A friend recently shared some personal news: a diagnosis of OCD. While the news surprised me, it also got me thinking about how deeply personal that information was to share, and how vulnerable sharing that must have been for them, and also deeply, how deeply personal are all of the rituals we create, uphold, and endure throughout our lives, many of them invisible to others.

According to Google, a ritual is “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”

Life is filled with ritual.

Wake up, brush teeth, exercise, shower, eat, work, stretch, eat, play, relax, rest. Repeat. Actions performed in a prescribed order.

These actions become so familiar that they happen automatically. You act without thinking about the order of them. You no longer think about the steps it takes to do a load of laundry, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or back your car into your usual spot.

You know what to do, and you do it.

Often, without thinking. What is routine doesn’t require cognitive effort.

Which means:

Ritual is a place where you don’t need to think, to do.

In fact, often ritual brings a state where you forget that you are doing.

You also forget that you are doing what you are doing. You are just doing.

You are present, and yet not present.

Attached, and yet detached.

You are you, and yet you are not aware that you are you, doing what you’re doing.

You are conscious, yet unconscious.

This relaxed state is also where magic happens: insights, flashes of intuition, fantastic ideas.

It’s also the place that sparks understanding and meaning. Have you ever had a flash of clarity or insight, only after stepping away from deep work on a problem?

This state is where you can connect with a deeper part of yourself that is outside of what “makes sense” and access deeper information. And ritual is one way to enter.

I reflected on my own relationship with ritual, and realized my life is layered with it, and these layers flow and shift and change as I evolve and develop. They co-mingle and influence each other on mental, emotional, physical, seasonal, relational, geographic, spiritual, and situational levels. Some rituals are automatic, some are intuitive, and some are intentional.

For instance, when I ended an unhealthy relationship and moved to a new space, I was ready for change. I knew I’d been practicing unhealthy self-talk (mental) rituals, and in my new space, I was eager to invent new rituals around how and where I would spend my time and energy and what types of thoughts and feelings I wanted to practice in that new space—essentially, I was looking to redefine who I was, or who the healthier version of me could be, through rituals; someone I had the potential to become, but who hadn’t yet emerged.

I knew I could carve out new neural pathways by practicing different, less familiar ways of being and doing, since the old ones were no longer serving me, and I was extremely ready for change and willing to move through discomfort to get there.

Ritual became my way to redesign how I was living my life, inside and out, and it was a brilliant teacher. I was willing to be curious and use ritual as a grounding method to reinvent my personal practices.

It was all on the table, and all of it I recalibrated slowly, by being intentional.

I defined what kind of experiences I wanted to live. I created rituals that matched the new way I wanted to live. Then, as the trained musician I am, I practiced until the new felt familiar. I created new rituals around my self-talk, around how I moved and interacted with my body, around how I dressed and interacted with people, even around the way I handled news that would have previously crumpled me.

Rituals helped me learn how to understand myself and how to be compassionate with myself—and thus, how to be present and empathetic with others.

Rituals helped me anchor myself and notice I was going to be OK.

Rituals helped me take responsibility for myself and become a better person after years of practicing blame and martyrdom.

They helped me find and hold my own space for myself, with compassion, tolerance, and understanding.

I mainly kept these ritual practices to myself, but in my work as a coach and facilitator, when people I worked with were stuck, I shared what had helped me. Often, afterward, they’d come back and tell me that my ritual had helped them.

Rather than become bound as a result of ritual, I began to see that ritual could help people ground themselves so they could attain greater freedom. That’s what happened for me.

And if there’s anything that I believe could help our world, it’s creating greater love and freedom for and with each other.

That’s why I’m opening up my personal vault of rituals and sharing a few with you now, in hopes that by sharing, I can help you the way I helped myself.

Because these rituals, and the intentionality that went into them, have produced magic for me. I hope they do the same for you.

Ritual creates a state is where you can access answers. Peace. Rest. Relaxation. Not thinking. Being.

This is the magic place where great ideas, creativity, and innovation live.

Ritual is a way you can become happier and more successful.

Here are 4 of my anchor rituals for creativity. They also help with breaking cycles that are no longer serving you. Test them out for yourself. If you feel moved, please let me know what results when you do them.

1. Create a “mid-problem” ritual.

Relaxation, half-consciousness, distraction, flow states, and trance set the stage for new ideas and openness. Because you can’t control things when you’re in this state, you are more receptive and can receive important insights and inspiration that you can’t receive otherwise. When you’re in “problem mode,” create a series of actions (ideally physical) you’ll follow, or a mantra you’ll say, until your mind relaxes. Document what happens over time.

2. Do some reps.

Receiving any specific information from a half-conscious state isn’t guaranteed, but it happens most often when the mind isn’t fully engaged, but the body is, such as a shower, exercise that doesn’t require constant focus (I use running, walking, elliptical), cleaning, knitting, or dancing. Define a go-to activity that involves physical repetition and do it several times per week. Document any insights or impulses that come up, follow through on them, and see what happens. Repeat for at least 3 weeks.

3. Get visual.

In a relaxed state, your rational mind (your left brain) is quieter and your creative-intuitive, visual mind (your right brain) is more active. That means you have access to a fuller range of information and possibilities than you can access from your fully awake, purely logical point of view. Put on a timer for 3 minutes and create a story that makes you happy or that reinforces the presence of whatever it is you’d like to be living. See it in your mind’s eye, in as much detail as possible. Enjoy it, savor it, feel it. When the timer goes off, return to your regular day. Repeat daily for a few weeks and document what happens.

4. Go for it!

When you begin regularly accessing this creative-intuitive part of your mind, often you’ll start to receive important ideas or information that provide new clarity or momentum. Sometimes you’ll feel a strong impulse to do something, like email a friend or look a term, or if you’re driving, take a different route than planned. Start a ritual and see what happens: when these ideas or impulses arise, follow through on them quickly, without second-guessing. When you act on this information without analyzing it, often you’ll find yourself in the right place at the right time to receive guidance, help, work, or money, to help someone else, or to otherwise get what you need to take the next step forward.

The cadence of rituals flows and influences how we note and absorb important moments in life. Rituals help us mark time, to notice how things change. When we return to a ritual, we cannot help but notice that because the ritual stays the same, we are different because we ordinarily move too quickly to see how much we are changing day to day. Ritual makes it clear just how much has changed.

And it pulls us toward the magic of the creative, intuitive mind—so that we may forget, and lose ourselves in the fuller sense of all that we are. So that we may be healed.

It’s the act of forgetting, of losing the conscious mind, that we gain the wholeness, wisdom, health, and magic we seek. The key is unlearning, and ritual is a pathway to get there.

What will you choose to unlearn, in order to experience your wholeness, wisdom, health, and magic?