Ceremony & Ritual
Tell a wise person or else keep silent
for those who do not understand
will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
what longs to be burned to death..
And so long as you have not experienced this: to die and
to grow
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth. - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is our birthright to hold ceremony and ritual for the immense transitions of life and death we undertake in our one precious life. This is an artform of maturing the human psyche which has unfortunately been lost. If you witness any earth-based indigenous community, you will see a devotion to ceremony and ritual.
There are many passages of life and death which will be moved through much more easily when we set aside time to honor the process through ritual.
If this is something you would like to learn more about, I have been immersed in work with the Animus Valley Institute for the last three years, and have undertaken many profound and life-changing ceremonies, and would love to witness you and hold you as you create your own.
You may need a ceremony to:
- grieve the loss of a beloved or family member.
- initiate your daughter into maidenhood through menarche, her first bleed.
- tend to your sons coming of age.
- die to an old part of yourself.
- enter into a new career.
- process the losses of having been abused.
We are in a huge wave of the Psychedelic Renaissance, where many are going to psychedelics to experience ceremony. Yet ceremony does not need the support of medicines in this way, it can be experienced in our ordinary consciousness.
A Ritual to read to one another by William Stafford
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.