According to Buddhist and Zen philosophies it is very important to stick to your morning rituals each and every day. It is through ritualistic practice that one becomes centered and aligned. Even if it’s just the one or two little things you have to get in every morning. The mind and body need rhythmic patterns to stay in balance. Once we make something habit the mind expects to go through this ritual and the body begins counting on it. The soul starts longing for the practice because that is what it knows, is comfortable with and comes to love. Certain sensations, sensory perceptions and inhibitors are triggered inside the brain when we are in the practice of something everyday. Our brains are like computers and the practices are the applications, the software that we fire up each day. The brain similarly gets into the learned behavior of these actions and relies on it and in turn is more dynamic. After many years of meditation and transformative work I know first hand how my body and mind count on me to do what I’ve always done. We all know what it feels like and how out of sync we feel when we don’t get in that daily run, or exercise or thirty minutes of silence. Life can seem so complex at times, but we’re much more simple and our expectations of ourselves are much less weighty than we sometimes realize. We just yearn for what we know, what is familiar, those must do rituals. Easy breezy, really.
