Dedication
"If you're using ritual to replace action," the apprentice said, "you aren't doing the Work." And that's true. Sometimes the ritual is the first step towards change, but it can't be the last. The ritual is a step towards managing the internal landscape that makes change possible and conscious. It isn't change unto itself.
Dedication
@literorrery I think this depends a LOT on how one defines 'ritual' and also feels like it sneers in the direction of anything but the psychological paradigm.
Dedication
@indi Apologies. I'm not speaking of any path but mine. I'm not here to weigh in on anyone else's approach. I can't comment meaningfully on how others approach their practice.
Dedication
@indi Unpacking in fullness should be done elsewhere. The short-short and practical rendition is that I'm frustrated with my weight-loss backsliding, ritual is good for empowering me to feel like I can make the changes to my habits and life that I can do and have done before, but they're not a substitute for calorie counting and regular exercise. Unless you want to say those _are_ the ritual, which I could do, but hadn't done.
"What is ritual? What you define it to be."
Dedication
@indi I try to avoid putting everything under the umbrella of ritual because I want to be able to step into and out of that space and not be fully immersed all the time in the liminal mindset. I have enough trouble not getting my narratives on everything as it is. So the emotional work to feel good about re-engagement with lifestyle changes is ritual, but the lifestyle changes themselves are just... practice. Support steps, but not ritual themselves.
Dedication
@literorrery That makes sense. It sounds like I have the opposite problem, a lot of the mindset that I find important and vital to existence-as-I-want-it-to-be is all too easy for me to simply forget when I'm too engrossed in quotidian banality. What I desire is a maximalist approach; I've found myself really upset lately when I thing about, for instance, how rarely I find myself daydreaming, these days.
Dedication
@indi Understandable and wholly legitimate. Not that you need me to validate, but I offer it regardless. I have trouble drowning it out at points, especially when I'm ankle-deep-head-first in the orthocosm; it reminds me constantly that this isn't the story I want to be telling, or the cycle I want to be exploring. I need tools to help keep it where I can manage it.
To quote Iili, "she needs triggers so she knows when not to go under."
Dedication
@literorrery Yeah, I suppose my approach is more the latter, that it's part of the ritual; if it's meaningful action as part of the Work, it's ritual. To do anything else, to say ritual != action, reads to me as approaching an uncomfortably dismissive dualism.
Dedication
@literorrery Fair enough. I'm just a bit sensitive about that sort of argument because it bears a lot of similarity to the train of thought that in my case didn't do much other than bolster my internal censor and turn ecstasy into obligation.