When you craft a powerful personal ritual

On rituals

Dear Reader,

It’s just after 6AM. Sometimes, I wonder what if it was always just after 6AM inside my house. If only time can stand still in here. Then I can linger in the early morning darkness of my kitchen, admire the arrangement of teacups in the drawer, and run my fingers over last night’s washed dishes stacked neatly in the rack next to the sink. I can let my body hover over the fragrant steam rising from the freshly brewed chai, while the sky outside the windows slowly lightens, brightens, and then, again, goes dark, and Mars grows visible once more, glowing like an ember in February’s western sky.

I know Mars moves around. I, too, need to move into my day. But, every morning, while I make tea, I get to enter into a tiny, timeless little bubble while the world outside my window churns on. That, I think, is the power of a ritual.

I can divide my life into two parts: the first part, where I read, and interpreted what I read, in a mostly literal fashion; and the second part, when I realized that words can hide entire worlds behind them. That words can function as entry points to some vast, sacred mystery. This (re)discovery of metaphor has been life-changing. A ritual is an embodied metaphor. According to the dictionary, a ritual is “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.” It’s a declaration of intention. It can look as prosaic as habit and yet connect us to timelessness. Our daily rituals can be comforting and alleviate anxiety- they provide assurance of sameness, stability, and safety. And there are also rituals, both religious and personal, that function as thresholds and help catapult us into a new way of being. It is fascinating that one keeps us anchored in the present while the other helps us set sail.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

-Abraham Verghese

Early last year, I wrote about some of my observations on personal rituals and I’m sharing it again, with a little modification: 1. You are the most necessary part of your ritual. Bring your Self to the table. What is your intention?

2. It’s a threshold which means the past, present, and future are here, all bearing witness.

3. Constellate words, movements, actions, etc. that hold meaning for you. I like the word constellate, meaning “to group together” and related to the Latin word for stars, stella, because 1) a ritual often involves more than one kind of action (words, movement, etc.); and 2) more importantly, it’s a conversation or a dance between you and the stars. You may want to bring in art, dance, and symbolic play to make it meaningful and personal to you.

   One purpose of creative ritual was to experience the connection to “the other” as well as a deeper connection to oneself. That’s why ancient people would say: that ritual made me more aware of how I’m connected to life, to the earth, to the spirits, to the song of creation, and made me more aware of who I am inside, at the level of my own being. What we’ve lost is partly the sense that we are each connected to the whole thing, that each human soul is secretly connected to the living soul of the world.”

   -Michael Meade

I’d love to hear from you! What do you think of personal rituals? How have they helped you?

Thanks for reading,

Best,

Priya

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