How would you like an easy way to empower your manifestation habits? The power of ritual and ceremony may hold the key. While most modern day Americans experience a notable absence of ritual and ceremony in our lives, that doesn’t mean we can’t incorporate the power of them now.
Injecting your conscious creation habits with the power of ritual and/or ceremony will not only give you more bang for the buck, but is also easy to accomplish with just a bit of commitment and intention.
Ritual and ceremony
“Ritual and ceremony empower human beings,”says author Page Bryant. A ritual is any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner. Some even say ritual is defined simply as any practice that is meaningful to the person acting it out. Which makes it easy to bring into your own daily life!
A ceremony, on the other hand, is usually considered a formal act or observance, but without the meaning infused in a ritual.
Whatever you want to call it, putting the power of rituals to work in daily life doesn’t have to be time consuming or difficult. Ritualizing for empowered manifesting is easier than you might guess, and the reward is well worth your investment of energy.
While many of us have habits that lead to achievement of goals, a habit doesn’t hold the same effectiveness as a ritual. The difference between a habit and ritual is that a ritual incorporates deliberate intention and awareness, whereas a habit is mostly unconscious. Bringing intention and mindfulness to a habit can recreate it as a ritual. (And that’s not to say that we don’t do the opposite as well, by turning rituals into habits when we lose track of the original intent behind the ritual.)
Adrian Calabrese writes in “How to Get Everything You Ever Wanted” that “establishing a ritual…adds energy to your intentions and sends a clear message to the Universe.” Calabrese says when we repeat the practice in the same way, the energy generated through the repetition gets stronger and stronger with time. The practice of ritual “increases the momentum of energy, boosting your message and launching it into reality.”
If you’ve ever experienced the effects of a conditioned space for meditation, you know what Cala_brese is talking about. Sometimes just getting into position or walking into the room where you regularly meditate can shift your energy. Thus it gets easier and happens more quickly over time to achieve the meditative state.
You can leverage this same phenomenon in your manifesting practice as well!
Amp up the power of old habits
If you consider that a ritual is just a mindful habit, you’ll reveal lots of opportunity to introduce the power of ritual in your daily life.
For example, instead of just absent-mindedly taking your daily bath or shower, you could turn that time into a specific practice of focusing on the day ahead as you’d like it to unfold. Or you could bring a mindfulness to the activity where you focus on cleansing yourself of whatever energies aren’t serving you, sending love and appreciation to all your body cells to perform at their optimum state. As you bring meaning and intention to the act, you transform it from a mindless habit into a powerful one.
In this way you can infuse any otherwise mundane activity with the power of ritual, whether it’s simply sitting down to a meal or even engaging daily exercise. In “Secular Wholeness,” David Cortesi shares: “You can invest any act with whatever symbolic and emotional value you want; this is a personal act that takes place in your head. … Nobody can prevent you from pouring meaning into any act you choose.”
Which brings to mind former Utah Jazz player Karl Malone’s mysterious phrase uttered before each of his free throws. Sports enthusiast Marquis Chapman says “Any good player will tell you that it is an absolute must that you have a free throw routine. For 10 seconds or less, you do whatever you need to do to get relaxed and make your shots. Making a routine and doing the same thing each and every time you step to the line is key.”
Whether you call it a routine or a ritual, by finding a way to symbolically connect with or reinforce the intention of the act, you add power to it.
Bringing ritual to your manifesting practice
So how to bring that power of ritual to your manifesting practice? Many of us already have daily habits that we could easily leverage into a more powerful ritual. For example, lots of conscious creators I know have vision boards hanging up that they don’t really “see” any more, or use affirmations that have lost their meaning.
If your manifesting method feels like a rote or empty habit, it’s not serving you like it could if you brought more conscious intentionality to it. Here’s how you might turn an empty habit into a more empowering ritual:
The key elements contributing to a ritual are objects, space (or location), and action. A ritual object could be anything that holds particular meaning or value to you, like a crystal, coins, photograph, etc. For example, I use a particular purple pen for making entries in a manifesting journal, which holds special significance to me, although it wouldn’t mean anything special to anyone else. Because I think of it as a special part of my deliberate creation method, it is. After all, it’s my conscious awareness and intention that’s powerful, not the object itself.
A ritual space is often thought of as a church, shrine or altar. But it can extend far beyond that. One of my clients has created her closet as a ritual space, where as she dresses each day she sends love and thanks to her body. In my last house, the back porch was a highly ritualized space used to mark the end of the work day and foster a sense of slowing down and shifting gears.
(After investing so much beautiful time on that back porch, I have to imagine that even now the current residents must feel the positive effects of it when they sit on that top step overlooking the garden.)
There are likely many objects and spaces in your life that have the element of ritual associated with them although you may not consciously recognize it. As David Cortesi writes: “A table set for a meal is just a table. A table set with candles is a ritual space: we don’t need candles for light any more, they have only symbolic and emotional value.”
An example of a ritual or ceremonial act might be the burning of sage to cleanse energy, or inviting angels to assist with manifesting our goals. You can easy incorporate mindful acts in a daily manifesting practice like using commute time to reflect on your blessings in life, or holding your hand over a meal while intending its vibration to be raised such that it is most nourishing to you.
Identifying and engaging empowering rituals and ceremonies to support your creative endeavors is both simple and powerful. By leveraging these in your manifesting practice you’ll find that previously mundane actions, objects and spaces invite you to a new level of intentionality and thus success.
As Page Bryant writes, “If we insist on filling our lives with mundane issues and activities and leave no time or room for sacred rites, we surely cheat ourselves. If we do not recognize and understand the importance of ritual and ceremony, we lose, or never even gain, the larger degree of upliftment and inspiration they provide.”
Jeannette Maw is a Law of Attraction coach and founder of Good Vibe Coaching in Salt Lake City. www.goodvibecoach.com.