#109 -Rituals & Spontaneity
The way we spend our lives and the things we do, no matter how big or small, have an influence on how we define life. We all want a sense of significance and find an endless number of ways to find meaning and purpose in this world.
Rituals are routines which we have attached special significance to. It can help us in becoming the best version of ourselves by aligning our goals with the habits that will help us get there.
Rituals are designed to serve us, which is why it's important to remember that when curating our own rituals, we should be guided by the reasons why we're doing it in the first place. It is not an ordinary or typical routine; rather, it is a one-of-a-kind routine that we have created for ourselves with the intention of reaching our ultimate goal, which is a fulfilled and engaged life.
While rituals help us be more intentional, habits provide us with a sense of comfort and a stress-free way of completing our everyday tasks. It enables us to better manage our time, change our bad habits, and avoid procrastination. Spontaneity, on the other hand, brings out our adventurous side as it is unpredictable yet exciting. The future is uncertain and sometimes it's also good to step outside of our comfort zone to try new and interesting things that will help us grow and develop as an individual.
In Episode 109, Andrew talks about how we can identify rituals that are serving us and which are not, as well as their importance in our lives. He emphasizes the difference between habits and spontaneity, and the significance of having both in order to live a balanced life.
When we reach a point in our lives where we are challenged by our thoughts , it's important to understand ourselves so we can assess whether the way we're living is leading us to our goals, or if it's something that we need to change to curate our lives in a way that allows us to enjoy it and control our destiny. Living is truly beautiful when we live a life that helps us grow closer to God, closer to becoming the person we want to be, and closer to living the life we desire.
Listen to Episode 109 to learn more!
Show Notes
What are rituals?
Understanding what triggers us to engage in rituals that aren't serving us
The purpose of rituals
Habits vs. spontaneity
The importance of having a balanced life
Identifying whether your rituals are serving you their intended purpose or not
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life and Legacy, everybody. The podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times. And today is a solo cast avec moi with little old me, talking about rituals, okay. There’s two halves to this episode. It's rituals on one half and habits versus spontaneity on the other half. The rituals portion of this episode is really about helping you identify which rituals you have in your life that are serving you and how to identify rituals that you have that are hurting you, and how to adapt them so that all of your rituals become something that helps you to become a more fulfilled, more engaged human being. So that you create a life that you're so in love with, you don't want to escape. The other half is about the spontaneity of the habits, is really about allowing yourself to be adventurous and to be excited and nervous about your life as well. And how important that is, but to also have some stability in your life. And how all of these things at the end of the day will help you to become a very happy and fulfilled person. So enjoy this episode starring Andrew Love. God bless you.
Andrew Love
Welcome back, everybody. Andrew love here. And today, I'm going to do a little bit of a solo cast because, well, because I can. Basically, I noticed in my conversations in the group that I help and also in other conversations in the High Noon world, if I ever see a pattern, I'd like to address it to the macro. If I noticed all these little bits and pieces of information coming up, I realized, oh, this must be in the collective consciousness. So let's address it so I can help as many people as possible understand something that just is like a recurring theme. And today, I wanted to address rituals. We all have rituals. A lot of them are unconscious rituals. And I want to help you to identify which rituals are serving you and which are not serving you. And then I want to get into habits versus spontaneity. Okay, your habitual self versus your spontaneous self, and I want to get into that conversation a little bit. All these things that I just mentioned are very much related. And so I'll keep it on topic, I promise you. But I want to get into these things because if you can understand them, then you can understand yourself. And if you can understand yourself, you can start to customize your life. You can start to curate your life. In which case, you can start to enjoy it way more and control it. You'll be able to control your destiny. And I think we all want that. I think we all want that. I know some days it's like, hey, you'd like to outsource your life to somebody else. Hey, can you live my life for me so I can chill? But that's not what I mean? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? You're here to live life. So let's live life.
Andrew Love
Now with rituals, let's start with the basics. Just to give you context, we all have rituals. We all have many rituals. A great example of that is the first thing you do when you wake up. What is the first thing that you do when you wake up every morning? I would say that you probably have a series of rituals in the morning. For some people, it's get up, go to the bathroom, take a nice pee, then go have a coffee. Or for other people, it's wake up and you stare at your phone for 20 minutes and compare yourself to other people on Instagram, and end up feeling terrible about your life. For other people, they press the snooze button. That's a weird habit. A weird ritual that we have is the first thing you do when you become conscious is to try to not be conscious anymore. To try to avoid life and reality.
Andrew Love
So that's one key thing is, what are your rituals in the morning? What are the things that you do every day? A lot of this might not be conscious. I'm telling you, one of the worst things that you could ever do in the morning, first thing, is to take out your phone and start checking it. You're plugging into all stuff that's going to influence your thinking, your feeling, your general state of being. And it puts you in the back seat of your own life first thing in the morning. So do you think that's gonna impact the rest of your day? Of course.
Andrew Love
Now, in terms of rituals and sexuality, this is really important for you to understand. That's really at the heart of why I'm bringing this up. I think a lot of people don't understand why they end up watching porn, why they end up masturbating? They simply don't understand it and they think, oh, it's just because I was horny. I just had this conversation with somebody yesterday, they were really under the impression that horniness being randy, being of the mind for sexuality. They thought that this was just a passive state that you just end up this way. We never just end up anyway. It's a series of emotional triggers, physiological triggers, psychological triggers. There's a bunch of stuff at play here. And again, if you can understand what triggered these things, then you can start to decide, do I want to pull this trigger or not?
Andrew Love
And so with pornography, I want you to think about this for a second. That's a result. Watching porn, masturbating, these are all results. How did you get there? You start thinking about rituals and acting out. You are always acting out on one device, maybe two devices max. You're probably acting out just in one part of your home or somewhere. It's like you have your place. You have these external ways in which you got there. You have websites that you went to before porn. You have these internal things like emotions that led you to porn. These are all part of this ritual that you have. I want to give you an example. I know a guy who I was helping a while ago, and his ritual was every single Friday night he would act out. And in the beginning, he didn't even realize that. But after a while, he started to notice this pattern. Whoa, I'm out of control on Friday night. That's always wanting to act out. And no matter what I do, he at some point would just try to be out of the house on Friday night so it wouldn't happen. But he'd always end up at home. Eventually, you got to come home, right? So it would happen every single Friday night. And the more he unpacked it, he realized that his ritual on Friday night actually started Monday morning. Because the reason he would act out and end up watching porn on Friday night was the accumulation of stress throughout the week. It was this buildup of stress and anxiety from work, from life that he wasn't dealing with as it was happening. And it would accumulate and accumulate and accumulate, and build up to this crescendo where he just wanted to escape. And that was Friday night. And Friday night is also when you can put your guards down because guess what, I don't have work tomorrow. So let's just stay up late watching YouTube.
Andrew Love
So he end up watching maybe a movie. If he was really high class that night, he'd watch a movie. But then he'd end up on YouTube. And YouTube is where you just go on this digging spree of content, content, content. And if you have some emotional drivers to want to watch more salacious things because it's more exhilarating because your life is confusing or you just want to escape it then the more tantalizing something is, the more you want to pursue it. Because that's like this carrot in front of your face of, hey, this is exciting. Come here. So he'd go down this rabbit hole. So he would watch YouTube videos that would lead him to anime YouTube videos, which will lead to sexualized anime, which would lead him to porn without fail.
Andrew Love
So the moment that he could understand that his routine started on Monday morning dealing with his emotions throughout the week, and then preparing for Friday night accordingly. By dealing with his stress, if he had any leftover, in a healthy way by talking to people, by meditating, by taking care of himself. All of a sudden, this ritual was redefined. And Friday night, wasn't him in his room by himself watching porn, it was him connecting to other people getting steam out maybe by hanging out with friends or whatever. But he completely changed his ritual. And the only way, at the end of the day, that you can do this is if you can understand it. One of the best ways is to reverse engineer. So you start with the result. The result is porn. The result is masturbation. How do you work your way back to understanding how you got to that point? What were the emotional triggers, these emotional rituals that you had of my sadness leads me to wanting to escape life, which compels me to watch risky stuff online? There's a process. There's a ritual. One emotion leads to the next, leads to the next. That's a ritual.
Andrew Love
Also, the external rituals of the location of which device you're on and at what time of what was I doing right before this? Is it because I'm frustrated with my homework? Is it because I'm frustrated with my spouse if you're married? Is it because I simply am bored and I don't know what to do with myself? I'm unmotivated. Once you can understand this process, then you can start to interrupt the process and replace it. The goal that I try to take all of my guys in the boot camp is to a place where they can get ahead of themselves. If you can get ahead of your habit, then you can choose what you do next. If your habit completely owns you, and if your ritual completely owns you, you have no say in the matter because it has so much energy and foundation that it pulls you by the color through this series of ritualistic events, and you can't stop it. It's like you're in this machine, and you're just being processed through it. But the moment that you can become aware of this process, this ritual, this series of events that you take and participate in, the more that you can see it in real-time. If you know what it is, I do this, and then I do this, and then I do this. While you're doing it, you can say, oh, I'm doing this. So you interrupt it. You become conscious of it. If you can become conscious during your rituals, and all of a sudden you can choose whether you want to continue down this process or not.
Andrew Love
Do you see how simple that is? It's really a matter of understanding yourself, then becoming consciously aware of why you do what you do, and then starting to change it. You can swap out rituals at any time once you understand them. But understanding them is really key. So look at the rituals in your life and see, are they serving their purpose or not? The purpose of any ritual is to help you be a more fulfilled individual to bring you closer to God, to bring you closer to the person you want to be, to bring you closer to other people, to bring you closer to having the life of your dreams that you deserve, that you were born to have. And if you have rituals that are making you sad, that is making you miserable, that is making you out of shape mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, you got to stop them. You got to interrupt them. You can do this. I've done episodes previously on neuroplasticity, you can do this. We can reshape our mind and our heart and our everything into whatever we choose, we have to choose.
Andrew Love
Okay, so that's the first part, it's rituals. I hope you can understand that we all have rituals. Think about the rituals you have in the morning. Think about the rituals you have if you commute to work or school. What are the rituals that you have? Do you always sit in the same seat? Do you always eat with the same people? Do you always eat the same food? To disrupt these rituals is a real blessing that snaps you out of the spell, this hypnotic spell that we're under most of the time of living unconsciously, which leads me to the second part of this conversation, which is habits versus spontaneity.
Andrew Love
As I know, a lot of people feel like their life should be more spontaneous. And sometimes they're right. Sometimes you really need to do something to snap you awake to wake up. Because we always wear the same clothes and do the same things with the same people. Think about even just grocery shopping. You go to the same place, go down the same aisles, you buy the same items day in and day out. That means that you end up being the same food which brings you the same feelings. It's just like a cycle. And of course, one good thing about that is that you can rely on it. And it's less stressful. It's much better than forging for food like our ancestors did. Are we going to eat this month? Well, depends on how fast you are. Can you catch that boar? Here's a knife. It's obviously a lot less stressful than that. But we have issues. We have many health issues in the West. And a lot of this is because we unconsciously just eat what we ate before and we don't evaluate it. Is this stuff good for me? Does my body want this? Am I eating for my mouth or for my body?
Andrew Love
The moment you start to interrupt this and try new things, you start to interrupt these patterns, these rituals that you have, a lot of that comes from spontaneity. Next time you go grocery shopping, go to a different place. Or go to the same place but start going the opposite way that you normally do. You'll see new things. Challenge yourself to try shopping in different ways. This is such a basic premise. But when we apply that to all aspects of our life. Then all of a sudden, we can evaluate our life and to see, have we created feedback for ourselves like healthy feedback loops? Or do we do everything just based off of what we did before? The opposite of that is being too spontaneous all the time is actually not that enjoyable. And I can really attest to that because my family has traveled quite extensively over the past few years. And after we traveled for long enough, we were like, well, I want to just go home. And we realized that we didn't have a home to go back to. There was no place, no geographical area. My wife's parents, her family's in Mongolia. My family's in Canada. We live in America. So we're free agents. We have no real deep roots in this country. So traveling too much just led us to this feeling of too spontaneous.
Andrew Love
Choosing a new air and be to live in each month after month after month is nice. It's kind of exotic. It's new but it leads to this weird loneliness. At least that's where it led us. And so the spontaneity was too spontaneous. We needed some regularity. And in our kid's life, we really felt the need to create some routine in their life so that they could adapt to some friends and really invest in those friends, and have some stability. Now, we've been really way too stable, in my opinion. And we need to travel again. But we also now have a home to come back to. We live in Colorado. We have a nice community that we can invest in.
Andrew Love
So the reason I bring this up is because I think it's fundamentally important to have a balanced life where you do have your routines and you have some friends. A lot of people just have a lot of acquaintances in their life. They love this idea of finding new people all the time. Or in romantic relationships, there's a lot of people who are addicted to falling in love with dating, to first and second dates, to that first kiss, and all that. But they don't have any depth of relationship. And so when it gets too deep, they get scared and they run away. There are many reasons why this happens. But they cannot go into a committed relationship because it frightens them. And so they're just running, and they cannot have any regularity. There are serial daters all over the place. Trust me, this is a very common phenomenon.
Andrew Love
So obviously, we want some level of routine, some level of regularity, and people or community that we can invest in. This is actually fundamental to our human experience. We need people who can rely on us that we can rely on. And you can imagine how important that is in this modern world. A community where you can ask for help. And also a community that can ask you for help. That's how we really embody being a part of a cell in a body and an organism. We need to be that. But bodies need movement too. Cells need movement. So it's good to move around. It's good to go on adventures. It's good to be scared, to be frightened, to put yourself into new situations. All of this leads to a life where you're alive and where you're choosing.
Andrew Love
Another advantage of traveling and then coming back home is after we traveled for a long time, we came back and our stuff was in storage. And I went, I looked through all my clothes and I'm like, wow, these clothes are amazing. I didn't know I had so many cool clothes. And I had all these clothes that seemed brand new to me, except I had already worn them in. So it's the best of both worlds. They were like used and not too new but they fit me perfectly, and they're like new to me again. If one, we're living in a state where we are new, as much as possible, that really helps us to avoid getting into harmful habits, just unconsciously.
Andrew Love
So in terms of sexuality, this is very much true. We, as people, have a tendency to want newness. And because of that, a lot of people say that's their get out of jail card and they say, that's why we need porn, that's why monogamy is a bad thing. And this is all hogwash. We do need newness. But the newness that we need is to see life a new, love a new. If you're in a relationship, it's very easy to see your spouse new all the time. It means that you need to refresh yourself. You need to be alive and engaged with life. And when you are truly alive, you will see the life and other people. When you're dead, you just see the deadness in other people and other things. You look at life and you're like, aaah, it's just the bench. But when you're alive, you're like that's a bench. That same words, just different life in those words.
Andrew Love
Wow, I'm so glad we have benches in public. That's actually a cool thing. I know it's a random example. But how cool is that, that you can just sit down in a park? If there were no such thing as benches, if sitting was just viewed to be a private event, then we would always have to sit on the grass. And what happens if it's damp or wet? No fun. But we have these things called benches. How great is that? And you can observe this when you're alive. You cannot observe this when you're dead. You're like that's just the stupid bench. Why is it there?
Andrew Love
The same thing is true of ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about other people, how we feel about God. I know so many people will complain about God. They complain about their parents. They complain about their religion because you're crusty. If you're new and fresh even when somebody makes a mistake, you just see that they're a person that's on their own journey. When you're fresh, you're a lot more forgiving, you're a lot more adaptable. So I'm going to conclude here. Rituals are meant to serve us. You can create rituals to keep yourself fresh, to keep yourself alive. And you can also create rituals that keep yourself dead, that keep yourself comatose. These rituals are the food that we eat, the way that we sleep, the amount of time that we spend online, what we do online, what we do with other people, the kind of conversations we're having, all of these rituals that we have need to constantly be up for review to figure out, are they serving the ultimate purpose of keeping me alive and well and fulfilled and engaged in life? And if not, I need to change them. And the other conversation was about habits versus spontaneity. It's good to have both to have regularity and to also challenge yourself and to go on adventures. All of this, if you are very conscious of it will lead you to an engaged life that you don't want to escape. And that the best antidote to porn is just to lead a life where you're fully engaged.
Andrew Love
So I wish you well on your journey. As always, if you have any questions at all, let me know. Let Benji know. Let Sammy know. Let Uncle David know. Let Aunt Mitsue know. Let Karina know. Let Robert know. Whoever you want to talk to, let me know. Whoever you want to talk to, reach out to us. We love talking to you. We love helping that's why we do this. God bless your souls. And I'll talk to you soon.
Andrew Love
Hello everybody, Andrew Love here, and I just wanted to add one more point. High Noon is a non-profit organization, and we are run by donations. Although we've been doing okay, thanks to the massive generosity of our founders, the Wolfenbergers, we want to expand higher, higher, higher, higher. We want to make a global impact. We want to reach every family, we want to change the culture. And for that to happen, we're going to need a lot of volunteers and a lot of staff. That's just the reality, it takes money to travel, it takes money to do a lot of the things we do. And we want to let you be a part of this growth. And so what we've created is a donor's club, which is a $10 a month club. And when you join, you get a T-shirt mailed to your door, you can get some exclusive content, we also have some really good goodies for our tribe of people who are part of the donor's club that we're going to talk about in the coming months. So I just wanted to invite you to be one of these people. Everybody can afford $10 a month. It's just a matter of whether it's a priority. So if you feel that High Noon has impacted you positively or your family or somebody you know, please consider donating. I don't want you to give any money unless you really, really want to. But if you do want to, I encourage you to really really donate. So $10 a month is I don't know, a cat a month? I don't know how to measure it. It's a giant hamburger and french fries a month that you can sacrifice in order to help this world become a more habitable, more enjoyable, more connected, more loving place. So please consider joining our donor's club, it's just $10 a month. We look forward to seeing you on the inside of our secret society for donors. Have a good day, everybody.