Daily Practises Create a Decade of Growth

Do you have a regular daily routine that you implement to set the standard and the course of your day ahead?

If you hit the ground running the moment your alarm sounds and your feet touch the floor, you are likely going to miss the opportunity to be grounded, centered, and focused from the inside-out. Instead, you are going to wind up chasing after to-do lists, kids, and schedules in a stressed out and incoherent manner.

While it doesn’t need to take a lot of time, performing a simple daily routine to be grounded will make a huge difference in your current physical, mental, and emotional state and will impact the attitude, energy, and power you bring to your roles, responsibilities, and activities over the course of your day.

All of the Women’s Wellness Circles that gather monthly in communities across southern Ontario (and soon across Canada) begin with the ritual of an opening intentional activity so that the attendees have a chance to fully arrive, settle in, relax, and be present to the evening ahead.

There are many simple and effective ways to do this: quiet reflection, one minute mediation, deep breathing, visualization, prayer, gratitude, and gentle integrative movement like Brain Fitness activities.

Some of our Circle locations begin with a poem, either written by the host, an attendee, or another source. This, too, is a wonderful way to become present, ready, focused, and energized for the evening ahead.

It may be winter from the place I write this. However, it is the start of a new year, and a new decade. In this event it is appropriate to consider the words of Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Summer Day’, that are inspiring and that ask the most important of all questions: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Each day contributes cumulatively to the creation of our lives. Each day we have an opportunity to show up more, less, differently, or the same as we always have. It’s up to us!

A small daily practise can play a significant role in the quality of how we do it.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?