Rituals have been used across cultures and spiritual traditions to help actualize intentions and goals. They are ways to create meaning and mark transitions. Rituals are interspersed into our daily secular lives in ways we may not even notice: beginning a baseball game with the national anthem, for example, or singing “happy birthday.”
I trained as a Buddhist nun for many years in Japan, and my life in the monastery was a succession of almost constant ritual. Surprisingly, there is actually no word in Japanese for “ritual.” The closest word with corresponding meaning is gyoji, which simply means “activity”. When we woke up in the morning, we bowed three times and said a gatha before putting away our sleeping mats. Gatha are short Buddhist verses that are recited to help honor and mark daily activities such as bathing, washing the face, eating, brushing teeth, and even using the toilet.
I grew up in a Northern California family in which many of the women identified as pagan. By the time I became a Buddhist nun, I was already accustomed to lighting candles and doing rituals (I’m pretty clear now that Buddhist gatha are basically spells!). So, these rituals are a mixture of both my training as a Buddhist nun as well as my love of wild nature spirituality.
Below are the personal rituals I developed to mark my transition between work and home. These two rituals are meant to fit together, but feel free to modify them to your own needs.
Ritual for leaving work at work
First, you will need to buy or acquire a small bottle or box that you will only use for this activity, and that can stay at your office on your desk, or at another designated workspace. I personally like small glass bottles with cork stoppers, the kind that can be purchased at herbal medicine stores. But it can really be any kind of container: an empty perfume bottle, a mason jar, a jewelry box. It’s helpful to find something physically attractive that isn’t used for another purpose—probably not a used soda bottle or lunch container.
When it’s time to leave work, sit at your desk (or wherever you end your workday) with the bottle in front of you. Close your eyes and feel your body sitting on the chair. Allow whatever thoughts and worries the day has produced to play out in your mind — the annoying email, your anxiety about your boss, your plans for next week, the details of your current work project. Bring all of it into your sphere of awareness, along with any feelings associated with these thoughts: worry, stress, anger, annoyance, confusion, insecurity.
Feel all of those feelings in your body. Are they hot or cold? Do they have a shape, or a color?
Now imagine that all of those thoughts and feelings have left your body and have formed a swirling blue (or black, or any other color) tornado around you. Breathe deeply and notice the intensity of the swirl. Maybe the tornado has a voice, echoing your deepest insecurities or replaying the day’s conversations. Imbue the tornado with whatever you are feeling — stress, worry, etc. — and visualize it swirling around you, commingling with the thoughts of the day.
Open the lid of your container and hold it in your hands. Take a few moments to just feel it in your hands while you are aware of the tornado around you. Then, imagine the tornado coalescing into something more solid, like a blanket or ribbon. Guide this shape and funnel it into the bottle. Visualize the ferocity of the tornado collecting and pooling into this small, solid space. When all of the thoughts and emotions are inside the bottle, put the lid on.
Open your eyes and put the bottle into a drawer or on a shelf. Pause for one moment and breathe. Acknowledge that these thoughts are only going away temporarily. You are not “shelving” them forever. Then recite this verse, either out loud or in your head:
Leaving work
I set my duties down here
Honoring their importance
With my distance and rest
When you arrive at work the next day, take the bottle off the shelf or out of the drawer.
Creating an explicit, tangible separation between work and home is important, even if only on the symbolic level. In psychological terms, the unconscious— the part of ourselves that we aren’t aware of, which shows up in dreams and fantasies — can’t tell the difference between symbol and reality. Even if you are not “doing” anything in a ritual, the symbolic meaning sends a message to your unconscious that, in this case, work is going to stay at work. As the Jungian therapist Robert Johnson writes, “The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because that is its native idiom.” It follows, then, that the way to speak to our unconscious mind is through symbols as well.
-
This article was originally posted at https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-leave-work-at-work-so-you-can-actually-be-at-home-843373f1e419
For more articles like this please subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter.