(Nimue)
David's recent post prompted me to think about my own daily rituals. Having spent a lot of years on the Druid path, my daily rituals have changed a lot over time. Usually what happens is that I get interested in a particular practice and for a while I explore that intensely and decide what to do with it. There have been times when I've had daily prayer practices, daily meditation practices, regular altar-oriented practices and gratitude practices. All of those have evolved over the periods I've spent focused on them.
I'd like a living arrangement where I could easily slip outside in the morning and have somewhere quiet and private to stand, and just be present. That's not feasible at the moment, and I make the best use of the windows that I can.
Currently I'm exploring a reflective relationship with the everyday details of my life. This is more about responding to my experiences rather than setting up specific actions. I'm making a point of pausing to reflect on things as I'm doing them. It mixes ideas I've explored before - slowing down and gratitude, conscious living and reflection. I'm currently bringing those things together in a different way. Part of the reason for this is that life has thrown a lot of new and unfamiliar experiences my way in recent months, and this deliberate slowing down has been needful.
Otherwise I'm flitting around a lot. Sometimes I do very intense and deliberate meditations. Sometimes I do body-healing meditations. I'm doing a lot of unstructured contemplation and window gazing, because I'm not so fraught all the time. I note that being calm is a great enabler of meditation and that meditating to become calm is actually a lot of work. I note that it's a lot easier to have a spiritual life when your life is better arranged to support your spirituality. If your spiritual practice is a set of coping mechanisms to deal with stress and try to keep moving, it's not as effective as a spiritual practice.
Working with embodiment has brought me towards relishing as part of how I do my Druidry. It's an ongoing process of celebrating lived, embodied experience. I pause to relish the flavours of the food. I linger over my tea. I gaze out of the window at the sunlight on the trees while relishing the cool breeze and the bird song. The sun on my skin and the wind in my hair are sensory experiences I make time for. Spending enough time in hugs and snuggly situations where I can take the time to really relish that is part of this, too.
When I go through deliberate phases with things, my aim is to embed something into my life. I don't always know what I want to have stick. For me, an important aspect of setting out to do spiritual things is to change what I do in the ostensibly more mundane parts of my life. At the moment I'm drawing on a lot of previous explorations to find ways of being more reflective as part of what I do all the time rather than as something I set aside specific time for. It's all threaded through with experiences of gratitude and joy.
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