escaping the automate: from routine to ritual

the ritual of everyday Life, the medicine of conflict, automated selves

what if our practice wasn’t about trying to escape and feel better? what if our practice concerned itself with Becoming into ourselves for the world? what might our lives look like if we took ownership over our present moment selves and situated our Bodies in Now? what if our practice was about being really fucking messy and allowing ourselves to get caught up in the trip of Being human; accepting we’re going to forget our divinity again & again & again?

when people come to me for healing it’s because they are dealing with some sort of conflict in their lives. i find that most healing comes down to confronting some kind of conflict within ourselves. whether it’s relational stuff, wanting to express ourselves more, or inner child healing/parts work—it’s all conflict. most of which comes from some background program running in our inner world that isn’t quite up to date with our present moment way of living, and so it causes us dissonance.

we are Beings in constant friction with automation. we are very programmable, which, at best shows we are capable of writing new worlds of Being into ourselves. at the same time, it also means we can get really lost and far away from our Bodies, truth & creativity if we let the programming run mindlessly.

even when we deny it, we see the self we long to become. though its often easier to set our gaze towards what we are unbecoming. we get jealous even though we know it’s not practical. we tell ourselves that those who have hurt us dont give a fuck about anyone other than themselves. we snap on the people we love because we fear they don’t understand us, or worse that one of us will have to leave. mostly, we let older versions of ourselves lead the binary narrative work around our world building and relationships. but again, we stay in the automate because we long for a deeper way of Being in our world. we long to fall in love with our lives. our {future} creative selves. that’s the biggest conflict of all. seeing how all of these mechanisms of protection, and ways of returning to the past are simply just a guise to keep us from fully embodying our most erotic, heart-led selves.

capitalism tells us that routine is how successful people are MADE. they lull us into the automate thru american dreamin’; that there is a world we can be free from the cycles…possibly even free from ourselves. but the conflict within ourselves isn’t because we need routine. it’s because we forgot how to break back into the mundane—the ritual of everyday Life.

routine is an automated practice that centers living in service to the machine. to the programming we never consented to receiving. it’s the 9-5 grind, tv after work, tense holiday dinners, the nuclear family structure, forgetting how to eat without staring at a screen, smoking cigarettes so we can clock a meaningful break. it’s the relationship escalators. monogamy and channeling all our love into one special person so that we never learn how to cultivate community. so that we abandon our friends and forget ourselves every time we fall in love. it’s the way that even our wellness has been infiltrated. cultural constructions of self love bound to the machine. prescriptions of ‘‘quality time” rightfully disconnected from others, 14 dollar candles with chemicals in them, nag champa & yoga classes, hyper-individualistic mantras to “protect your energy & peace”, ketamine, cacao & cold plunges, a visit to the rain forest before its gone forever, and the constant reminder from wellness coaches that your nervous system is fucking fried. youre not meditating enough. but dont worry, spirit will send you a clear booming message from the cosmos when youre on the right track. but youre never on the right track are you? and besides, someone was else was chosen to deliver the message to you, so you pay them to do an egg cleanse. you think it works. for a little while. and then you fall back into the automate, but this time you see the machine.

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from routine to ritual; falling in love with the mundane.

at the heart of all healing is ritual. ritual is our way of tapping into the memory embedded into the present moment. a full bodied re-membering on how to come back into communion with the sacred; how to devote our Bodies to Life. our Lives.

i view ritual as the antidote to routine. ritual is how we transform conflict into medicine. it’s about stepping outside of the automation and seeing ourselves separate from the cycles we fall into; the conflicts that mirror and warp across our realities until we resolve them and break free from the pattern.

ritual is a way of living in service to life: routine is a way of living in service to the machine. routine is a lie we use to hold ourselves accountable to avoiding the pattern cycling beneath the program. routine, in a capitalist society, is about creating structures that shut our shadowed parts of ourselves out. but it never addresses the root need. it also fails to acknowledge that puritanism is a form of excess. routine chains us to the automate. and i suspect that’s often why our shadows communicate through the automate; rumination, shame, spiraling etc. this is how they can be loud after we silence them.

ritual is ALIVE.

ritualizing is a way of communing with the sacredness infused in everyday life. it’s intentional and filled with meaning. when we engage with ritual we have to be honest with ourselves about what we are ritualizing. its a practice in accountability to presence. it isn’t bound to repetition, it’s bound to HERE, to this.

deepening into the present moment is how we break the spell of the automate. we no longer have to let the program run our lives, because we are willing to engage with what’s right here. there’s nothing to escape from, because we find it all sacred. everything is ritual, all of life is transitory and flowing. from our morning cup of coffee, to the subtle invitation of our grief to fess up to how deeply a human being can love. over and over again.

ritual is about finding the practice in every moment. accepting that the world is a mirror, and our Bodies are rippling out into everything. we are constantly in dialogue with the universe, the open sky, sharing information with every particle and fiber of existence. there is nowhere your atoms haven’t traveled or heard about through the great atomic web of all that is. it’s accepting that maybe your practice isn’t waking up at 5 am every morning to meditate, maybe it’s sleeping in. maybe the practice is not in meditating at all. maybe it’s about triggering the fuck out of your family and letting your spirit do the work of inviting them out of the automate. maybe it’s about being messy as fuck and experimenting with karmic happenstance and letting your shame lead the way.

what i’m getting at is it’s ALL delicious from the perspective of the ever-present Now. everything deepens the experience of the universe. it’s especially delicious and ritualistic when we engage with our shadowed selves. when you find the way to voice all the ways you’ve been hurting. when you let all the stolen pieces of you come to the surface and Be involved in your Life. or when you take a pause from all the inner work to just let yourself be human. give yourself the grace and spaciousness to accept that you’re not going to fix your abandonment wounds in one mushroom trip, or a great breathwork session. instead, youre going to make more progress by building a relationship with those parts of yourself.

we shift from routine to ritual when we change our relationship to the pattern, instead of denying the pattern access to reality by blockading it in a routine. when we try and let go of habits/patterns by building routines, we often do so through the binary of ‘doing’ and ‘not doing.’

for example, telling myself i’ll NEVER watch tv again if i can’t be mindful and not use it to numb away reality. (you can replace tv with ur own X here ) inevitably, i’m going to watch tv again. except, when i do, i’ll experience far more shame and guilt than i would if i made space for myself to fuck up and adjust my relationship to media consumption. i’ll have betrayed myself.

and when i engage with it again, my binary thinking of “watching tv is bad i shouldn’t watch tv” the only option for me is that i am bad too. when the deeper reality is that it’s complex. tv isn’t bad, and there’s plenty of pleasurable things it brings to me and the world. what’s harder to accept is that i don’t like the person that tv brings out of me. i don’t like who i become when i let myself get lost in the experience of tv. that’s where the cognitive dissonance emerges when i fall out of routine. i’ve limited myself to a set kind of behavior and at the same time it makes parts of myself feel shameful because i want the thing that i’m calling “bad”.

the shift into ritual is where we can find spaciousness to engage with the pattern presently, and compassionately. again, we know who we want to become, but its easier to focus on who we are unbecoming. ritual gives us a broader focus away from dualistic “i am this” & “i am not that”, and invites us to hold all parts of ourselves and invite them into the present so they can be free from living in the echo of old patterns.

ritual is relationship building with life. it’s creating a map and landscape of your inner world so that you can free up the stuckness and the avoidance and let all the pieces of you come out and dance. one minute youre weeping and sobbing and the next laughing because your Body feels so free and youre grateful you could love as fully as you do. it’s all about riding the waves, and letting your Body do most of the talking and ritualizing. this is integrative work & integration leads to presence.

| INTEGRATING THE AUTOMATE INTO OUR PRESENT MOMENT SELVES |

the gag is: just because youre present doesn’t mean everything is good. Being Here doesn’t equal enlightenment and enlightenment doesn’t equal catharsis or release from the suffering. Being Here means welcoming every piece of yourself into your Body and accepting that sometimes you just need to have a shitty day, or a couple of fucked up weeks where you feel out of balance with yourself. sometimes the most enlightened thing you can do is have a temper tantrum and be honest about how much you’re holding in your body.

~fucking up is a part of Being present.~

there’s this big idea in the spiritual community (that’s deeply informed by the patriarchy) that we have to ram ourselves against our inner world, get to the bottom of our shit, and let it go completely. but that’s precisely the point of incarnating into physical form. WE ARE HERE TO FEEL EVERYTHING. there’s no such thing as ascension if you accept that reality of the present moment. everything is right here, right now and we have to tend to it as it is, not as we want it to be. there’s nothing to escape from. there’s no higher form because there’s no hierarchy. no state of Being is better than another. it just is.

living in the automate is telling ourselves everything is fine, or we can handle it when there are parts of us screaming for air. i view cultivating presence with our Bodies as an essential piece of engaging with the present moment. in the west, we have a long standing tradition of dismissing the intelligence of our Bodies. we are taught that cultivating presence happens by detaching from our Bodies and ignoring their messages and cues. but why else would we incarnate into this form if not to become students of it? our Bodies create meaning even faster than our minds. our sensory inner world emerged long before we had to language to gesture towards our experience.

our Bodies communicate through nonlinearity. the present moment somatically is concerned with both our becoming and our unbecoming. this is why when we start to do somatic work many parts of ourselves emerge. our Bodies start to tell us the story of our needs through flashes of memory, sensations, & longing to release programming that inhibits our mobility through Life.

the conflicts that erupt in our inner worlds—the ones that keep us in ruminative cycles & winding endless narratives are calls from our Body to engage with the program. the conflict becomes the medicine. whether it feels beneficial to our present moment selves or not, every part of us is working towards our highest good.

for example, if there’s a part of me that feels deep shame about sharing my voice and a part of me that LONGS to sing, write, create, and be heard, there’s going to be a felt sense of dissonance in my Body. the shameful part may exist to protect me because someone taught me along the way that it was better to be quiet, that my needs were too big, i was too emotional or intense. and so even though the experience of the shame is deeply uncomfortable, it’s also part of my story of survival in this world. the work of interrupting that program is figuring how to update that part of myself to admit the deeper sense of longing i have to express myself. that might look like going really deep within and letting that self know “hey, i know that you were made to feel like you can’t express yourself, but that’s bullshit. whoever told you that feels limited in themselves too, and it’s not fair for them to place those restrictions on your voice.” and then making space for ALL of those repressed expressions to emerge. all of the crying. and the words left unsaid. it’s a deep work in radical honesty.

and when we begin to make space for those background programs to enter the foreground, and re-align with our current view of ourselves, we set ourselves free from the pattern. this is how we escape the machine, the automate, and return back to our Bodies as they are. we become students of ourselves and therefore, gain access to the present moment. life becomes ritual.

if youre interested in exploring integrative, ritualized somatic work with me you can explore here.