Contemplating Rhythm, Ritual & Reverie
Sunset in Arizona.
Contemplating Rhythm, Ritual & Reverie
How can rhythm, ritual and reverie weave a grounded, resilient matrix from which we have the inner freedom to respond to life’s challenges with wisdom, clarity, and inspiration?
Our days and nights are a natural rhythm that can infuse ordinary routines with structure and a sense of purpose. Rituals have the symbolic power to heal, renew, and connect to the Sacred, creating a space and mood for reverie to arise. Reverie is a moment of inner freedom and inspiration that connects us to the breath of Life—a brief recognition of the magic and grace that moves all of Creation. When rhythm, routine, and ritual become intentional, they can be the sturdy boats that carry us over swift and wild currents in the river of life.
Rhythm
Rhythm is at the origin of all things. The whole Universe is made of waves, which are made of vibration, sound and rhythm. The constant flow of quantum waves are the primal pulse and measured flow of life that gives birth to all that is, from the vast cycles of galaxies and suns to the beat of our hearts and the in/out of our breath. Here on Earth, we see the rhythm of patterns everywhere—in the golden ratio that shows up in ferns, shells and Fibonacci spirals of all kinds.
When we pay attention to Nature, the Great Web of Life becomes visible. We can bring our awareness to the rhythms of sunrise, sunset, midnight and noon, the seasons and cycles of the moon orbiting our planet and our planet orbiting her sun. Watching the stars and planets of our solar system wheel across the sky at night links us to how the Earth spins while simultaneously circling around the sun, even as our sun moves around the galactic core at an incredible speed.
Revelations of the rhythms and patterns of interconnectedness can help us tune into our place in life and in the Cosmos. When this happens, a sense of connection and well-being bubbles up inside. A feeling of being in the right place at the right time, when everything falls into place, is an attunement to cosmic truth or dharma in the Hindu tradition.
When we are “on the beat” or “singing on key,” as one small part in the Web of Life, we resonate in harmony with the Universe. We are in the flow of dharma and our own unique svadharma (sva or self) is discovered. Paying close attention to these sacred rhythms, ordinary daily routines naturally weave and flow into a mood of ritual and the flow of reverie.
Routine
Daily routines help us to ground, self-regulate, and cultivate an awareness of our basic sanity. At the same time, routines easily become habitual and careless. Looking into to our daily routines can tell us a lot about our underlying attitudes and habits and how we approach life in general. Am I rigid or fluid, stubbornly fixed on preferences and opinions or flexible, open, and listening? Am I defended and shut down or open and receptive? Do I need to control every aspect of my environment and tasks?
Like everything else, routines have a shadow side. They easily can and do become a defense against reality. Routines that shield us from our own vulnerability make us numb, while the same routine, lived with open-minded awareness, can protect and safeguard personal boundaries that are necessary to our well-being.
This is not about judging or making harsh corrections to our behavior. For example, even numbness in small amounts can serve us for a time, especially after a shock or a time of great struggle. Being numb for a while can offer comfort and haven until we are ready to turn back toward life with a feeling heart. We want to know the difference between a healing process or time of integration and a chronic routine that buffers us from reality and effectively blocks our growth, often encouraging addiction and unhealthy patterns. When we see how we are cocooned in certain routines, rather than reject them we can recreate them—unless, of course, the routine is harmful to ourselves or others. Ordinary routines that have become stale and rote can be refreshed, brought to life to begin anew.
Begin with noticing what you see and how you feel in your routines. Invite a deeper seeing and feeling with questions. Is there an inner depth in your routines, a feeling of aliveness? Do you feel nourished, energized as you move through the routines of your day? For example, when, how, and what do you cook and eat? What is your mood when you study, exercise, work, play, or put on the kettle for tea? Take stock of how you wake up in the morning and how you go to sleep at night. These are ordinary “threshold moments” when it’s important to pay attention to moods, thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.
Seeing clearly, we then have an opportunity to accept where and how we are presently functioning, invite a fluid and receptive mood, make different choices and wise decisions. A routine can become a ritual of renewal and a true response to Life. When this happens, we may find ourselves suddenly washed in inexplicable happiness or notice the background hum of a good mood when we clean the house, sit at the desk, answer the phone, brush our teeth and make up the bed.
It’s never too late to begin again, with renewed intention to relax and soften our hearts to simple human activities. Look for ways to bring a sense of the sacred to the rhythms of how you begin each day. Before you even think about looking at your cell phone, start your morning doing three ordinary things that support and nourish you, body and soul. Upon rising, whisper a prayer of gratitude—just “thank you” is enough. Make up your bed and straighten your room or living space, then light a candle. Drink a cup of warm water before you make your sencha tea or coffee. Offer flowers, incense and prayers at an altar or shrine if that moves you. Set aside time to meditate or be in quiet contemplation. Write down your dreams, play a musical instrument, draw, paint or make art of any kind. If you can, reserve an hour or more for these early morning routines before you start “doing business” or attending to all the responsibilities of the coming day.
Small routine actions can carry respect, honor, reverence for life, gratitude, and simplicity into your day. They can bring order and beauty into your work, interactions and the space you inhabit. Even when I sit at the piano and play the same old chord riff or sing a song I’ve sung a hundred times, I can notice my state of being, my mood—the rasa that is present in me. Sometimes it starts out feeling wooden and a little boring, but if I stay with it, presence builds and a little spark shows up and catches fire. Before I know it, inspiration is flowing.
Ritual
There are countless ways to transform routines into personal acts of ritual. Ritual is an invitation into the sacred world. Ritual happens in infinite forms, but it depends upon mood and intention. Rituals can open doorways to an expansive horizon of inner experience. Our rituals can be pathways of exploration and self-knowledge, of prayer, of asking open-ended questions that invite the Self to speak. Rituals of recognition, self-compassion and the remembrance that hum at the origins of all things are riverbeds where inspiration flows.
Rituals are life sustaining. They focus our attention on what matters most and the inspiration that is our heart’s calling. Create rituals that are unique to your investigation into Life and Reality, beginning with making space and time to connect through timelessness to the vast rhythms of Cosmos.
A ritual can be complex in form, with many symbolic aspects of invocation and offerings of something precious or beautiful, like rose petals, water, or ghee. A ritual can be as simple as lighting a candle, cleaning the kitchen, or pouring a glass of water and leaving it in sunlight for some minutes before drinking. Build a small ritual fire in a brazier and offer into the flame a scrap of paper inscribed with names, thoughts, deeds, memories. These can be blessings, prayers, the things or people you most need to forgive or release in a ritual of letting go.
Ritual is also the mood we bring to any action we make or do. In ritual space, we turn something precious over to the Sacred, however or whatever we imagine That to be. In ritual, we invoke a simple mood of gratitude and reverence for all that has been given to us—the fact that we are alive. There is an innate sense that we are giving back to Life. Every ritual is a declaration: “I am here. I am paying attention. I am grateful. I wish to serve.”
Rituals connect us to the divinity in life and beyond the world of form. Ritual is one way to curate a relationship with the flow of time that is fluid and creative. Ritual transports us beyond time and space. As poet David Whyte wrote, routines that have emerged out of a true rhythmic relationship with Life are how we “worship at the altar of timelessness.” There, in that place in between time and timelessness, we ask ourselves “invitational questions.”
Revelations emerge from the infinite presence that exists in timelessness. Many traditions speak of this experience as going “beyond the beyond,” often with references to emptiness or shunyata (Sanskrit) to describe such states of being. For me, the word “emptiness” can be misleading. It hints at a striving away from the gift of Life and toward a goal of nirvana, a state in which nothing exists. Moments of dipping into the shunyata of tradition are more poetically described as a vast space of mystery and infinite potentials. From that “golden field of emptiness” flows the miracle of Life.
Communal rituals may be an important part of bringing ritual space into our lives. One of the simplest and most powerful rituals in all cultures is to gather with others to share food. This daily act, common to all humans, has been held as sacred by all religions. The ancients asked universal questions through powerful communal rituals that were transformational for the individual. These were often a form of sacred theatre, an artform of invocation and initiation into an awakening within the individual. Those rituals always included forms that encourage embodiment—enacting sacred stories, dance, music, food and libations as offerings to the deities and the spiritual helpers who support and sustain life. These communal ritual forms are still alive today in many religious traditions.
Beyond religion, there is nothing and no one stopping you from creating your own solitary ritual moment. You are free to dance, sing, shout, cry and laugh!
Do you have a dedicated place—a temenos, a sacred place in space and time, or even a little corner for meditation, a shelf for an altar in your house?
When have you touched an experience of timelessness and that which is Beyond? Or a deep fulfillment of inner belonging and connection with your own being?
When have you recently experienced a moment of inspiration, delight, and pure flow?
What about times when we are not inspired? When we feel lost, blocked, at a dead end, full of fear, anger or anxiety? How does struggling with a whole range of intense emotions fit into your aspirations?
Take these questions as your doorways to go deeper into ritual and invite an experience of reverie.
Reverie
When rhythms, routines and ritual open the doors to reverie, the moment is often experienced as a creative flow, a flood of joy or inspiration. In my own experience, reverie is essential to contemplative life and the inner workings of the soul. A reverie can be many things, and it often leads to prayer and a kind of “unknowing.” The contemporary definitions of reverie reflect that elusive quality, according to the dictionary:
1) Dreamy meditation or fanciful musing
2) Daydream
3) A fantastic, visionary or impractical idea
4) Or an instrumental musical composition of a vague and dreamy character
The word reverie has interesting roots. Reverie was not clearly associated with daydreaming until the 1650s in the English language. In ancient times, reverie could be experienced as wild conduct, frolic, revelry, delirium, dream, wander, and rave. Poet David Whyte said it well in a workshop:
To be equal to, to meet the ferocity of the world, we must find the wildness in ourselves, the unbridled, the unfettered, the inexplicable, the bewildered, the wilderness of ‘the crazy’ inside, and to then find a narrow path between our ‘crazy’ and our ‘brilliant’…. Brilliant is the fruit of the harvest of ritualized contact with the source that produces energies and powers that have been unrecognized in our lives.
Sedona pathway.
It is through the untamed, free flow of reverie that inner and outer, conscious and unconscious dimensions of soul and spirit come into dynamic relationship. Imagination opens and cascades in glimpses of the uncatchable and numinous. Intuitive knowing and insight bubble up from the deep Self. Scenes, stories, symbols and fantasies arise in the imaginative wandering of reverie.
Reverie is close kin to what C.G. Jung called active imagination, an essential aspect of meditation and inner work in transpersonal psychology. In active imagination, we begin with focusing on a particular mood (rasa in Sanskrit) or feeling that is present or that we perhaps remember from a recent experience. Allowing that mood to amplify and resonate, we pay close attention to any symbolic image, words or fantasy that arises. The aim is to allow the fantasy—or daydream—free play, without departing from the initial mood or feeling. This has the effect of bringing the mood or feeling closer to consciousness, hence making it more understandable to the conscious (and more rational) mind. Jung wrote:
Visual types should concentrate on the expectation that an inner image will be produced. As a rule such fantasy-images will actually appear—perhaps hypnagogically—and should be carefully noted down in writing. Audio-verbal types usually hear inner words, perhaps mere fragments or apparently meaningless sentences to begin with. Others at such times simply heart their ‘other’ voice. Still rare, but equally valuable, is automatic writing…. (From the Introduction to the The Red Book, Liber Novus, reader’s edition.)
Jung wrote, “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body…” [Collected Works, p. 394] In the Hindu tradition, Western understandings of contemplative reverie as doorway to the imaginal realm are the concern of tantra and kundalini yoga. In those traditions of practice, the Sanskrit word triveni refers to the “confluence of three,” historically meaning the convergence of the ancient holy rivers of India, the Saraswati, Yamuna and Ganga. Going deeper, triveni is an imaginal place, the mystical point of inner union where the three rivers of energy in the human body—ida, pingala, sushumna—meet and mingle to produce the experience of inner union, moksha or liberation.
The sacred number three can be found in many layers of symbol, myth and imagination in ancient cultures and religious traditions around the world. For example, the three gunas of the Hindu tradition—divine forces that move all of Life: creation, preservation, and destruction. The ancient Celts knew these three forces as the triskol or triskelion. The number three is found in many depictions of deity and godhead, from the three faces of the goddess—maiden, mother, crone—to the Trinity of Christian faith.
We can also recognize the reverberation of three in rhythm, routine and ritual, which produces the reverie that catalyzes the imaginal function within. Reveries and states of inner flow often bring with them a sense of wonder and awe, which in turn develop and give rise to an emerging wave of what is to come. Dipping into these direct experiences of our own true nature builds a greater capacity to respond to life’s challenges in wise, productive, and creative ways.
In the moment of reverie, we lay our burdens down. In reverie, we may discover freedom and grace; we touch divine moments, moods, rasas, spontaneous prayers that open doorways to letting go of all that we are holding onto which does not belong to us. We’ve outgrown it, or we just took it on ourselves as a burden out of childhood’s sorrows, an indoctrination in religion, or wounds that formed the way we survive in life, how we buffer ourselves, how we respond.
But this is far from being our fullest and truest response to Life. Within each of us, reverie reveals a blueprint of potential. In reveries, we are invited into a deeper truth that may shine on us for a moment, but can we integrate and embody the truth that we’ve seen, tasted, known?
What is hidden inside each one of us is still taking form, like in the chrysalis stage of the butterfly. In the chrysalis, the caterpillar is broken down into a completely liquid state and suspended there before the butterfly begins to take shape. We can imagine reverie as one way of opening to the mysterious dissolutions we experience.
Reverie can be a moment of transfiguration. A moment of recognition. Of remembrance. We remember the question we have refused to ask, for that question taps the clear stream of an internal source that can be given to no one but you. Cultivating reverie through routine and ritual, we are making a gesture toward the revelation of our own inborn potential. As with all powerful, transformative experiences, the secret lies in the integration of the experience. We may sail the river of time on inspired currents of reverie and revelation, and yet we must come back to ground in our ordinary human life.
Response
The integration of numinous experience shows in how we respond to life’s great challenges, dualities, and burning questions. For some months during the summer of 2025, I found myself contemplating intertwined themes of love and freedom with the question, “What is moksha (liberation) anyway?” Rather than hinting toward elusive concepts of transcendental freedom, my inquiry became about how I respond to Life, leading to a deeper seeing into how, over time, I am learning to become responsible in the crucibles of life.
The word response comes from the root Latin word respondere, meaning “to answer in return, to promise, to pledge.” Thus came the question: What is my pledge, my promise to Life? Do I have the inner freedom to act based on my promise to Life? These questions dovetail with the Sanskrit word samaya, which refers to the appointed or proper time for doing something related to our covenant or sacred commitment on the Path. The answer to the inquiry—What is my promise? What is my sacred commitment to the Path?—is carried forward in my response to life’s daily challenges.
Being present in the rhythms and routines and rituals of our day-to-day we cultivate a sense of the sacred that evokes a mood of reverie. We do this primarily by paying attention and being present to whatever Life has brought to our door. This inner culture builds upon itself, grows through our meanderings on the path and sustains us in the unexpected shocks and turnings of the wheel.
In those very moments of change, we have access to the imagination and the presence of being to know when to say yes, thank you, or no, thank you to the invitations of life. When to take the shortcut or the side road that appears or just stay on course… How to live through a time of personal undoing that is fraught with transition or loss, or a decision that must be made. We may find that we know when the medicine should be homeopathic and when it should be allopathic, when to say yes to that surgery. We know how and when to ask for help and when to respond to another’s need. The more we cultivate loving awareness and presence through our routines, rituals and reveries, the more our response to Life’s conditions and conundrums becomes a great healing balm to ourselves, to the other, and to the world.
Arizona sunset.