Do you consider routine a bad word?
There was a day routine meant boring, mundane, dull and uninteresting to me. What I’ve come to learn through my years of studying Ayurveda, habit science and yoga, is routine and rhythm are likely medicine for me in the modern world. We live in a fast paced society whether we like it or not. Information is available at a click, there are shiny objects seeking our attention every turn we take and “time flies” whether we are having fun or not.
I don’t want years to “fly by” and wonder where they went.
I know it’s easier than I like to admit, to get sucked into this current of quickness. If I’m not paying attention, I can get pulled down a current I had no intention of exploring, whether that’s simply with my attention, in projects or in life in general. Taking a new approach can sometimes be a good thing, but many times it pulls me away from how I truly want to be spending my time.
Over the past year I’d have to say the answer for me is daily rhythm or as referred to in Ayurveda, dinacharya. In her book Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life, Dr. Claudia Welch says dinacharya is “one of the most important elements of Ayurvedic medicine and a crucial part of our health. When the body adjusts to a daily routine and learns to count on it, the nervous system can relax.”
This is not suggesting we all start eating the same thing every day or drop into a mundane and rigid existence where we are unable to veer from a plan. To me this is a sure formula for getting stuck. We need a balance. Balance is a dynamic expression and experience in any moment where we feel an equanimity of body, mind and spirit.
I seek balance in my daily life and I’m super interested in how structure creates freedom and how it’s important to recognize there is a natural pulsation in everything we do. If we seek more structure we might swing towards rigidity. If we seek more freedom, we might swing towards overwhelm. Somewhere in the middle we might get a hit of balance, but it may not be sustained if we continue to move in the same direction without reflecting and refining how we are doing.
Here’s how I see it…
Structure and stability help anchor a mobile mind, an overly flexible body, and when we are constantly attracted to shiny objects and never completing projects. Some approaches to remedy this might be scheduling activities in a daily calendar, adding weights to daily movement to build strength, meditating at the same time every day, and in general creating a conscious rhythm to the day.
Freedom and variability help move stuck, resistant and dull energy. So if the structure vs freedom pendulum is more on the stuck side of things, mobility is needed to shake things up. Some approaches to remedy stuckness might be creating more variability, getting moving first thing in the morning, taking a flow yoga class, scheduling activities that stretch your comfort zone and doing things differently, finding mobility within the rhythm.
Either way, there’s the possibility of being pulled to the opposite extreme. This is where awareness, reflection and refinement come in. We want to stay conscious of how our actions are making us feel. Reflection and refinement serve us in carving out the space to make the necessary tweaks and adjustments to keep us moving towards balance versus seeking extremes. Interestingly enough the extremes can give be a milepost or boundary on the journey to know where the center is.
Visualize a top spinning. There is movement and stability. We can’t slow down life, but we can align ourselves in such a way that we experience even greater balance. Each day provides a laboratory to seek greater balance and align our actions with what’s important. We learn, apply what we are learning, experiment to see how we feel when do apply what we’re learning and then refine our actions. Join me on a journey to learn, experiment, apply and refine over 12 weeks of merging yoga + ayurvedic living, habit science and lifestyle to ALIGN your life with greater ease and seek daily balance.
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Rachel Peters is a yoga teacher, yoga health coach, lifestyle and habits expert, easeful living advocate, and lover of wild places. She leads others towards Embodying Ease through a yearlong wellness & lifestyle journey to dissolve perfectionism, embody daily habits that promote mental clarity, overall ease, and deeper connection to life on this wild ride of modern living. Learn MORE today!