5 Rituals of Preventive Maintenance

The primary issue with so many health and wellness methods available today is that it is difficult for us to choose which one will produce the best return on the amount of attention we give to it. Practices like yoga and pilates are great, and we recommend doing them mindfully, but more often than not we find people will use wellness methodologies out of balance and accidentally replace other more rudimentary habits of self-care. The easily forgotten and overlooked practices are what we focus on FIRST, because they are the most foundational and widely applicable.

This whole “Rituals of Preventive Maintenance” idea was drummed up by a question that surfaced soon after learning the concept of “the Pareto Principle”, also known as the 80/20 rule: where 80 percent of results is yielded by merely 20 percent of work activity.

The question was “so what’s the 20 percent of effort that produces 80 percent of the results in health and wellness?”
For being such a small question, it has proven to be a very good question.

Here are some features of these actionable steps to wellness that even someone with little self-discipline could see sweeping benefits from.

1 — these "80/20 practices” needed to be at a skill level where people of all age, weight, and strength levels could do them

2 — they needed to be accessible to as many people in the world as possible

3 — they needed to not be a time suck

4 — they needed to require no equipment

5 — they needed to be cost-free

So here they are!

The 5 Rituals of Preventive Maintenance:

Ritual 1 - Hydration. Drinking water and staying hydrated affects every single thing in your body and determines your body’s capacity to perform on any level. Complete dehydration, you’re an immovable mummy. Human jerky. Every Liter of water added to your body adds to your capacity for faster movement, better brainpower, and heavier load-bearing potential. It’s liter-ally the one component of wellness that makes or breaks everything else that you’re trying to do. I go into this further with a whole blog post dedicated to water. good ole’ non-carbonated neutral Ph non-distilled clean drinking water. https://www.wakepdx.com/blog/hydration

Ritual 2 - Breath Control. This action step is all about integrating our minds with the animal body we live inside and controlling what we want the body to behave like.

same thing, full feature blog all about breathing below:

https://www.wakepdx.com/blog/breath-control

Ritual 3 - Range of Motion (ROM). Determining your body’s eagerness or reluctance to move the joints in various directions is important for knowing actions you’ll want to be aware of to improve your body’s mechanical advantage.

https://www.wakepdx.com/blog/range-of-motion

Ritual 4 - Body Mechanics. Movement through posture. Structured movement. Once you understand this concept kinesthetically (through practice), you’re ready to expand your wellness practice into exercise and nutrition. This is the basis of having “good form” in your exercise routine.

https://www.wakepdx.com/blog/body-mechanics

Ritual 5 - Quality of Rest. The depth of the rest that the body can receive definitely dictates to a very strong degree the pliability and performance capacity of that body’s tissues. Fortunately, all the previous 4 rituals lead up to maximizing the potential of this 5th ritual.

Blog post coming soon.

Now, Why do we even bother with ANY of it? There are plenty of people “alive and well” that don’t drink enough water if any, much less do any of the other things. So why bother? Each person has to answer that question for themselves. Personally, I feel an immense duty to maintain peace and protect those who have less strength and capability than me wherever I go. I can’t be that person if I’m too dehydrated to exert myself and move quickly at a moment’s notice. Too groggy to think clearly. Too sluggish to control my body’s reflexes, know my limits in movement, and not pull a hamstring through sudden bursts of action. I require a high-performing high-capacity body for me to live peacefully and honor my self-imposed responsibility. The more detailed a person can get with answering the question “why am I alive?” the more reasons they’ll have to follow through on these 5 Rituals of Preventive Maintenance to gain some leverage on using their body the way they want it to work.

I like Sahara Rose’s explanation of why we even bother with wellness in her book Discover Your Dharma. We do it to raise the planet’s vibration, by first raising our personal vibration and being an example that leads others to do the same for themselves. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s create a wake of wellness that washes across the world so we can help heal the people of our planet. We all need to believe that investing in our bodily mastery is attainable and worthwhile in order to accomplish progress toward cooperation, respect, and unity on an energetic level in those higher dimensions. Gawd I hope this makes sense.

You’re favorite LMT,