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Flylady and Ritual
As I work up the Canadian Charge for Lodge next week (the first new text I've learning for Lodge in years), I'm reminded of one of the basic principles of learning ritual, which I note is the same as the basic Flylady principle for housecleaning: a little at a time is the way to get the job done.
One mistake that many people make in learning ritual (as with so many things) is impatience. They try to do it all at once in a big binge. It doesn't usually work for cleaning up, and it never works (for most people, anyway) for learning lines -- you wind up intimidated by the scope of the problem, then frustrated, and then you psych yourself out of making any progress at all. It becomes scary, and fear always hampers getting things done.
By contrast, the usual Flylady principle of "a little at a time" works really well for working up ritual. You don't worry too much about making huge leaps -- instead, you just focus on getting a little better each time you do it. The first week is just reading through it repeatedly and saying it out loud as you do so. The second, trying to look away from the page as much as you can, but not worrying about looking back as often as you need to. By the third, you're most of the way there, just tripping over some words here and there. And by the fourth, it's mostly just a daily reminder, sharpening and figuring out where to put the pauses and changed in intonation.
Of course, this all requires starting early enough, and having the discipline to *do* a bit every day, giving it the 10-15 minutes needed to make progress. But those are preconditions to doing anything complex and interesting...
One mistake that many people make in learning ritual (as with so many things) is impatience. They try to do it all at once in a big binge. It doesn't usually work for cleaning up, and it never works (for most people, anyway) for learning lines -- you wind up intimidated by the scope of the problem, then frustrated, and then you psych yourself out of making any progress at all. It becomes scary, and fear always hampers getting things done.
By contrast, the usual Flylady principle of "a little at a time" works really well for working up ritual. You don't worry too much about making huge leaps -- instead, you just focus on getting a little better each time you do it. The first week is just reading through it repeatedly and saying it out loud as you do so. The second, trying to look away from the page as much as you can, but not worrying about looking back as often as you need to. By the third, you're most of the way there, just tripping over some words here and there. And by the fourth, it's mostly just a daily reminder, sharpening and figuring out where to put the pauses and changed in intonation.
Of course, this all requires starting early enough, and having the discipline to *do* a bit every day, giving it the 10-15 minutes needed to make progress. But those are preconditions to doing anything complex and interesting...