Ritual Takes Us To Deeper Learning and Presence

A bow to Shawna Lemay’s blog, Transactions With Beauty.

I enjoy Shawna’s writing. She’s much more of a curator than I will ever be. Her words are quite beautiful. And informative. Her photography is really moving, I find.

I’ve learned and known rituals primarily in two contexts.

One, with Soultime Men’s Group, where on our weekend retreats one key aspect is creating ritual. It’s saved for our last full day. Sometimes it takes us the better part of a day to discover what the ritual will be. Soultime ritual is journey to the non-linear. It is resonance, so often with the unseen. I find it moves my heart and belly in ways that last. We rely on things like a drum, sometimes stones, sometimes notes to be given to a fire. Sometimes song. Sometimes sage. Sometimes silence.

Two, I’ve learned and known ritual in Circle, which has meant bringing objects to the center, to the hearth. And sometimes, to a fire. Christina Baldwin embodied this at a time when I was really ready to learn. She was offering advice — “Become a ceremonialist.” It was instruction for the heart, to go to ritual. Light a candle. Carry a stone. Wash hands in the ocean or the pond. Release something to the ground. I’ve done quite a bit of this over the last 25 years. Speak an intention. Let go of a wound. Invite a new birth.

Ritual dislocates us from the linear, rational mind. Ritual relocates us to the heart, to the flow and resonance of a much bigger story. Ritual alchemizes. Ritual opens. Ritual reminds us that we are not alone.

And, and…

Back to Shawna’s blog. She wrote recently, some of her learning from reading a book by Byung Chul Han. Her words move me. In mind, and in heart. In the great story that is timeless. And in the day to day that requires commitment and navigation.

From Shawna…

— I’ve been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. Rituals stabilize life, he says, and he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says rituals are “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” He talks about how things can be stabilizing points, a table, a chair. But today, things are consumed, taking away the mode of lingering. He talks about how smartphones are not things because “lingering” is “impossible.” There is a “restlessness inherent in the apparatus [that] makes it a non-thing.” We are compelled compulsively by our phones. “They consume us.” 

— “Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things…” (Byung-Chul Han). 

— “Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.” (BCH) Digital communication is disembodied, but “rituals are processes of embodiment.”