How to Craft a Daily Practice: Ritualize the Routine
- Lara Vesta
- May 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 5
Developing a tiny daily ritual practice has been instrumental in my personal and spiritual growth. It is also the non-negotiable foundation of every class I've ever taught. From community participants, dark goddess cohortees, university students and even children all learning is bookended by this:
--craft a daily practice that is repeatable and achievable. usually this means keeping the practice short, frontloading it first thing in the day, and ritualizing (bringing intention to) something you do already
--keep a record of your process
This morning before dawn I lit a beeswax candle and took a deep breath.
Like so many this past year I have been navigating unimaginable, yet tactile and persistent, life transitions. So many of these are not new to me. As someone who has spent the past decade navigating divorce, single parenthood, repartnering, moving nearly once a year, legal-custodial challenges, job insecurity and loss, I eventually became disabled, homebound with severe, cyclic chronic illness. I’ve found there is a familiar pattern to these challenging myth cycles of initiation we endure, ancient and imbued with meaning. I recognize the themes: we separate from the known world, descend into the liminal of transformation, the underworld of what some call rites of passage and I call death transitions, and re-emergence, changed.
In the old ways we returned to our communities, saturated with the gifts of transformation, rewarded for our wisdom with a new status and name. In modern times many of us have forgotten this sacred round of ceremonial passage. But I have found we can reclaim it in tiny ways which are sustaining, practicing the infusion of honoring into our daily lives.
This is particularly potent in the between space of liminality, the unknown where our former self dissolves and a new one is re-formed. With so many limits on our time and energy, adding ritual to daily life can feel overwhelming. I have less than two hours a day I am supposed to be active—cognitively or physically—but the root of ritualizing the routine, bringing intention to small tasks I already have to do, supports and nourishes each day, brings clarity and comfort in the midst of devastation, and sets touchstones on the path of transformation in my initiations. Plus, it makes life more joy-filled and wonder more evident, glittering gem flowers in the darker days.
Anything done with intention is ritual, and the best ritual is simple and repeatable because that is the ritual I know I will do regularly. Bathing, brushing teeth, drinking tea or coffee, eating, all of these may be ritualized to beauty, love and gratitude. A potent ritual has a beginning, middle and end, mirroring the rite of passage cycle. These may be as simple as words: I am now entering ritual space, I am now in ritual space, I am now exiting ritual space. Breath and awareness also work fine. In the ritual whatever you are doing becomes symbolic action, carrying your intention. A flow of water carries healing energy, food transforms through chewing into the eating and digesting of kind thoughts. There is no wrong way to ritualize, only the lived path. This morning I lit my candle and wrote these words, now I breathe out and end this tiny ceremony.
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