PROJECT FIVE.
Rituals
Initial ideas
-waking up at 3am and taking photos of my roommate
-sitting in silence
-singing in the shower as loud as i wanted
-dance break
Questions / Concerns
Why am I doing this?
What does it mean to me?
What rituals do I do naturally?
work in progress
silence
Silence, this was something that i needed. After weeks of constantly moving, and not a minute of silence, I decided that this was something that I wanted to implement into my ritual. Each day I decided to gage my stress level from 1 - 10. And depending on the number I would have that number of minutes of silence. I chose 1-10 because, there was no option for 0. I wanted it to be slightly forced for me to take a break for however many minutes just to sit in silence.
I chose to document my silence by video taping me for the full amount of time that I needed to sit in silence. I set up my phone , and set up my timer and just sat there in silence while my phone was recording me. It was nerve racking. By having the phone record me, I was kept accountable for my ritual.
day one
my stress level today was a 8/10 = 8 minutes of silence
"so, i just finished the 8 minutes of sitting in silence. and i’m going to lie, it was a little hard to be silent and reflective. i felt my mind wandering off to think about like what homework i needed to do or something else that i needed to do that was due tomorrow and um, but i also really did enjoy like taking the time to, to have like time to myself and to reflect and i found myself um, it reminded me of living an unhurried life, which i think is something that i heard in chapel about living an unhurried life and that’s kind of what i wanted to achieve through this. And i think it really did help me to just like take the time to slow down and that’s something i appreciated from that. so yeah, see you tomorrow"
day two
my stress level today was a 6/10 = 6 minutes of silence
"well that was my six minutes for today and um i found it a bit harder to relax and be in silence for six minutes. i think i don’t know why it was harder today opposed to yesterday. but it just felt really long and i wanted to go look at something and fidget and i found myself having to close my eyes so i wouldn’t get distracted or think about stuff. um, or like start scratching the floor or something, so yeah. that was a bit harder this time. but yeah, overall it really helped clear my mind, and reflect about this week and think about how this week went. and it was nice having time to reflect, cause i feel like a lot of things just go really fast and you don’t really have time to just sit down and think about your week and that was really nice. see you tomorrow"
day three
my stress level today was a 1/10 = 1 minutes of silence
"um, for this day i found myself, it was so much faster than the other days and because it was a minute but, i, i don’t know. i’m not as stressed out today i don’t have classes on fridays. and it was nice to take the time of like. i rest on fridays but this is like, another to sit down and like take a breather from like filling my brain with like youtube or content and it was really nice to just like sit down and like take the time to breathe. and be with myself and my thoughts and um it was nice, that one minute. that one minute of silence. see you tomorrow."
day four
my stress level today was a 1/10 = 1 minutes of silence
um i found that to be the fastest minute ever, um i feel like before the time took a lot longer and i was not looking forward to like waiting a minute and i thought of it as wasting a minute but i think now, now that i’ve done, this is my fourth time doing this, i’ve kind of reframed my way of thinking to be like, this is a minute i get to spend to myself, get to spend sitting down and reflecting and it was actually really nice to just live in the minute and to take that minute for myself. and um yeah, and, huh, it was just a nice time to just like not look at other stuff or constantly be bombarded with all this content and media that’s around us. that was a nice minute. a nice calming minute. see you tomorrow for our last day
day five
my stress level today was a 5/10 = 5 minutes of silence
so, um today was the last day of the ritual, and it was a little, it was nicer this time because i actually had a lot of anxiety today and it was a time for me to recollect my thoughts and to prepared for the week with the right mental space. i think a lot of the times we tend to think about our bodies physically and our emotions. but i think that i tend to forget that i need to take care of myself mentally also and um, how i’m doing personally. and while sitting here in silence for five minutes, it led me to start thinking about how we tend to think about time as a currency and we want to get things to get done quicker or we want things, we don’t have a lot of time to spend, and that kind of stuff. and i really want to start changing the way i view time and um that i can spend five minutes sitting down and in silence and um spending five minutes watching a movie. and not feeling bad spending time on things that i actually need to do. and so that is something that i learned, and i really want to continue to do this in the future, and maybe not like record myself but definitely like implement that like it is okay to spend five minutes to myself. definitely something that i’ve learned.