This is blunt, but the simplest thing that can be said about how people usually move and conduct their lives uses the word ‘flailing.’ Our movement, our behavior, our conversation is all flailing. We’re just throwing stuff out and off of us real carelessly and casually. We’re not composed, we’re not grounded, we’re not deep with how we go about doing things. It feels superficial, like it’s all coming off the surface; we hardly ever even say what we mean or mean what we say. We speak and move haphazardly. So basically we’re just dumping away energy all the time. We are constantly wasting whatever might be there of real value. With all the spinning of our minds, our emotional states are equally chaotic and flailing. On the other hand, living ritualistically is a much more composed sensitive, deeper way of conducting your movement, your relationship to any activity – whether it’s cooking and eating, going to work, leaving work, speaking with others, driving, etcetera – knowing how to approach your life with sensitivity and grace so that you accumulate more sensitive energy, which is a crucial foundation point for other evolutionary mixes of energy. It is cultivating genuine sensitivity in how you conduct your activities so that you feel more deeply connected with them and at peace within yourself. Along with being intentionally directed there is a refinement and enhancement of feeling, clarity of mind, and artfulness and creativity that enters into everything you do.
A ritual is a procedure to set things up in a way you can be open to and in alignment with certain forces or certain qualities both within you and in the world around you, so that you can deeply mesh with them and fully receive, contain, and absorb their riches. When you do an activity, do you ask yourself what else can I get from this? And do you set yourself up in ways that would make it possible, before you do it, while you’re doing it, and then when you’re done doing it? Do you take the time to approach and conduct it as a ritual? Do you cast aside the speed of the temporal, the speed of the moments ticking upon moments? Do you cast that aside for the sake of something which is more still and more internal? Do you stay on alert for what you can find, what you can see, what you can experience beyond the normal implications any mundane activity has for the vast majority of people because you have set yourself up in a way that can make such experiences possible?
