The Dark Night Part IV: Ritual

Another way to “fall in love” with the process is through ritual.

Ever feel just …GOOD with doing something ritualistic? I love how rituals and traditions do that. They allow you an excuse, an entrance point in order to access greater sensory perception and joy of what could be a mediocre experience. It’s connoisseur-ship that makes the event “sticky.”

I feel that ritual can be an entrance point to being in the moment. I understand how you can do that with tea or wine, but how do you apply that to writing? Or marketing? How do you view a task in the now without heavily eyeing the future?

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-power-of-ritual-conquer-procrastination-time-wasters-and-laziness.html

Lifehacker seems to agree with me on this - the above article, The Power of Ritual, is on the right track but there’s very little in the article to distinguish it from a habit.

http://writeitsideways.com/writing-rituals/

This article gets into the differences between the two, specifically with writing. In it the article outlines a three part structure to ritual:

Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner observed that ritual has three phases:

Separation from everyday activities.
Transition to an unstructured or “liminal” reality, where the participant becomes a walker between the worlds, a traveler at the threshold. (The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.”) Writing is the ultimate liminal reality.
Reassimilation into normal life, but more deeply than before.

Obviously there are a lot of examples of ritual - There’s even a book on it

http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601

The question is: How do I create my own so it emphasizes living in the moment and “falling in love with the process?

The Dark Night Part III: Flow

The reason, in case you’re wondering, why this is all relevant to this project is simple. So many elements of habit formation are inextricably linked to this identity crisis.

I cannot relax because everything I do hinges on fulfilling future goals. Becoming good at a task because I enjoy it is a goal that gets further and further away because I CAN”T enjoy that which is a step to a future goal. It’s in the way, and that’s really how I have viewed it. It’s almost a definitional construction. 

Habit formation emerged as a way out of this. If I just *do* a task than it builds on its own. The problem comes with regimentation and mastery - to master a task you have to be able to improve in the moment by improving. You can’t shirk away from it and procrastinate. Similarly you can’t shirk at doing a task in a day, and leaving it when it’s done.

So the main question becomes - how do you fall in love with the process, and focus on the aiming a la THESE previous posts on Zanshin.

Of course mindfulness, as Shinzen Young and Daniel Ingram suggest, is important. But for me I also believe one key point is Flow. I talk a bit about that in THIS post. What interests me are the conditions that are theorized to bring about such states:

1. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.^[15]

2. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.^[15]

3. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one’s ability to complete the task at hand.^{[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29#Conditions_for_flow}

Getting into such states seem to simultaneously satisfy meditative requirements, process orientation, and pushing a habit towards skill mastery.

Another set of conditions include:

Knowing what to do
Knowing how to do it
Knowing how well you are doing
Knowing where to go (if navigation is involved)
High perceived challenges
High perceived skills
Freedom from distractions^[22]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29#Conditions_for_flow

What’s also interesting is that there are, as far as I understand, several flow state scales to determine whether or not you are in it and to what degree. Which could prove useful if this is a skill I should learn to better “grip” the present moment, particularly skill acquisition.

The Dark Night

Yesterday I had a serious of realizations that lead to an immense depression.

I started describing the art of focusing on the present, and realized that a huge contribution to the hangups I have about my self day-to-day comes specifically from holding a future projected ideal. And this high standard results in an inability to focus on the present and fall in love with the process of self improvement and change. I’m too focused on the future, and I see the present as getting in the way.

As I described this I realized that giving up that future idealized self in order to regrip the now would, ironically, best give me the chance to have that future. I grew immensely depressed at my potential to give up that future self. So much, if not all of who I am, is put in that basket. 

Mind you, it wasn’t a wonder of whether or not I *could* do it. Oddly enough, the ability to do so seemed all too easy. The problem today became regripping the world as someone who is able to be in love with the process in the present. I vacillated between calm questioning and immense fear and sadness.

It was as though my mind was caught in between - with no clear alternative, my mind wavered shifting back and forth. 

In Buddhist circles this type of mental anguish is sometimes referred to as the Dark Night. Is this what has been happening to me?