evening routines. Tea ceremonies. Journaling practice. Candles. Baths. Standing in a forest. Breathwork. These are all things that are enticing to me, all things that at various stages over the last five years I’ve tried or thought about trying, all things I thought were missing. I see people sharing their rituals online and think how lovely it looks, how much I’d like to do that too – and yet I also know I’m never going to.
I suppose I must be honest and say that one of the reasons why I want some rituals is because they look pretty. I want a squat terracotta teapot steaming from the spout to pour into a matching bowl I hold in the palm of my hand. I also want to look the way I see people with their eyes closed focusing on their breathing, not the way I feel with my eyes closed focusing on my breathing. These are not, of course, the reasons why I want to be doing things in my life, but I think my fascination with ritual goes deeper than the consumerist surface.
Because underneath that surface are other longings. My interest in morning routines belies a craving for order and calm. Lovely teapots aside, a tea ceremony speaks to a desire for intentional nourishment. Breathwork is a way of being in touch with one’s body, journaling a prioritisation of feeling. My fascination with ritual does, in fact, go deeper than the pretty surface – I crave regular grounding. The most beautiful thing about rituals, I think, is that they are unfettered devotion to oneself. They are an act of giving over our most precious commodities, time and attention, to be with ourselves and fulfil our needs.
As I was planning out the monthly deliveries for The Cabin, I wrote, without thinking, that there would be a monthly ritual. This felt natural and necessary, because of course living one’s most fulfilled life will be abetted by giving time and attention to just ourselves. And then I started to panic: how was I, this chaotic ritual-less person, about to tell people to have rituals?!
I was mulling this problem over in my mind on one of my regular walks; I remember I was approaching the boggy bit in the field after the fourth gate, picking my way over rocks. I remember jolting my freewheeling thoughts to halt with, “but hold on, isn’t this a ritual?”. Don’t I ritualistically walk these paths almost every day so that they are so familiar I know the route through the boggy bit without even thinking about it?
After that I began to see I have lots of rituals. Every morning I make a cup of tea and sit at my desk and listen to some music before I start work. I never counted that as a ritual before, perhaps because I’m drinking PG Tips and not a loose leaf green, or perhaps because I do it every day it doesn’t seem “special enough”. But the point of the ritual is not that it uses the “right” equipment or that it has some special import – the point is that it is time devoted to grounding into yourself.
When I thought of rituals it was always something I thought I needed to add to my life, something that was missing. Now I see that ritual is implicit throughout my days, from that morning tea to my daily walk to the time on the sofa doing the day’s Wordle. They are all giving me what I wanted a ritual to do, I just needed to clock on and receive it.
Each month in The Cabin we will be creating rituals together around our monthly themes – this will include making brand new rituals and also recognising and becoming more intentional with the rituals we didn’t know we had. Find out more here.
