The Importance of Ritual
“Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or group that attempts to connect the individual or community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.” - Frances Weller
“The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind within us, to put it to work, the old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, different eternal parts, senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. These parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.” - Zsuzsanna Budapest
It has been said that ritual is the original art form; a form of direct knowing. Weaving what is personal and what is communal in ways that help us relate directly with the larger, unseen world. Ritual is used to signify the space between transition; marking the end of something and the beginning of something else. Beginnings and endings are happening with or without our awareness. Recognition that one is going through a transitional period in life provides a window into what can be considered the most fertile ground for healing.
We ritualize our experiences more than we realize. We ritualize occasions such as weddings, birthdays, holidays, funerals, etc… We celebrate graduations, promotions, and new offerings. Our habits and maladaptive coping skills such as substance use is often ritualized- I drink in the same chair every night, out of the same cup, or I go to the same bar at five o’clock. When we choose to use ritual in an intentional way, it can be used for healing, gratitude, initiation, visionary processes, grief, maintenance, renewing earth, reconciliation, peace making and more. What ritual provides is a creative space to make meaning so that we can deeply integrate and honor our life experience. This allows us to fully digest our experience rather than feeling as though our experience is consuming us.
The more we practice ritual, the more comfortable we become with the never ending process of birth, life, death, and rebirth. When using ritual to signify an ending, it provides us with the ability to release our past experiences in order not to "carry the dead with me." This is how we keep the natural flow of life open so that we are less likely to get stuck. Biologically and spiritually, we need to bring all things to closure and we call on this sacramental energy to help us do so (the spirit of living in the present). When we choose to keep the past more alive than the present, we interfere with the flow of the life force.
From the book The Edge of Sorrow, France Weller writes “Ritual is a language we have forgotten but one that we are designed to understand and speak. Ritual offers us two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release.”
Containment is the holding space for emotions surrounding grief. It gives us the structure and safety needed to completely surrender and find reverence in our sorrows. Without an adequate holding space for emotional release, it is natural that we become the container ourselves, preventing us from fully releasing and instead continuing to recycle our grief back in and through the body. To help us do the work we can not do alone- the sacred joining of community becomes the larger holding space. Grief takes a village.
Ritual provides us an opportunity to heal what has been neglected and to unburden the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. It is essential to come back to soul in times of crisis. Holding a sacred space to ritual brings ease to the psyche so the trauma is less likely to get locked in the body as unprocessed or helps to move and transcend what is already in the body that has gone unprocessed. Ritual is a practice that seeks to make the repressed viable (this is why we fear it). It has potential to disrupt our ordered lives (this is why we need it). It is frightening and freeing to connect with and fully express who we really are. This natural duality is a fundamental aspect of our human experience.
With constant rupture from the fast paced society we find ourselves in, ritual brings restoration and repair for the basic needs of our soul. Ritual helps us remember and reestablish our inner rhythms and the deeper cadence of our soul. As an offering to honor the sacred in our lives, used once or several times, there is no right or wrong way to ritual.