Rituals
On New Moons, nervous systems, and the underrated power of doing something that can’t be put in a spreadsheet.
There was a new moon on Monday.
I know how that sentence lands for some of you. Eyes glazing over, maybe a small internal eye-roll, a quiet “okay but what does that actually mean.” I get it. I spent most of my career in rooms where the word “ritual” would have gotten you gently removed from the strategy conversation.
But for me ritual is doing something small and intentional to mark a moment. So on Monday I lit a candle. I wrote down a few things I want to call in this cycle and a few things I’m ready to release. I sat outside with a blanket and thought about the coming month. And then I got on with my evening.
And it helped. Not in a mystical way. In a very practical, nervous-system, okay-I-know-what-I’m-doing-and-why kind of way.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about focus. About how we decide what to work on, what to let go of, what deserves our real attention versus what’s just loud. And what I keep coming back to is that the answer almost never lives in a framework or a to-do list. It lives in a moment of stillness where you actually let yourself hear what you already know.
Ritual creates that moment on purpose.
It doesn’t have to be a new moon. It doesn’t have to involve candles or crystals or anything that would make your pastor or your boss uncomfortable. It can be a walk you take at the same time every week. A notebook you open and jot a couple sentences into before you look at your phone. Five minutes of sitting before a hard conversation. Ritual isn’t about form. Ritual is about intention. It is the decision to pause before you act, to check in before you charge forward.
In my coaching work, I see so many smart, capable people making decisions from a state of pure reactivity. Someone sends a message and they respond immediately. A new opportunity appears and they say yes before they’ve felt the weight of it. A problem surfaces and they’re solving it before they’ve even named what the actual problem is.
Ritual is the interruption.
It’s the thing you do that says: not yet. Let me be here for a second first.
The new and full moon are useful prompts because the moon and it’s timing is external to me. It doesn’t depend on me feeling like it. It shows up on a schedule whether I’m ready or not, and I’ve decided to use it. But you could use anything. A season changing. The first of the month. A Sunday evening. The moment before you open your laptop in the morning.
What matters is that you have something that pulls you out of the current long enough to ask: what do I actually want to be doing here?
That question changes everything. But only if you stop long enough to ask it.