What are your self-care rituals?  Can you think of any off the bat?  OR is your self-care on autopilot?  Do you enjoy your acts of self-care, or do you sometimes dread it and see it as a chore?  Acts of self-care should always be things we look forward to doing. If they have started to feel like chores, they may have slipped from ritual to routine.

You can tell the difference between a routine and a ritual simply by looking at the thoughts and feelings that drive the action.  Very often, routines are the things we do without thought.  This is why routines are what create habits.  Now before this sounds less than ideal, we need to point out that we do need routines and habits.  There are GREAT habits to have, such as brushing your teeth and flossing twice a day.  Another would be removing your make-up when you don’t need to have it on.  Yet another would be designating a day to go to the grocery store so that you can maintain your weekly or monthly budget and not take up time on days you don’t have the time to be at the store.  There are also BAD habits.  Smoking is an easy one to point out, and one that most will agree is not a good habit.

When our rituals, our acts of self-care, our moments that are supposed to be a reprieve or a chance to recenter our minds and spirits; when these become routines and habits, then we’ve lost the point of the act as one of self-care.  Luckily, it is possible to turn them around and to turn any of our self-care routines into a self-care ritual by changing the way we think about what it is we are doing.

Changing the way we think, changing our perspective, being aware of our present or current actions are all a part of mindfulness.  Mindfulness helps inject ritual into routine, and bring back both the mind and body benefits of self-care.

Depending on your self-care routine, injecting mindfulness can be about pausing to really reflect and think about the moment and everything happening around you as well as being aware of your body and how it is reacting or responding.  

Using some of the examples given here, we can turn an exercise routine into a ritual by planning or choosing exercises that help you appreciate your body or being aware of how your body moves as you go through your exercise.  Feeling the weight of your body, feeling its strength, its resistance, and being grateful for how it can move and respond to what you are asking of it and often focusing on your breathing, can turn your exercise into ritual.

We can turn our makeup removal routine or process into an act of self-care by pausing and reflecting on what we enjoy about makeup, and/or what we enjoy about the process of removing it.  Do we like the feel of the remover we use?  How does our skin feel after cleansing?  What scent comes with your chosen serum or cream, and how does it glide onto your skin?  As we do these, we can pause to watch our face in the mirror.  What do we appreciate about our features?  What stories do these laugh lines hide as secrets?

As you become more accustomed to mindfulness, you can take any one of your good habits and make them self-care rituals.  Even the most mundane and basic “need to dos” can become moments of mindful self-care.  For example, planning your weekly menu carefully so that your attitude towards each of your meals changes can transform every mealtime into a mindful experience.  Similarly, choosing a specific toothpaste or toothbrush, carefully brushing your teeth and feeling how the bristles rub your teeth and massage your gums can make the “must do” activity of brushing into a moment of self loving.

Self-care need not be complicated, but they ideally are meaningfully and mindfully done, giving the act–however simple–greater purpose in your life.