A Morning Routine
Starting the day with the Daemonic Divine.
Having a daily practice can be incredibly fulfilling, stabilizing, and serve as a spring board for deepening one’s connection to the divine and advancing one’s craft. Between the hustle and bustle of full time jobs or school, social requirements, chores, the works, it can feel difficult to keep up with any sort of regular practice, especially one that is daily.
For this reason, I feel like it might be helpful to discuss my own daily practice— and most specifically, my morning routine, which I have made a point to keep to no matter what else comes at me during the day. Please note, by “morning” here, I mean right after I wake up. This does not necessarily mean between the hours of 5am to 11am.
Building the Tree
The Tree is an incredibly important symbol to me, and as such, it shows up constantly in my practice, in my writing, art, it is everywhere, and I begin every morning with it. Once I am awake, realize I am awake, and have a concept of what time it is (incredibly important on work days), I ease myself up into a seated position and meditate.
The meditation I do here is not one just to clear the mind— it’s actually quite active— where I move the energy and emotions and just any feeling from the previous day and sleep down and out of me, down and into the earth, and once I am clean of it, I breathe the earth back up into me, visualizing it growing and sprouting and becoming a great tree.
Throughout the day, whenever something catches me by surprise or sets me on my guard, anything at all really, I can tap back into that heavy anchor at my core, feel the stability of it, the firmness, and it draws me back to that collected, clean slate.
Morning Devotional
Once I am centered and balanced, the next thing I reach for (after my water bottle) is my prayer cord. I am already in a calm and quiet state, still sitting as in meditation, and I spend the next few minutes working through each of the major beads of my prayer cord.
Some mornings I feel the need to say long, winding prayers, full of reverence and admiration. Other mornings I say a quiet thank you. Others still I work through each with the enn of my Patron and talk of a particular instance where my work with them has made me stronger, or how my future work will continue that. It depends a lot on what I need. Prayer is, after all, about our connection to the divine, our communion with it, how we relate, and the way we pray has to, in that sense, conform to our personal needs or it just isn’t from the heart.
This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a full hour depending, though I suppose it could be shorter.
Waking the Altar
The altar is an incredibly important place to me, and after not being able to have one for many years, being able to make one again has increased the importance of this step to me. The altar is a place for my tools, images and offerings to the divine, a place for my practice.
I greet my altar every day. Yes, I tell it good morning. Try it. And from there, I tend to my altar’s needs. I clean up incense ashes, bits of wax that have spilled. I check the offerings bowl to see the state of things in there, and if it is time to lay the offerings to earth and refresh them. I dust the artwork I purchased and use for my patron. During this, I will often light some pleasant scented candles, which are appropriate more as treats than ritual cornerstones in my opinion, but are still lovely. I’ll also light a stick of sandalwood incense for my patron and leave that burning while I work on freshening everything up.
Once I feel it is well tidy, I will just sit before it for a little while, if I have the time, and just coexist with it. It is a good practice to get into, because then you can really tell quickly when something is out of place or something is wrong. I like taking a moment to appreciate it as well. A well maintained altar can feel like incredibly hard work, but at the same time, it is so, so, so rewarding.
There are some “mornings” where everything is rushed and quick and I don’t even have time to think about lighting candles or incense, much less do it, but even then, I try to do what I can. The meditation comes first because that gets me going in the morning, it is a great help, and a pleasant way to start the day out. If that is all I have time to do before I rush off to work, I will try to do my devotional after I arrive, if I have a few moments before clocking in.
Now, I can’t clean my altar and tend to it properly from work, but it will be there when I get home. I like to work with my altar daily, but it is not necessary to do a huge amount of work on it every day. Some people reserve the big stuff for weekly or monthly. A lot of it is what feels best to you, in that regard, and what your space needs. Some altars don’t need as much maintenance as others— which is fine, and detracts nothing from their value to your practice.
If you already have a daily routine, what is it? Has it helped you a great deal? If you want to build a daily practice, what do you think you will be able to add first to help you on that path? I’ve left the comments open so we can share some ideas, trade, swap, and grow.