Ritual and Routine

As we experience the transitioning weather and enter into America’s holiday season, it is easy to spot ritual and routine lining the roads, decorating homes, and changing menus. The increase of pumpkin spice and candle-lit windows exemplifies our human practices of ritual and routine on the macroview. Similarly, ritual and routine drive our personal daily lives in both massive and minute ways. Think to yourself, which hand you use to brush your teeth, or if you begin brushing on the back top left each time. Consider the whole sequence of events and behaviors that occur prior to your arrival at your place of employment. At work now, reflect on how you begin your day and what drives how you proceed throughout the day. Stepping beyond the individual day, each week may have its own pattern, affording an even more general predictability. Our uses of routine and ritual simultaneously act as a complex mechanism of socialization while providing us shortcuts for the mundane and monotonous.

     It seems near impossible to conceive of what life would be for anyone void of routine or ritual. Each day navigating a novel world without the unconscious conductor following previously laid and reliable tracks. Though for us with routine and ritual, it is when the tracks prove reliably unreliable that reconsideration and actionable change may prove beneficial. It is when new aspirations, dreams, or goals become thwarted by obsolete routines that we must consider what concedes.

     In this short series, I will share tools and techniques that may assist with first identifying routines and rituals, then we will work to consider the costs and benefits of those routines and rituals on well-being. At the end of this short series, I will explore concepts and practices that may assist in maintaining new routines and rituals.

Mindfulness and Defusion

Autumn has arrived, hear now the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. See the brown wind burn creeping toward yellow, and into a waning green sliver. Smell the sweet decay of leaves carried crisp into your nose, and through to your nostalgia. It is a practice of mindfulness to recognize one’s experience of these elements at the moment they occur. 

The term “mindfulness” is exhausted from the weight of expectations imposed onto its 11-letters by pop-culture outlets. Mindfulness is not the cure to all ails that is often promised. Though, mindfulness is an essential component in the process of identifying routine and ritual. Mindfulness is akin to the syringe used to administer a vaccine: the vessel for the real antidote - choice.

For most of any given day, we are reacting to stimuli and feeling both the internal and external effects of our interpretation of those stimuli without question. This state of “fusion” between our interpretations and experiences allows all people to persist without the withhold of laborious decision-making processes at seemingly inconsequential crossroads. “Fusion” allows for routine to flourish and facilitates the safe arrival of oneself to work after a commute that is largely forgotten. Though, it is “fusion” which acts as a warm usher for the follies of a life unexamined. In pursuit of identifying ritual and routine, we must first examine the self and the monotonous minutiae of daily life.

To “defuse” is to retract inwardly and observe one’s own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with mindful intention. The power of “defusion” is in allowing decisions made automatically within a state of “fusion”, to be brought to the scrutiny of the executive mind. It is only when we become aware of the self that we can enact change from within. I invite you to be playfully curious with yourself, wonder “why” you do that, and bring attention to the details typically glossed over within “fusion”. Here, through the practice of “defusion”, we begin to identify opportunities to enact influence on routine and ritual with meaningful intent. 

Defusion as a Path to Intrapersonal Examination

Here we find ourselves enlightened to the role of mindfulness in allowing defusion to occur. So what?

Defusion is the essential step that allows an intrapersonal examination to be held. The curious magnified eye openly perusing the nature of self. Here, we are able to identify routine and ritual from a vantage point and with a spotlight. Shining the glow of our mindful attention we ask “how did this routine come to be?”. Inherently, the answer to this question will unveil either the unconscious development of this expression over time or the conscious and intentional decision to incorporate this routine.

There are no good routines or bad routines, though the tax and outcome of any routine ought to be considered.

The outcomes need to be measured biopsychosocially, allowing for a holistic understanding of the implications of routines as small as the process of one’s brushing teeth or as impactful as the type of food that is consumed daily for one’s lunch.

When we employ our ability for mindfulness as a tool to defuse, we see ourselves more fully. We begin to take control of our lives and determine behaviors and thus trajectories that may have been largely glossed over prior. We examine ourselves to live closer to who we believe we are. This unique power of choice is a phenomenon that involves self-determination. This power of choice is exactly the mechanism that allows for all of us to decide who we are, for ourselves.

If you are looking to practice a concept like this, start small and obvious. In a journal, write down your observations of a routine, and include your theories on where the routine or ritual came from. Then, when you have considered the origin, engage the routine in a cost-benefit-analysis: weigh the pros and cons. From here, a crossroads is presented and a decision needs to be made to reintegrate the routine or ritual or to modify it. After the choice is of course one’s commitment to the decision.

These writings are influenced by literature on and clinical experience with Acceptance and Commitment, Cognitive Behavioral, and Narrative therapies. Please reach out to trevor.holak@innerpurposellc.com for additional information and resources regarding these theoretical orientations.

Written by Trevor Holak, MA, LAC