The Importance of Daily Rituals
How you structure time is essential to your spiritual life. The rituals by which you define your day-to-day activities determine if you feel connected to or disconnected from life — your self/spirit — and whether you feel okay about yourself and about others. Rituals allow you to find meaning in your daily activities if you are willing to slow down enough to realize that you are in and on the journey rather than hurrying to reach the end of the journey. It is where you are right now that is important, not where you are going and when you are going to get there. We are, as Teilhard de Chardin, said "spiritual beings on a human path," not human beings with spirits somewhere if we could only find where we put them. You can use rituals to remind you of the fact of your spiritual beingness. Rituals are specially designed actions, whether physical or mental, that are used to change your perception of reality. Rituals help people to find meaning in their daily lives. If you are willing to do so, you can find meaning in everything you do. Every ritual that has a full and deep meaning for the participant(s) will result in a transformation of their humanness and often will feel like magic. The performance of a ritual in a meaningful way will help you to realize and utilize energy flows. Feelings are energy — actually, they release neuropeptides (endogenous peptides that influence neural activity or functioning) — and if you step through a ritual with a moment-to-moment awareness of what you are doing and how you are doing it, you give yourself the opportunity of a transformative experience. Anthropologists von Gennep and Victor Turner have described rituals as having three phases. In the first phase, which is called Separation, one loses the sense of the "ordinary" and is in a position to redefine one’s reality and to lose the ordinary self into the experience of the ritual. This first phase signifies your willingness to suspend judgement and to begin to look at what you are doing in other ways. It is as if you are symbolically "killed" and separated from your ordinary and usual way of being. This attitude of mind provides you with an opening into non-ordinary reality and a possibility of being in the moment and leaving your usual way of acting and existing. This prepares you for the next phase of the ritual. The second phase is the stage known as Limen or Margin. This is the in-between phase. In this phase, you are neither here — where you were — nor there — where you are going. You are betwixt and between. Because it is unfamiliar, you often feel uncomfortable. If you have a backlog of unfelt emotions, they may erupt. Since you have suspended judgment and are no longer in the beginning phase, and you have not yet achieved the ending phase, you may feel great discomfort. You have a sense of being suspended in time. In most rituals, if you have truly succeeded in separating yourself from the ordinary, this phase is the time when you can be in an altered state of consciousness (ASC). Assuming that your ritual "recipe" contained the right "ingredients," having released your feelings (energy), you may experience a sense of connectedness, of belonging, or communitas. This is when you experience being a part of the whole (holy). You feel part of the process; you feel a connectedness with the ritual objects, with your surroundings, and with the others who may be participating. This middle phase is often a time of peak experience, or "ahas." It is a much-valued and much-sought-after experience. The third phase of a ritual is the Completion phase. The anthropologists call it Aggregation, and it reincorporates the individual with the ordinary. It symbolically allows you to be reborn to the usual and ordinary life experience, and you move back into the familiar. Try this with a simple daily ritual such as brushing your teeth. First be in the act of preparing to brush your teeth. Notice how you feel. What are the sensations of "morning mouth"? Be in each moment of the cleansing act. Be in the experience of selecting the brush, applying the toothpaste, the feeling of the brush, the action of the brush, the taste of the toothpaste, the action of your hand and arm, the smell of the paste, the color, the sound. Be totally in the moment; be in the meaning, the symbolism of cleansing of your teeth. Notice the difference between the meaningful and symbolic act of cleansing your teeth and the routine, daily, automatic and therefore meaningless act of cleansing your teeth. This is the name of the book I wrote to help people heal from grief and loss. Every change in your life, whether through loss or gain, presents you with an opportunity to grieve what is no more. Grieving is very important, but many do not do it because they do not know how, or because they have a fantasy that it is "too big," "too unimportant," or "too scary." Instead, they discount their need to release the feelings around the loss and the changes that have occurred in their lives. If you would simply take the time to do a little grief ritual every day, you could release those neuropeptides that represent themselves in your body as feelings. Releasing them is important, because in the normal course of neurophysiological events, these neuropeptides either get metabolized in the act of acknowledging and releasing them and you feel better, or they accumulate and gum up your synapses and you end up feeling depressed in the long run. How much healthier it would be to do a grief ritual daily, just as you take responsibility for brushing your teeth! A grief ritual can be very simple, like writing down a list of things that make you sad or mad or scared. Even a list of things that make you glad can be very healing; it does not always have to be feelings that some people label as "negative." Actually, I do not see how a feeling can be negative when it is dealt with appropriately. A feeling is simply a neuropeptide, neither negative nor positive. What is negative is the aftermath of not dealing with the feelings and storing them up for a big bad feeling, often labeled as a depression. What is keeping you from doing a "good grief ritual" daily, even when you do not have a loss? I have found that making a list of the things for which I am grateful makes for positive feelings, which I store up in my heart. Making a "mad" or "sad" list or writing a poison-pen letter when such is called for is also tremendously relief-giving and good feeling-making. Try it. My advice to you as an elder is to find out how to do your grieving rituals and then get on with forgiveness and gratitude. If you would like to read more or have further direction in this matter, simply pick up a copy of the book Good Grief Rituals by Elaine Childs Gowell, Ph.D., available from online and neighborhood bookstores. The next Good Grief Rituals® workshop is March 9, 2001. Call (206) 781-0839 for information or to make a HeartMath® coaching appointment with Elaine. |
Time is the gift that has been given to you to come to terms with your mortality.