Walking, writing, meditation and being grounded, and how routine helps life make sense

Things that ground me. Etcetera.

I've been on quite a personal journey over the last few weeks. It's nothing exciting or big. It's not about my love of yoga or dance, or being more open to finding myself beyond my comfort zone. All of that is true, I have 'grown' perhaps in that way, and one day it'll be worth writing about, but that's not the journey this post is about. It's about the mess in my routine, how my happy go lucky routine was changed by my yoga classes which I also loved. And how I'm adapting to it or planning to. Well the details will be incoming in a future post, but I want to get us started at the bottom.

What are the activities that ground me, hold me to my reality, make me feel my day has been worthy and complete? What are the things that when I do I feel like it's going to be a good day? Those are the things that 'ground me'. For me it's writing: I wrote about it almost exactly a year ago (15 months ago) here. I understood then that if I don't write on a given day I get unwell, something feels off, and eventually more writing must be done to swing back to sanity and comfort.

Over the last year I've discovered two more activities that ground me.

One's walking, for 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. On days I don't walk I feel tired (somehow), lazy, sad stressed out and feel something lacking. I'll try to avoid walking when I'm tired but in the end it won't be worth it because it'll sap more energy away from me to not walk. So it's clear now that walking is as fundamental part of my life as writing is.

There's the third activity that I've practiced for a month or two now, on and off, that I haven't appreciated much. But it's become increasingly obvious that it's becoming so crucial to preserving my mental sanity: meditation. Visualization, affirmation and meditation (with reading and writing) take up just 30 minutes of every day, but they give me hours and hours of productive energy. They're by definition never a waste of time because without them my days are almost sure to be wasted.

So yeah incorporating these grounding activities in my daily life will help me ground myself even in changing circumstances. No matter how much I travel, or switch around my activities or hobbies or jobs or interests, as long as I have them, I know that there is safety nearby, that I am being honest with myself. This is the beginning of understanding how my days are structured, and how I can play around with the structure to suit my needs.