THE COMFORTABLE RUTS WE LIVE IN

Are you a creature of deep routines?

Hi dear one

Same cup, same corner, same first sip of tea and same feeding of the cats before the world is allowed to ask anything of me. There is a particular order to my mornings that my body could perform while my mind was still half asleep, and most days it does exactly that.

Some of them are the best part of my life.

We talk about routines like they are all a trap, like the word itself smells faintly of boredom. But I have come to see that I live inside many of them at once, and they are not created equal. Some hold me up. Some are quietly shrinking me. The trick, I think, is learning to tell which is which without lying to myself about either.

The good ones I will defend with my whole heart. My morning meditation. My painting. My gratitude’s. The routines that put me back inside my own body and remind me who I am before the day has its say. I want to be a creature of those forever.

Then there are the other ones, the ruts. The reaching for my phone the second I feel a flicker of bored. The little speech in my head that begins with “I am just the kind of person who” and ends with whatever excuse I needed that morning. The way I can run a whole day on yesterday, and the day before that, and a decade before that, never once choosing it fresh. Those do not hold me up. They eat me. Slowly, politely, one unexamined morning at a time.

There is a Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation I do most weeks. It is one of my favorites. In it he says something that lands in me beautifully every single time. He says

its time to be defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past. To move into a new state of being. ❤️

I sit with that. Defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past.

Because that is exactly what a rut is, once you take the coziness away. A rut is the past, wearing today’s clothes, pretending to be a free choice. It is memory running the show. When I wake up and become the same person, think the same thoughts, feel the same low hum of the same old feelings, do the same things and then somehow hope that today my life will look brand new and different, I’m asking for a magic trick I’m actively sabotaging. I am ordering soup and praying it arrives as cake.

He puts it so plainly. When we do the same thing every single day, the same, the same, and yet we want to see new results in our lives on every level, then we truly do have to be different, do different, and feel different. Not one of the three. All of them. The being, the doing, and the feeling, all rowing in the same direction for once.

There is an old word in the yogic tradition for these worn channels in the mind. Samskara. The impressions we carve through repetition, the ruts worn so smooth that a thought slides down them automatically, without us ever choosing it. The tradition does not tell us to dislike our samskaras. It simply asks us to wake up to them. Because the unexamined rut runs you. The one you can actually see, you get to choose.

And this is where I have to laugh at myself a little, because waking up sounds so dramatic, all golden light and trumpets. In reality it looks like the smallest, least glamorous things. It looks like driving a different road I never take, the one that adds four minutes and shows me something new. It looks like catching myself mid-sentence, about to tell the same old story about my life, and gently choosing not to. It looks like feeling grateful on purpose before I have a single reason to, which my logical mind finds a little outrageous.

That last one is the heart of it, I think. The feeling. I am very good at deciding to do things differently. I am a champion of the to do list. What I am clumsy at is letting myself feel different first, before the evidence shows up. Letting myself feel like the woman whose life already turned the corner, while the corner is still up ahead and out of sight. That is the part that does not fit on any list. That is the new state of being he keeps pointing at, and it cannot be bought, scheduled, or faked. It can only be practised.

So here is where I have landed, with all the lightness I can carry. Im not going to declare war on my routines. Some of them are the best things about my life, and I would be a fool to throw them out. But I am going to start asking each one a single honest question.

Are you carrying me toward the future I can feel, or are you just rehearsing the past because it knows the lines.

The good ones can stay. They can go deeper. The tired ruts get a gentle eviction notice and a kind goodbye.

Tomorrow morning my body will reach for the same cup in the same corner, and maybe I will let it, because some routines are basically neutral. But somewhere in that familiar shape, I am going to do one thing that yesterday’s version of me would never have thought of. Small, kind, exciting and completely new.

That is how the future gets in. Not through the front door with a grand announcement. Through a side window I forgot to keep locked.

So Im loosening my grip on the old story, and trusting that whoever I am becoming knows the way.

Now your turn. Which routine in your life feeds you, and which one is slowly eating you? I want to hear it. 😊

Until next time. Stay grateful and curious.

Light and love,

Kim