Calling in Ritual in 2020

Photo by Luz Mendoza

I am not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I used to be. I used to scurry to my notebook at the start of each year and write an exhaustive list of things I wanted to change about myself. I’d visualize the life I wanted to live. I’d think about how different I had to be to fit that life. And then, by the third week of January, I’d start to lose steam because, even if I’d been checking all my boxes and faithfully employing the new habits I thought would make the change, I still felt the same. By mid-February all my resolutions would have faded into failures. And I’d be left feeling even worse about who I was. Because I just couldn’t make the change.

It’s a familiar story, isn’t it?

But I have to admit, I still love the feeling of a turning year. I still feed into the energy—that shared passion we all seem to get lost in—that this year could be better than the last. It’s an optimism that motivates me to want to build something, do something, be something. Reflection is a powerful motivator. We spend so much time at the end of the year looking backwards, reflecting on our wins, our losses—it’s only natural to want to look forward with hope for what’s to come.

So I’m not against setting intentions for a new year. But I choose to shift the perspective from being results-oriented to process-oriented. When we focus on results we get stuck in a win/lose category. But when we focus on process, we’re inviting a flexibility to the table. Instead of “I want to change my body,” I say, “I want to learn how to better honor it.” Instead of, "I want to gain a billion followers,” I say, “I want to learn how to better connect to the people in my community.”

Do you see how this subtle shift changes the playing field? Inviting process allows you to learn and grow with your intention. It’s harder to burn out. It’s easier to return to if we get off track.

This year the only thing I’ve got on my list for 2020 is to invite more ritual into my life.

I was recently talking to a friend about it and she said, “I feel like you already have a lot of rituals.” She’s not wrong. But I thought about it and replied, “Yeah, but they feel more like habits than rituals. I want to try to invite more intention into them.” Because a repetitive action without intention is just a habit. But when you invite intention into the moment, when you elicit a sense of presence in the act, then it becomes a ceremony.

And I believe that building ritual into the every day makes life more exciting. It invites purpose into all of our small actions. And purpose feeds us on a cellular level. It’s a core need that all human beings share. So when we can tap into purpose in little ways throughout the day, we’re connecting to one of our core needs in a really nourishing way.

I have a suspicion that when we turn our habits into rituals they become stickier because we’ve infused these moments with meaning.

Now that we’re nearing the end of January, and I’m glad to say I’m not at all nearing burn-out on this intention, I thought I’d share a few ways that I’m working it into my life.

Here are the ways I’m looking to invite ritual into my every day:

GREET THE DAY through movement and meditation.

My goal is to wake up each morning without immediately reaching for my phone. So far I’ve got about an 80% success rate. This works particularly well when I wake up early, with enough time to meditate and move my body. I’ve noticed that something shifts within me when I treat each morning like I’m greeting a new day. By waking up and allowing myself to connect with my energy through a short (we’re talking 5-minute) meditation, and another short (20 minute) stretch or strength routine, two things happen: (1) I call my energy back to me, which feels expansive, and (2) it gives me permission to interact with each day differently.

No two days are ever the same. Our energy is always in flux. But sometimes it’s hard to feel that. Days can feel monotonous and repetitive if we’re just moving through them without connecting to our feeling space. So I’ve found that waking up slowly and checking in with myself and the energy of the day really helps me to feel excited about it—and it also helps me stay grounded when things start to get heavy because I’m already living from a felt understanding that each day is flexible. And it’s just as likely to turn light again as it is to get heavier.

Treat food as a spiritual offering.

If you’re not used to me talking about spirituality, 2020 is going to be a real hoot for ya. But when I talk about spirituality it’s not meant to be in a theological way. In fact, the definition of spirituality is, “the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material things.” So the kind of spirituality that I’m embracing, more openly now, is centered on energetics. What is the felt energy of any given thing? And how can my energy interact with that thing in a more aligned way? We all have energy bodies. We can feel the energy in a room shift when someone walks in with something heavy or joyful. So I just want to be clear that when I say things like, “food as a spiritual offering,” I’m talking about seeing food as energy. If I am offering my body energy in the form of food, what does that offering look like?

That doesn’t mean I’m going to choose health food 100% of the time. If I’m on a date or with friends and it feels aligned in the moment, maybe it’s a slice of pizza. But my guess is that if I’m asking myself how to honor my body through food, I’m going to be leaning toward foods that I see as nourishing most of the time. And that’s all I can really ask for.

Now, of course, I also talk about spirituality in the context of connecting to my spirit guides—but even that is energy. How can I connect to an aligned energy that exists in the unseen world? That’s all it is, if you think about it. I might believe there’s something more tangible behind it, an actual spirit coming forward, but does it matter? Whether I’m connecting to an actual presence or simply calling in the archetype of an energy that I want to align with, the outcome is the same. I am surrounding myself with new energy that serves me. That’s the beauty of this work. We’re learning to move through the energy space that doesn’t serve us and into one that does. There are many techniques to get there. Of course I am biased toward mine.

Which leads me to…

TuRN TO MY INNER GUIDES when making BIG decisions.

I’m a mixed bag when it comes to making decisions. Some have been simple, like the decision to move to LA ten years ago. Some have been harder. I find that the ‘harder’ decisions are crossroads decisions, like deciding when I should stay or leave a job that isn’t quite right, or a relationship that’s challenging me—is it challenging me in a good way or a bad way? These decisions usually come from a place of discomfort, rather than one of drive and passion (like moving to LA). They feel more nuanced, and heavy, so they’ve left me scrambling for answers outside of myself. I’d ask other people, I’d ask the cards, I’d ask my pendulum. And regardless of the advice I’d get, I’d always leave with that no-good knot in my stomach that said, “but is that the answer?”

I’m grateful to have found an inner knowing in regard to relationship—and I’m lucky right now to be in a relationship that feels right—but my career is still a bit of a tangled web. I have clarity in terms of where I want to take it, but the road is ripe with decisions-to-be-made that will either keep me on the path or push me off it. And let’s be honest: there’s still a lot of discomfort. I’m going to have to make decisions based on or in spite of that discomfort.

I can pull tarot cards all day long, but at the end of it I’ll have to be okay with the decisions I make. That means I have to take responsibility for them. Looking outside of myself is futile. It’s crazy-making, actually.

So when it comes to making decisions, I choose the ritual of going inward. It’s as simple as finding a quiet space and journeying. As I visualize the choices I have and the outcomes that could result from those decisions, I notice what happens in my body. Where do I feel expansion in my body and where do I feel tightness? What is my body trying to tell me about the road ahead? If I need more inner guidance than that, I’ll journey to one of my guides. It could be as easy as connecting to my higher self, the part of my consciousness that knows what’s best for me.

The beauty of this ritual is that I’ll always feel that I’m my own guiding light. It’s empowering. I’m not giving my agency to other sources. It’s also really grounding. It offers a sort of inner refuge from discomfort, which, let’s face it, we’re all probably going to need in 2020. And I know that as I continue to practice going inward it will start to come more naturally. I’ll reach conclusions faster. My own guidance will become clearer. I’m really looking forward to this one because I think it will lead to the most tangible progress this year.

FINALLY, At the end of each day, I WILL release the energy that doesn’t belong to me and invite all the energy I lost throughout the day to return.

Ultimately my rituals are all centered on connecting to myself and protecting my energy. I’ve been a long-time fan of bedtime rituals (my husband even joked about it in his vows), but I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to keep this practice so sacred is that I’ve always allowed it to shift and change and grow with me. I rotate some things out when they don’t excite me anymore. And that’s okay—that’s the beauty of ritual. It reflects where you are.

So where I am now, as I mentioned earlier and as my RISE meditation series reflects, is in a ‘reconnection to self’ phase. Last year I fully learned to step into my power—and to practice what it felt like to live there. This year, I’m learning how to protect that power, to hone it. One strategy I’ve found very useful is calling back my energy.

This might take a little explanation:

Throughout the day, we engage with the energetic world. We interact with people, we read the news, we watch television, we observe road rage, we witness acts of kindness. Even our observations are interactions because our nervous systems respond to what we see. And what we see affects our nervous system, sometimes in a really fulfilling way, and often in a sort of jarring or uncomfortable way. When we interact with an uncomfortable or stressful scenario, our energy drains. Sometimes other people feed on our energy. Let’s say a boss chews you out. Their anger feeds on your apology. (That’s a very basic example for the sake of ease—usually there’s more nuance to it than that.) Sometimes we offer our energy freely to others: maybe we’re consoling a good friend, which takes a great deal of energetic resource, or maybe we’re working really hard into the night because we’re proud of our work and we want our team to be proud of us, too.

As you can see, every day is a balance in how we are using our energy and how our energy interacts with other people’s. And our nervous system reflects the energetic exchanges that we’re making throughout the day. It’s kind of like the beacon, or red flashing light, that lets us know when our energy is activated. A calm nervous system reflects that we are allowing calm loving energy into our energetic space. We’re activating balance. This is one of the virtues of meditation, and it’s even more impactful when you are intentionally calling your energy back to you, which I’ll get to in a minute.

One thing to understand first is that when you’re out in the world and you lose some of your energy, something has to come in to replace it. This is a law of physics—energy can’t be destroyed. It’s technically called the Law of Conservation of Energy, but it states, “energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. For example, turning on a light would seem to produce energy; however, it is electrical energy that is converted.”*

So think about your energy body. What happens to the energy when you feel drained? It could have converted into stress energy, or changed from one form to another. Or, if you’re interacting with another person, it can transfer between you two. Sometimes this isn’t a bad thing: when you’re offering empathy, and they’re offering appreciation, for example, you’re both exchanging nourishing energy. But when someone is angry and demanding an apology, you might be taking on their anger, which makes you resentful or shameful, and as they pass their anger to you, they are receiving whatever energy surrounds your apology.

Not to make matters more complicated, but I think this is something that’s really important to understand in a healing context—we can exchange energy with people we don’t interact with, also. If you pass someone who is frantic on the street, you might pick up on some of that frantic energy and it can get caught in your energetic space, right? That’s probably happened to you before, where you walk by someone and your nervous system starts to engage and you continue to feel off even when that person’s no longer there. Your energetic body is in constant conversation with the world around it. It’s picking things up. It’s letting things go.

This is nothing to be afraid of—I’m not saying it to stress you or make you even more anxious about engaging with the world. That’s not the point here. Because, like I said, even if you don’t engage, this happens. When you watch a TV show and it spikes your nervous system, you are converting energy in your own body. This is just life. And I believe that one of the reasons we are seeing so much added anxiousness and depression in the world is—not fully, but in part—because we’re not teaching each other how to manage and protect our energy bodies. (Teaching each other self-worth is a great way to learn this, by the way, because when you’re in your worth you naturally create boundaries with energies that don’t serve you—and again, that’s why I created RISE).

All that to get to this:

Here’s what I do at the end of the day to protect my energy body, which is really easy and feels amazing.

As I’m laying in bed (this really takes very little effort), I close my eyes and I call in loving, protective energy. I ask my guides (remember this is an archetype of an energy you want to align with) to cast out any energy in the room that does not hold me in the highest truth and compassion. This is to protect the space around me.

Then I ask them to remove, from my body, whatever energy is not mine or does not serve me. This is to protect my actual body. Sometimes I will actually feel a gentle pulling sensation from the crown of my head, as though whatever isn’t serving me is being pulled out of my body. I ask my guides to heal the energy and send it back to where it came from.

Then I call back my energy. I visualize all these little balls of light floating back to me from wherever I’ve left them or wherever they’ve traveled. I allow them back into my space and do my best to feel them reintegrating into my body. I notice my nervous system relax as a feeling of expansion takes over.

And then I thank my guides and that’s that. Sleepy time. Ready to start it all again tomorrow.

(And by the way, when I mentioned calling my energy back to me in my morning ritual, this is basically the same practice. You can call your energy back to you first thing when you wake up—it helps collect any parts of your psyche that are stuck in dreamland, the astral plane, whatever. It revs you up for the day and makes you feel whole).

So there it is. This is my intention for 2020—to call in ritual. To connect with and protect my energy body. The actions I’m taking keep me centered and grounded, and the ceremony behind it all invites meaning into the mundane. I invite you to consider where in your life you can invite more ritual. Where can you invite intention and presence into your day? Where can you give yourself five minutes of peace to reconnect, tend to, and reset your energy?

If it all sounds a little too ‘woo-woo,’ I get it. But remember spirituality is simply a focus on energy, not material. These spiritual-leaning practices do support brain health. They work. And the best part about ritual is that you get to cater it to your comfort level. If talking to spirit guides feels like too much, just focus on calling in energy. You get to be the boss of your own spiritual practice. That’s what makes it special.

Here’s to an uplifting 2020. Whatever your intention for the new year, I hope you allow yourself to enjoy the process, rather than focusing on the result.

*an excerpt from Lumen Learning about the Laws of Thermodynamics