Real Self-Care: Ritual
This post is part of a month-long series on Real Self-Care for world-changers. It’s about the experimentation: figuring out what works for you and following your heart. Simple, messy and everything in between. Self-care should be custom, intuitive, feasible and kind – to serve your actual life.
Ritual
Rituals have been a subtle through-line of this Real Self-Care project: how can we make self-care a devotional habit? How can we bring both sacredness and consistency to how we offer ourself sweetness?
Today, I offer you this: adopt one Real Self-Care prompt as a ritual.
Assign it a time; decide how frequently you want to do it. Make space in your schedule, make space in your heart. Treat this as preciously as you would your most non-negotiable engagements. Not out of a sense of rigidity, but because you are eager to give this gift to yourself.
I have my own rituals:
I drink coffee with my husband every morning.
No matter how late I arrive home from a trip, I empty my suitcase as soon as I return home from the airport or get out of the car.
On Sunday nights, we have Japanese food for dinner.
On Monday mornings, I draw a card from one of my divination decks.
I meditate most mornings and light a candle. I wrote more about my morning rituals here.
It can be simple and quotidian, or deeply spiritual. But creating ritual around self-care allows it to take on a life of its own – you don’t need to remember it, it’s a habit.
Rituals don’t have to feel like “shoulds”; they don’t need to be time-consuming. A personal ritual is a way of offering yourself some attention and love, consistently.
