Prompt 5: Cultivating Awareness

From Rick Rubiin’s “The Creative Act: A Way of Being:

”To support our practice, we might set up a daily schedule, where we engage in particular rituals at specific times every day or week.

The gestures we perform don’t need to be grand. Small rituals can make a big difference.

We can decide to take three, slow, deep breaths upon awakening each morning. This simple act can set a course to start each day still, centered, and in the moment.

We might also eat our meals mindfully, slowly savoring each bite with appreciation. Take a daily walk in nature, looking at everything entering our field of vision with gratitude and connection. Take a moment to marvel at the feeling of our heartbeat and the movement of blood through our veins before sleep.

The purpose of such exercises is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation isn’t in the meditating. The purpose is to evolve the way we see the world when we’re not engaged in these acts. We are building the musculature of our psyche to more acutely tune in. This is so much of what the work is about.

Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again.

Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.”

What habits, even good ones, do you have that are serving your awareness, that feed your creative refeshing?
What habits, even good ones, do you have that are no longer serving your awareness?

What kinds of small rituals will you perform today to cultivate awareness of the world around you?