I've written before about daily practice, and it's a topic that comes up a lot. It's something that many people struggle with, and finding a way to practice daily that works for you can be a process! Now, over the years I've developed a morning and evening routine that works for me, but I always feel like I want to do more. I'm definitely someone who struggles without structure, but I don't always want my spiritual practice to feel too structured, if that makes sense.
I could list off a whole slew of things I'd 'love' to do daily, as I'm sure many of you can. But I also feel like if I haven't actually started doing these things daily, maybe I am not quite as called to them as I think I should be. It's kind of the idea that it if were important enough to me I would find time to do it. And yet, life often gets in the way, and we find ourselves working with the time we have instead of being able to do all the things we wish we could do.
I also feel like some things just aren't really practices that I need to do every day. Now here's where I struggle a whole lot. If I do things on a regular basis, I can remember them. It's why I blog every Wednesday, because if I just aimed for 'once a week' without setting a particular date, then the odds are I wouldn't blog regularly. Knowing that it's Wednesday and that means I need to blog makes it something I don't even have to think about, it's just something I do.
But a lot of spiritual tasks don't really fit into that mundane form of scheduling. I may feel a need to cleanse more than once a week sometimes, but if I know it's scheduled for a certain day, I might feel it's okay to put it off until it's regularly scheduled day. Other things just feel weird when scheduled, like working with my ancestors. I don't want to ever feel like it's a chore, and "It's Friday, so I guess I gotta work with my ancestors today."
I use habit trackers in my daily planner, to help encourage me to build the habits I want to grow into a daily practice. My daily planner does contain some of my spiritual stuff, but it's mostly just everyday stuff. My tracker there includes things like: moving (aka doing something physical for health reasons), reading (engaging my mind), writing (being creative), posting in Ky's Crossroads (building community), and other things like that. My goal in this tracker is to tick everything on the list off every day.
I've learned to be kind to myself with trackers, and though the goal is to do everything every day, that rarely happens. But each day is a new opportunity to do each thing, and that works for me. When it comes to spiritual stuff, I didn't want the goal to be do every thing every day, but rather I wanted to go more fluid.
This is what I ended up with, and though I've just started it, I am really enjoying it so far. I made myself a list of the basic categories of 'stuff I do,' things that could be done in a day with no need for previous planning. Kind of off the cuff practices.
By putting them in a tracker, I can use the list as a springboard for daily practice. With this tracker, my goal is to do at least one thing every day, but which thing is completely up to what I feel I need that day. The list becomes a suggestion, ideas for inspiration.
But also, the tracker itself lets me look back over the whole month and see what types of activities I was drawn to, or maybe to see what I hadn't done that I might want to do in the next month. It's a way to check in with my daily practice and see where I am.
Because I wanted to work on my daily practice, I started what I am calling my Witchy Logbook, which has my variable daily practice tracker in it. This book is to help me manage my daily practice, all the witchy stuff I may do (or think...more on that in a minute) in a day, and keep it all in one place.
When thinking about a regular spiritual practice, I often come back to the moon cycle. I love how it naturally flows through a whole cycle of work, and gives structure without being too strict. I had an image saved on my computer of this version of a moon cycle, which I really loved and wanted to work with, so it's the first thing I put into my book. I really like how it alternates yin and yang for each of the phases, so there are active and passive spaces built in. I also love how it has little affirmations for each, to help remind me of what the energy of that phase is.
Then, because I kind of wanted some other type of reference on the opposite page, I copied in this rune poem I had found. Again, it's just something I really liked and thought would be fun to have in my book. I'm still thinking of this book as my everyday carry (my daily planner really isn't an EDC, it's a "lives on my desk where I work" book), so having things in the book I might want to reference regularly just fits.
Then I get into the meat of the log book, where the daily work really lives. As you can see in the cover image, I highlight the date line, to separate different days, and then I add in notes or thoughts or records of what I did that day. When I started this book, I really didn't know how I wanted to use it beyond 'spiritual BuJo style log', so there are lots of orange 'ideas', where I was just thinking about what might work and brainstorming. I did know that I wanted to note the moon phase, so I drew that in after every day line.
There are a few things I tried that I am definitely going to be continuing. I am doing daily intentions, making a conscious effort to set my energy for the day. I am writing down prayers and ancestor communication (and may get into write and respond with this, we'll see). I am keeping notes on my moon work, on how I am working with the different phases as they come along.
And I love having all my future ideas handy, so I can read back through them and see what I might like to try, when I'm feeling like doing something brand new. I'm going to have to figure out a way to note when I've worked with something, but for now, just having all those ideas gets me excited!
I still feel like this is a practice I'm growing, and yet I'm really loving it so far. I feel like having a variable aspect to my larger daily practice really encourages me to branch out, to do different things and to go with how I am feeling instead of simply following a strict schedule. I love being able to look back and see what I did on different days.
I think the most important takeaway from this idea of variable daily practices is that we each have to find ways to practice that works for us and our life. And that may mean breaking the mold a little bit and trying different things to see if one of them takes hold. Daily practice is an established thing, both in the spiritual word and in my own life, and yet I felt like having a set daily routine wasn't fully serving my needs, and so adding in this log and the variable practice tracker lets me expand and adjust in ways that a set daily practice simply doesn't. So, if you are looking for more out of your daily practice, and this idea of a variable practice sounds interesting, give it a try!
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