Living Ritual should be essential reading. In a timeline where everyone and everything is fighting for the currency of your attention, give it to this. It was the reminder I needed that life itself is the ritual. Tracee Stanley poetically shares how creating a meaningful ritual does not have to be an “either/or” choice but instead “both/and”, meeting you wherever you are in your stage of life.

Living Ritual is full of “micro rituals” that are meant to be digestible no matter how busy you are, but deliberately for those in the “householder” stage which she describes as “those of us who also have worldly responsibilities, like raising young children, maintaining a home, working a full-time job, or caregiving for an elderly parent”. It has actionable practices (breathwork, self-inquiry, lists, journaling, etc) in abundance, scalable depending on how much time you choose to devote to your own rituals. As with her other published work, this also includes access to audio recordings in Tracee’s own melodious voice for guidance.

If you’ve felt like you need to wait for the “perfect time”, let this help you see that the perfect time is the moment you are in. You don’t need a week long reset, or a trip to Bali (but if you go, take this with you!) This is a bountiful resource to help take back ownership of your attention and with beautiful illustrations by Maggie Eileen it will be a delight to come back to again and again.

Endlessly grateful to Tracee Stanley for her wisdom, along with Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC. (Clearly I am still cultivating patience).