When I tell people I always start my days with a 1-2 hour long morning routine, they look at me astonished.
“I could never keep up with a routine like that,” they say. “Routines are impossible for me to keep.” “I feel suffocated and restricted when I try to commit to a disciplined practice.” “I could never do what you do.”
While I do believe that we all operate differently, I want to challenge the belief that discipline and routine is impossible…or restrictive…or something that is going to make your life harder than it already is.
I often start my days the same.
I wake up, roll out of bed and walk into the bathroom. I brush my teeth before returning to my room to make my bed. I (sometimes) take a big gulp of water from the carafe on my bedside table – I need to be better about this. Then, I move into my morning practices. That usually begins with morning pages and moves into meditation and ends with either movement or a freshly brewed cup of coffee. The order often shifts depending on how tired or energized I feel in the morning but I always: make my bed, brush my teeth, write in my journal, and sit in meditation.
My routine contracts and expands as the seasons shift and my schedule and mood fluctuates, but the base is always the same. I start each day with intention. I check in with myself, prioritize uninterrupted time to tend to my relationship with self, and try my very hardest to start each day on a grounded foot.
This routine comes easily to me. I feel out of sorts if I skip my morning practices for more than a few days but it hasn’t always been like this.
When I first ventured down the path of self discovery, I fell down the rabbit hole of creating the perfect practice. I created a set of rules to follow and guidelines to keep me connected to myself. I looked externally for the boundaries to place in order to dive deeper into myself. I listened to podcasts, read books, and took courses on varying healing and introspective modalities and tried to weave everything into a consistent routine. I spent hours meditating and chanting and writing affirmations. I wrote about my dreams in the middle of the night, I read each night for an hour before bed.
I did everything I thought I was supposed to do and I was never able to maintain consistency.
I remember when I was living in Belgium in 2018, traveling every other weekend. I would sit in the bathroom of whatever airport I was flying through or hostel I was staying in for long enough to pull up the Insight Timer app and “meditate” for a minute so I didn’t lose my streak. I was studying abroad, traveling through foreign cities for 48 hours at a time and I was obsessed with keeping up with the unrealistic practice I had created for myself.
I was so focused on being the perfect practitioner, I completely forgot the point of a practice.
A practice – whether it’s for your mental health, spirituality, creativity, yoga, or anything in between is meant to support you. To practice means to do something over and over and over again. You will never get better if you don’t practice. Thus, if you don’t practice meditation, you will not get better at it. The same with writing or painting or yoga or dating. Sometimes people practice to strive for perfect (or to get as close as possible). But when you’re looking at your daily routine, the goal of a practice is not for you to become perfect, it is to simply feel more supported.
I don’t always wake up and want to spend an hour writing and meditating but I do so because it makes me feel good. It supports me to show up and be a better version of me. It supports my well-being and allows me to dive deeper into my process of self discovery. Over the years, I’ve learned that a consistent practice acts as a support system. It allows me something to fall back onto when life feels messy, or chaotic, or heart breaking. It grounds me when I get swept up in the current. It allows me to find my equilibrium no matter how the external circumstances of my life change.
Compassionate Discipline
The only way, over the past seven years, that I have been able to maintain discipline throughout my practices is by structuring that discipline with a lens of compassion. I find compassion for myself and understanding that no two days are the same, therefore, I am able to find fluidity within the structure of my practice.
When I have compassion for myself, I am able to see the discipline as bumpers rather than restrictions. They are the structures that hold me up and together as the circumstances of my life are constantly changing. With compassion, this structure is able to be a cushion that supports me.
It gives me space to show up each day.
And forgiveness for the days that I do not.
The key with building a sustainable practice is finding the practice that works for you.
This might take time and it might take trying on many different practices until you find the tools, practices, and routines that work for you. The beauty of this exploration is that you are building a tool box filled with tools that can support you.
You may not always use every single tool, but they will always there for you use if you ever need them.
Your practice, as a whole, is there for you.
It is meant to act as a support system, not a reminder of how much more you need to be doing.
There will always be more. There will always be more that you could be doing. You will never be able to do it all – you do not have to do it all. It is a radical act to commit to yourself by saying, “this is good enough for me and that is all that matters.”
What is the practice that will support you? What does it look like? Feel like? What feels sustainable and attainable to commit to? What practices feel fun? How can you find joy within the practice of coming home to yourself?
When I think about the life that I want to live, I want to feel so grounded within myself that I feel completely free to show up in my life. I want to live a life that is not dictated by the shoulds, obligations, or stories about how I’ve been told I am supposed to live my life. In order to get to this place, I must cultivate a connection to myself – a portal of understanding that allows my true path to unfold. The practices I do everyday create the space for me to be in conversation with myself, in order to live my life with intention. The discipline allows me to cultivate a trust within myself that is unshakable when I move through the world.
I hope that this inspires you to shift you perspective of discipline to something that can allow you to live life more freely.
LISTEN: How to Start (Restart, or Upgrade) Your Meditation Practice
READ: To be the one that nurtures by
What can we expect from friendship? by
The gut biome of creative expression by my friend
(we met at the Guatemala City airport!!! LOL)JOURNAL:
What is your relationship with discipline?
How does it show up in your life and in your practice?
What holds you back from showing up for yourself?
How would you describe the way you show up for yourself?
How could you invite in more compassion into your practice?
Thanks for this post, I too have a long morning routine but it's taken me a while to get into it. We prefer to concentrate on the things we have to do instead of doing the things that are good for us beforehand to get the day off to a good start. It takes discipline, especially putting yourself first. A good routine, as you say, takes care of your mental health. Find a good routine that's perfect for you and stop comparing yourself to others. I'd like to subscribe