Routine and Ritual: Engaging the Relationships of Life

Routine.What do we mean by routine? When we want to make routine, we want to do something on a regular basis, do something we think of as ‘good’ for us, often. Eat healthfully with regularity, exercise at least 4 times a week, or get to work on time…everyday.

Routine is also the list of what we do. The progression of exercises, the perfect yoga sequence. We seek these routines sometimes as if you knew the ‘right’ thing to do, you would do it more regularly. If you knew the ‘right’ things to eat you would not want that cookie. Really? We often think if we got it ‘right’ we would settle down and make it regular…like marriage. If I got the ‘right’ guy, I could live with him forever. And our market based economy tries to lure us into thinking that is all we have to do. We just have to get it ‘right’. Marketers created one hundred calories packs of cookies because they are supposed to have the satisfaction of a cookie with the calories of an apple, so it must be right. And that would be easy to make that routine, right? Each new exercise machine or video is marketed as if all you needed to do was get the right one and you would do it.

The other side of routine is the boredom. Once we have succeeded, and something becomes ‘routine’ we often lose interest, we just go through the motions, it’s no longer fun and we want to change our routine…that sequence is not doing it for us anymore. Those 100 calorie packs don’t taste that good after a while, they are ultimately NOT satisfying. And that husband, … well I’m not going there. Then we want to change it and we start all over again. Once we change it You need to search the right one again and then struggle to make it regular. We are back at square one! Yikes!

So what is it that makes a successful routine if it’s not simply the right routine, yoga or spinning, apple or cookie, right guy, which makes a successful routine?

Importance. One major factor is whatever we want to stick with must be important and meaningful to inspire a high level of commitment, to make what the wellness industry calls a ‘lifestyle shift’. And that importance, the special-ness does not necessarily depend on which thing we do, but in the meaning we give it. And we are the ones who must cultivate and assign that meaning. How important is it to you to take care of your body? And what does that mean to you?

Yet even when we think things are important, when we think we are committed, our routines are fragile. I have seen thousands of students over the years, with the best of intentions, let their class cards expire because one day it snowed, (and we live in Rochester!) Or they got a phone call just before they got in the car, or the studio changed the teacher, and poof, routine broken. Any excuse becomes the excuse to break the routine. The meaning that motivated you was muster up the motivation, to direct the energy, if you are even conscious of what you’re doing. We want commitment to ourselves, and yet how conscious is that commitment? We want commitment to what we know is good for us but how?

Bringing the routine into the realm of ritual
When you hear TV pundits say that doing good things for yourself takes a ‘lifestyle shift’, what are they trying to say? This shift is a way of saying that we need to take routine into the realm of ritual. Ritual is a celebration, something done to self-consciously mark a significance or special relationship. Yet most of the things we do in our lives on a daily basis we consider routine in the sense of the mundane, rather than a ritual celebration. When it’s something we ‘must’ do, we can see that obligation as burden. Even our rituals can become burdens, longing to get back to our every day routines. Have you never heard someone say, I can’t wait til this wedding, bar mitzvah, party, etc. is over. Seeing our everyday lives as ‘routine’ is a recipe for, dissatisfaction, drudgery, and disappointment in us. Shifting the perspective on our lives, making that ‘lifestyle shift’ can be taking the routine and making it ritual.

So what does it mean to make something ritual? We are a culture of few rituals and we have reduced down our rituals to be few and far between. Douglas Brooks always says, Americans do only ‘4 wheel ritual’. Most of our rituals require a set of special wheels: baby carriage, limousine, ambulance, hearse... Birthdays, Anniversaries, Bar Mitvahs, Confirmations and a few holidays are the only things we ritualize. On these occasions particular rituals are performed marking a certain important significance. Blowing out the candles on a cake is part of the birthday ritual. If you look at this list, one of the hallmarks of our rituals is it’s rarity, something has to be very occasional for our culture to consider it a ritual unless you are one of the rare ones who still attends weekly religious service.

Just making something more regular, more routine, isn’t the only thing we need to cultivate. Remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine’s co-workers got a cake for every little excuse? They sang, with candled cake in hand, “Get well, get well soon, we want you to get well….”, because she called in sick the day before. Elaine got annoyed because of the dissimulation. They didn’t care, they just wanted cake… and then they got mad at Elaine for being the party pooper. In their desire for something special in their routine workday, they wanted to add ritual, but it was not a meaningful ritual, it was trying to establish a routine aimed at a particular goal…cake. The daily ritual of cake would supposed to get them through the drudgery of work!

The Fruit of our Actions. Going after the ‘fruits of our actions’, a main teaching in all yoga philosophies, will often fool you into thinking you are getting what you really want. Elaine’s co-workers didn’t want cake, they wanted some meaning and to feel the importance of their work. When we continually go after the fruits of our actions, all we get is frustration when that fruit does not deliver more than temporary satisfaction. It’s like going after the husband for the ring, and expecting the ring to give you the meaning, instead of the cultivation of the marriage. This gets really old when the ‘fruit’ is not as immediate as a cake or a present. We have turned so many rituals into the means for instantaneous gratification, rather than for the cultivation of meaning in our lives. Christmas becoming about the presents, is this same complaint.

This is what drives our economy. Yikes do we need a paradigm shift! But it is not the ‘fruits’ themselves, the presents, the ring, the cake, the husband, that are at fault. The shift that has to take place is in our thinking. They, as objects, cannot deliver things we simply hope they will. The objects, the fruit we aim for, the cake is not somehow inherently wrong or bad, but cake cannot, in and of itself, deliver a meaningful experience of your office job! The ring represents a promise. That promise is the opportunity to create a relationship of intimacy. That’s all marriage promises is the opportunity to create a deeper relationship. The ring does not give you the cultivated relationship. If you do yoga, you don’t get a different body, just the opportunity to have a relationship with the one you already have.

We must realize that if we are wrongly attributing our actions and their fruit. I spent years going from job to job hoping the next one would be the one that gave me satisfaction. I thought it was about finding a job I loved, then finding a noble job, then a fun job. All they were, was work…. Just jobs! There was nothing wrong with any of them when I looked at them as just jobs and not at the fruit of what I thought they were supposed to give. Instead of cultivating a relationship with what the job actually had to offer, I was focused on what I thought the job should offer. Jobs are an opportunity to explore your relationship with many things, money being a main one. In our culture, that’s what a job is essentially offering. But my dissatisfaction came from ignoring the essential relationship presented by what something is offering.

It is the same way in asana. If you go into yoga thinking it will give you a different body, slimmer figure, less stress, more energy, without cultivating the relationship with your body, all you’ll get is the desire to switch … to running, or spinning, weights, anything else. Anusara Yoga is the invitation, the opportunity asking you, “do you want to cultivate a relationship with your body” in ways other exercise systems are not, because they tend to focus on the fruit, rather than the relationship that is being offered.

Cultivation of a Relationship. Now let’s go back to thinking about the regularity, the idea of how to get to do it often. Instead of focusing on the need to do it regularly, focus on the fact that it is important to cultivate the relationship with whatever, in a healthful, regular way. I always tell new students to try to come to class at least 2 or 3 times a week to work your way into this new relationship. Once a week is not enough, and 6 times you will crash and burn. If you go on a date once a week for 6 months with a guy, you build up the relationship too slowly. You probably don’t really want a deeper relationship with this guy. If you don’t want a deeper relationship with your body, you may also only want to do yoga once a week for 6 months, But you’re already married to your body! Then sometimes you have whirlwind romances. You see each other almost every night for 2 or 3 weeks. Then one day you get a hold of yourself and see that you are completely exhausted, forgotten to pay the bills, you’ve lost yourself, and are being smothered.

In the body one way your relationship is cultivated is in the fact that your muscles build up memory. As you begin to imprint it on your body in the asana, your body starts to give back by remembering for you. You know when you remember how good it felt after that particular class? That’s your body reminding you it wants a relationship with you. And what happens is you will find yourself remembering to pay attention to your body, how you are standing or sitting at random moments of the day. Or you recognize the pain in your knee is a request to realign. As you nurture the relationship, the conversation grows, and you begin to understand what it’s trying to tell you.

Did you see the movie “50 First Dates”? Adam Sandler must woo Drew Barrymore into a first date every single day because she had an accident that prevents her memory from holding new information. This is what happens in your body when you come only once a week… or less. You have to start the relationship all over again! It takes years, but because Adam is so persistent in his desire for relationship, after a few years the memory of him begins to be established in her unconscious. In the end something in her knows that she loves him, but on the surface, she still forgets every day. This is our relationship with our bodies. Even though we are married, we can be so unconscious that it takes 50 first dates worth of commitment to establish the foundation for a good relationship. When we realize that our hearts desire is that relationship, we are willing to do what it takes to make it a relationship of conscious ease and recognition.

Yoga and Ritual. Now that we have established the importance of making the relationship the priority, let’s look at a different way to think of ritual so it we can open up what that word means to see how it can apply to our lives.

In yoga, rituals are not simply things you do at special occasions. Ritual is the self- conscious act of engagement, so that all occasions, each action is seen as an opportunity to be something meaningful. Ritual is the possibility of yoga. You can see any action as self-conscious engagement and in that way, marking it as significant. The idea of ritual is so primary in the Indian culture it is seen as the structure of life. Anything done routinely is important enough to be conscious of, to ritualize. Said another way, the significance of our lives comes from making self-conscious the things we do every day.

Unfortunately we tend to see ritual as the opposite of what we do everyday. The fabric of our lives is marked by the duality of the mundane vs. special. We see everyday dinner as mundane, and Thanksgiving as special. For cultures established in ritual, the creation of the everyday meal is an everyday ritual, and the Thanksgiving meal would be an occasional ritual, In this system, the Special meal does not make all other meals less significant, it is celebrating something else entirely. Making dinner every single day makes it more important, not less, and worth marking as significant. The meals we eat being the very fabric of our lives, and therefore sacred and worthy of conscious ritual.

When everything is ritual, everything is sacred and holidays are occasions for marking different significances, not the only important days in our lives. Categorizing the days of our lives into the mundane, the routine versus the ritualized special, is a set up for disappointment. If you see the everyday things we do as ritual, there is ‘special’ and ‘special’, for nothing is mundane in a world where everything is sacred. There is a difference when you see the underlying fabric of our lives as starting our special, sacred, an opportunity for ritual, for deeper engagement, rather than a series of routines marked only by the occasional occasion.

Starting from the premise that life is the opportunity to engage the invitations the universe has presented you, sets up being able to see the ritual in the routine. Recognizing what is special, important about what we do every day is the starting place for a deeper relationship with anything we choose to engage. If everything is sacred, we have to choose.

Yoga is engaging an action that allows you to create relationship. Ritual is an action that marks a particular significance, a particular relationship that can be cultivated. Yoga is the possibility of ritual, or making a conscious, special, sacred by marking significance and cultivating the relationship with that which you are engaging.

Asana is the ritual of the body. Yoga presents an opportunity for you to create a sacred relationship with your body. Why yoga is different than other exercise is in it’s premise. If the premise of life is that there are opportunities for engaging deeper in relationships, and asana is that opportunity in your body, regular exercise is often not that, in fact the opposite. Most gyms use music or television to actually distract you from your body so you just keep running on that treadmill! In a way it is the practice of dissociation with the body. Now I am not saying that everyone runs this way or exercises this way, not at all. There are plenty of people who seriously cultivate relationships with their bodies in a multitude of ways. But I pose to question so you can ask yourself.

Ritual, Priority and the Cultivation of Your Heart. We ritualize the things that you want a deeper relationship with. Your life is an offering of relationships, inviting you to a deeper experience of yourself. Because there are so many, you must prioritize. The questions you ask yourself, in order to prioritize, is an essential part your primary relationship, the one you have with yourself. Cultivating your desire, asking what you want, what you love, what makes your heart beat, literally what turns you on, is one of the ways we get to know ourselves. Any ‘lifestyle shift’, any ritual or routine is about priority first. What is important? is an important question, and perhaps the harder because in the land of freedom, there are so many choices. Like in a Greek Diner, choosing what you want from an 18 page menu can be overwhelming. Many things in our lives are not very different from that. Choosing which relationships are important takes knowing yourself and your preferences, your upeksha in Sanskrit. You love cycling, but don’t like hot yoga. To make routine, ritual, a fulfilling life, cultivating your heart, part of the relationship with yourself is the foundation for all other relationships. Many routines get interrupted and rituals uncultivated because you try so many things without asking yourself what you love first.

Commitment to anything comes from love, priority and cultivated importance. There are consequences to not dealing with some primary important relationships, your dharma. You say, “Oh, I’d rather not go to work, or pick up my husband from the airport tonight, I’d rather go to the movies”…… indicates re-prioritization is called for.

We have so many things that are important that we acquired unconsciously, not realizing that the relationship with them required cultivating. Our culture offers so many invitations, marketers are bombarding us with choices. In a free market society with everyone competing for your attention, choosing is difficult if you don’t know what’s important to you, and ritual comes only to things you consider really important.

For some, cultivating the relationship with the body is more like an occasional ritual, rather than a foundational primary everyday ritual. This is why it is difficult to make it routine. One of the foundational relationships in your life is not considered important, loved or a priority. Sometimes taking care of yourself and getting to yoga class can seem as remarkable and occasional as a surprise party. You don’t have to turn the mundane into the special, but see what is already special, what is important and cultivate those relationships. If the body is an important relationship for you, you will end up making a ritual for it, cultivating a deeper relationship with it, in the way you choose.