Starting Your Day with Ritual

I have been quiet for a little bit, honestly, I have been struggling with some emotional and energetic issues. 2020 is making staying positive a difficult task indeed! So, just as I advise others, I took a few days of quiet time, to rest and relax, meditate, and gather my thoughts.

Today, I would like to talk about starting your day with ritual… Many books you read suggest this, however, they also go about setting forth a ritual to “greet the dawn”. I am a nocturnal person; I worked third shift for quite a while and I naturally am awake during the night hours, I start to get tired around 3 or 4 am. So, my day starts around noon, which is definitely not the “dawn hours”. For many years I didn’t start my day with a ritual because my day started at an off hour, I felt like I had to try to get up and be active in the early morning hours. This was not honoring my natural sleep cycle and I found myself beating myself up for not being a morning or day person.

Recently, it dawned on me that I was trying to make myself fit someone else’s definition of what my life should look like, instead of making my spiritual/magical practice fit into my own life. This is something I have found many people do. We read books from “experts” and we read about what works for them and beat ourselves us for not having the same life experience that they have. I know I found myself rationalizing that “surely, they know something I don’t. Afterall they are successful writers who make their living being magically inclined. I should model myself after them.” I am not saying disregard the wisdom of those who have trod this path before us, but I am saying look deeper and question more. While I may learn a valuable and useful meditation technique here, an interesting bit of philosophy here, not all of it will fit my life completely.

As I continued to learn and grow, I found myself looking to nature for a lot of my wisdom. The more I observe nature, the more the lesson of diversity is impressed upon me. Within nature there are animals that are diurnal and those that are nocturnal. I am quite sure a nocturnal raccoon doesn’t lament the fact that he is not a diurnal squirrel. In fact, I think it is fair to assume that a racoon doesn’t compare themselves to squirrel at all. A raccoon accepts that they are a raccoon and they do what comes naturally to them. This is something we as humans have to learn.

I am a nocturnal person, no matter how hard I try I am up at night. Even when I have a job that requires me to be up at 7 am I tend to come home take a nap and be awake until 3 or 4 am ( FYI this is a reason I prefer not to apply for daytime hours.) If necessity demands me to work on daytime hours, I will find a way to adapt, but I still find myself most active in the evening hours.  After this realization I began to work on adapting those “greeting the dawn” rituals. I look at them instead as a greeting the day ritual. I removed references to “morning” and “dawn”. Instead, using phrases like “as I begin my day” or “when I awake”.

What the drawn-out moral of this is:  you can start your day with ritual no matter what time your day starts!

Now let’s discuss what starting your day with ritual looks like. For me, I have to fully “wake up” before I can even gather my thoughts and be coordinated enough to be allowed anywhere near a candle, flame, or other ritual tools. Within my life I give myself a half an hour to “wake up” ( I have the bad habit of smoking and so part of this consists of smoking the first cigarette of the day, and drinking my first Pepsi- coffee and I are not friends!) During this time I get out of bed, do what I need to in the bathroom, get dressed and then smoke my first cigarette, drink a Pepsi and simply allow myself the luxury of coming into full awareness and consciousness without any other demands on my time or attention.

From there I perform my “greeting the day” ritual in which I ground and center, greet and thank the elements, the ancestors, and my Gods. During this rite I also send healing energy to those who need it or have requested it, give thanks for the blessings I have and ask for blessings for those around me. I start my day speaking with the Divine. I may or may not pull a tarot card for the day or spend 5 minutes in still contemplation. (All of this takes approximately 15 minutes, now that I have memorized parts of my ritual, though a large majority of it is ecstatic and I speak the words I need to at the time).

Starting my day in this manner helps me to be more focused, affirms my connection with the Divine and with my own Sacred Dove. This time offers me guidance on the day to come and helps me to center myself, call up energy from my spirit allies. It is a peaceful less harried way to start my day. I find myself able to be calmer, more collected, and less stressed throughout my day when I start it off this way.  NO MATTER WHEN I START MY DAY!

So, readers, how do you start your day? Do you already have a ritual in place? Is there something you would like to work into your morning routine? What keeps you from doing so?

A morning ritual is a great way to begin working on a devotional practice. Devotional practice is something I have come to find invaluable in my personal spiritual work. It ensures that I am committed to my own well-being, committed to communication between egoic self and my Divine self, committed to putting my spirituality at the forefront of my life. As this is something that I feel is part of my reason for being on this Earth and incarnate at this time, it is the small way that I fulfill that on a daily basis.

The further I delve into the mysteries of Frith Craft that the Goddess Frigga is revealing to me a little at a time, the more I am shown that Devotion is an integral part of this practice, as is the self-discipline and commitment needed to show up each day, fully engaged with my inner divine energy, the present moment and my life.

I encourage anyone seeking deeper spiritual truths, inner emotional balance or connection with the Divine to begin to make it a part of your daily life: however, that may need to manifest within your schedule.