The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 10
The urge to create rituals to help us hold the intensity of day-to-day living exists deep within our psychic structure. For most of our history, rituals provided the means by which the community could address the need for healing and renew the people’s relationship with the place where they lived. Over generations, a call-and-response between the individual, the community, and the land evolved that centered on ritual as the primary technology for maintenance of the living world. Today, in the absence of communal rituals that hold and sustain our psychic lives, we often unconsciously fall into ritualized behaviors. These patterns, however, do not carry what is required to make them soul-nourishing practices. In the end we will either participate in ritual deliberately, which binds us to soul, community, nature, and the sacred, or we will be reduced to repetitive patterns of addiction, compulsion, or routines lacking the artistry and renewal of genuine ritual.
What Is Ritual?
Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit.
Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process. Author and ritual facilitator Z. Budapest says, “The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the different eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.”53 Ritual is the original art form, weaving the personal and the communal in ways that help us we relate directly with the larger, unseen world.
Rituals rise from the land, surfacing through the bedrock and the soil, and enter the imagination of the people that live there. In this sense, rituals evolve to reflect the entire context of the people’s lives—the terrain, the animals and plants, the communal wounds, the patterns of weather, the stories and myth, the collective suffering, the beliefs. All these things combine and arise in a dream state requiring expression in ritual form. Rituals also reflect the shared values and mythos of the community. While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.
There are many concerns that are addressed through ritual; these are universal themes: healing, gratitude, initiation, visionary or divinatory processes, grief, maintenance, renewing the earth, reconciliation, and peacemaking. How they are expressed is unique to each culture. For example, while the underlying intent is the same, the healing rituals of the !Kung are vastly different from those of the Navajo. Their styles are a reflection of the land on which they live, the mythology of their culture, and the particular ways they envision healing.
I wrote earlier about the use of ritual in working with grief. Ritual provides the essential elements for this work. Most notably, it offers the necessary structure to hold the wild and eruptive moods of sorrow. It helps us shift the weight of the pain and emotions we are carrying, allowing us to set down portions of the burden. Ritual also evokes a feeling of reverence, a sense of the sacred. Not every loss requires a ritual, though every grief we carry is worthy of the sustained attention that is offered by ritual.
The Purpose of Ritual
Ritual touches us in many ways. One of its most powerful impacts is that it breaks us open to a vast and more enchanted world. The first function of ritual is to enable us to become transparent to the transcendent, to use Joseph Campbell’s phrase. It fosters our link to the great mystery. Ritual elicits a certain vibration, a pitch, that enables us to individually or communally connect with the sacred. This pitch activates the psyche. In ritual space, movement, rhythm, expression of emotion, and direction of attention all open gateways to the sacred. At every grief ritual we have held, there has been a palpable sense of the sacred. We call upon this mysterious presence to help us do the work we cannot do alone. The sacred becomes the larger holding space for the community to do the work we have come to do.
Secondly, there is a reparative function to ritual. It sutures the tears in the soul that occur in the daily rounds of living. We live in a culture that has forgotten the basic needs of the soul. This is especially important today, as our world is increasingly dominated by the rhythm of the machine. As we succumb to the pressure to adapt to this rapid-fire world, we feel ripped out of our own natural human rhythms. Many of us feel exhausted, flattened by the energy expended to keep up with the pace of culture. These ruptures in our emotional lives are frequent, and yet we lack the basic requirements for restoration and healing. African healer and elder Malidoma Somé calls ritual the anti-machine.54 Ritual helps us remember and reestablish our inner rhythms and to place them once again in accord with the deeper cadence of our soul. It restores our psychic foundations. By this I mean we are aided in ritual space to remember what we really need to live in community with other humans and the natural world in a meaningful and enlivening manner. Living as we do in the belly of a soul-eating culture, it is imperative that we have measures that can help us come back to soul, especially in times of crisis.
On one occasion our community was faced with a profound trauma. I received a phone call late in the evening from a woman telling me that she and her daughter had been in a terrible accident. It had been raining, and visibility had been very limited. The daughter was driving, and as they headed up a nearby road, a man suddenly stepped out into the road in front of the car; there was no possibility of avoiding him. They bolted out of the car, one running to get help, the other to comfort the man. Unfortunately, by the time help arrived, he had died. It was sudden and tragic.
These women were a part of a ritual village training that I was leading. Fortunately, we were scheduled to meet the next day to hold our second full day of teaching. As I talked with the woman on the phone, I suggested that they both come to the training the next day and that we would do what we could to help them deal with this overwhelming event. She agreed. I then asked that they arrive about an hour later than usual. We would address their trauma as a community.
When I got to the meeting, I informed everyone about what had happened and that we were being called into emergency service. We needed to create a healing ritual for the woman and her daughter to help them restore their emotional equilibrium. When they arrived, the daughter was cold and shaky. She looked ashen and lost. We crafted a beautiful process for them that included comforting touch, washing of hands and feet, and ample holding. We also utilized some cross-cultural practices such as smudging with sage, brushing them with rosemary branches and anointing them with ash. Sage is used as a way to clear the psychic space, rosemary cleanses the energy field, and ash has been used in many cultures for protection.
Slowly, over the course of hours, warmth returned to the bodies of the two women, and a sense of presence was restored to their souls. The accident could have triggered a major case of post-traumatic stress disorder, but it was eased and brought into the tolerable realm of grief and sorrow. The two women were hungry by the end of the ritual, a very good sign, and we all shared food and a feeling of having been knit together as a community by this intense experience. The reparative function of ritual was powerfully displayed.
The third function of ritual is that it invites the denied and forgotten aspects of psyche to show up, those abandoned parts of who we are. Ritual provides a space potent enough to bring in the undeveloped aspects of our lives in order to help them mature. This is possible because the container, the safe space generated within the ritual field, is capable of holding the intensity of emotions associated with these aspects of soul. This is a pivotal function of ritual. However, inviting in the wounded, neglected, and rejected parts of our psychic life is risky. Without an adequate holding space to contain the emotional release that accompanies the return of these parts, we cannot commit to allowing them to return home. Psychologist Robert Moore writes, “Deep structural change requires a reliable psychosocial framing, the facilitation of a holding environment that can help individuals and groups tolerate the terrors of change, with its attendant painful truths and emotions.”55
Ritual is a practice that seeks to make the repressed visible. This is, in part, why we fear it. On some instinctual level, we know the power of ritual; we recognize its potential to disrupt our ordered lives. And this is precisely why we need it.
The repressed aspects of our lives carry an intense energy. One man requested a healing ritual to deal with his feelings of hopelessness and depression. He carried a hidden life of alcoholism and was skilled at keeping this part of his life concealed. When the ritual began, however, this buried piece of his soul life rushed to the foreground, demanding to be seen. We asked him to share more about his drinking and how it was siphoning off his life, destroying his work and marriage. He tried to push the group away with a bellowing stance, but we did not yield. In that ritual, something shifted in his heart and the grief of his exile burst out in a great cry.
In ritual space, something inside of us shimmers, quickens, and aligns itself with a larger, more vital element. We are released from the limiting constraints of our collective agreements, such as not showing our emotions in public, not bothering anyone with our troubles, and remaining stoic and self-contained with our pain. This release allows us to enter into a fuller expression of who we are. This is both freeing and frightening. We become vivid in ritual space, exposed and transparent. This is exactly what we need and what we fear.
I was teaching at a university in Oakland, California, several years ago. The class was called Reclaiming Our Indigenous Soul. On the first day of class, I started by drumming and inviting the students to get up out of their chairs and dance. They all did so, and after I was done drumming, one of the students, a nun in her mid-seventies, came to me and asked, “Is there any way we could talk privately?” I said, “Sure. I could come down early next week, and we could spend some time together.” She paused and then asked, “Is there any way that could happen today?” I said, “Let me make a couple of calls and see.” I did, and it worked out that after the class was over, we sat down in a little room and talked about what was happening for her. She said, “When you started drumming, an old memory came to me that I haven’t thought of for years. When I was fifteen, I was a novice at the convent. I had only been there a couple of weeks, when my father died. The Mother Superior called me into her office and told me the news. Then she said to me. ‘You may go to the funeral, but if you go, you cannot come back. And if you stay, you cannot cry.’ I stayed. I lay in my bed every night shaking, trying to keep the tears inside. And when you started drumming, it all came flooding back in.”
My heart was breaking as I listened to her story. I promised her that in two weeks we would hold a grief ritual. I told her it couldn’t happen earlier, because we needed to prepare the class for the deep work of grieving together, but in the meantime, I encouraged her to tell her classmates what she had shared with me.
The next week we began the preparations for the ritual. Everyone had stories to share, losses untouched and unattended. The following week we set up a shrine to receive the grief; we said an invocation and entered the intense field of decades-old sorrow. This woman went to the shrine many times, lying on the floor and sobbing her heart out. For the first time in over sixty years, she was able to grieve the death of her father. It was a moment of healing and grace. Everyone was moved by this shared experience. The last time she went to the shrine, she did not cry. She sat there, still, silent like a stone. Afterward everyone shared their experiences, and she said, “The last time I went up to the shrine, I saw a Native American woman holding a child. I was that child. This was the first time I felt like I belonged.”
Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot hold on our own, what we cannot face in solitude. As this nun’s story beautifully illustrates, it is never too late to grieve these buried pieces of soul.
When we enter the healing ground, we are stepping into an alternate reality. In this space, the rules of consensus reality dim, and those of another possibility emerge. The usual agreements—such as not weeping together side-by-side or holding one another when in the throes of sorrow—don’t hold in ritual space. Ritual signals to the psyche that a different order has been established, one that invites alternate styles of behavior and modes of social engagement. For example, we don’t normally all weep together, but somehow, when we step across the threshold into a grief ritual, it feels right. We enter a borderland state between our individual lives and the unseen world of spirit. This is the terrain of radical change.
Ritual provides the elements necessary to help transform whatever it is we are carrying in our psyches. It may be fear, grief, rage, or shame. It may be that as a community, we have been shattered by the loss of one or more of our youth through murder, suicide, or war. Whatever it is, it evokes an emotional response that necessitates a holding space in which we can invite everything to be present. In this way, ritual provides sufficient intensity to help access the emotions that are present. We need its heat at times to help us cook these states into something new.
Ritual provides something else that we deeply need: a level of witnessing that truly enables us to be seen. Attention is necessary for embodiment, for fully stepping into the world in an open and vulnerable way. There is something sacred about sustained attention; it deepens the connection between all present. I have repeatedly seen individuals reveal themselves in remarkable ways inside ritual space. There is a fierce grace that comes with this type of transparency, as it removes all strategies of concealment and falseness and exposes the raw and naked pieces of our soul to the community. I remember, in a number of rituals, men who always hung back, but finally they found the courage to approach the grief shrine near the end of the ritual and express their pent-up rage over their pain and suffering. Each of these men pounded the floor, shouted, wept, and shook. They had been waiting for this level of witnessing in order to fully reveal what they were carrying in their souls.
Sometimes, after years of being alone with our pain, the offer of deep attention initiates a radical shift in our worldview. One woman contacted us following a grief ritual to share how this level of being witnessed had changed her life. She said she had arrived at the weekend terrified and not even sure if she could stay.
I never would have thought that raw, searing grief and sorrow could bring out the most tender, generous, compassionate, and loving sides of total strangers. It was exquisite. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. I saw in the darkest corners of our pain and grief, something very beautiful. Suffering compels us to reach. When you find a channel for your rage and deepest suffering, and there’s another hand there reaching back, what lies in the wake of it all, is finally—blessed peace. Calm. Nothing has changed about your loss . . . it’s still there. But your relationship with it has been greatly altered. You have been heard and held tenderly. You have been drained. And then you can open yourself up again. You can start to rebuild in that annihilated place.56
Rituals are intended to take us into those places where we can engage with the difficulties in our lives in ways that are potentially transformative. They help us move from places where we feel stuck into territories of fresh living.
While most of us have a difficult time touching our sorrow, some of us feel that we may have gotten lost in it; we feel that grief has taken up permanent residence in our hearts and souls. We are trapped, unable to break free from the emotions that swirl around our sorrow. Grief becomes an identity, a way of locating ourselves in the world. It can become a place of hiding.
One man with whom I worked had lost his wife to cancer about eight years earlier. It was clear that he still carried a great deal of grief for her death. There was something about the grief, however, that made me wonder whether he was unconsciously using it as a way to avoid retaking his place in the world. I didn’t assume that this was a conscious decision on his part, but one day these words came out of my mouth: “I think you are hiding in your grief. I have no right to say this to you. Your loss is real, and yet I have this feeling that you have found a place to hide.” I didn’t know what to expect as a response, but something inside of him registered the truth of what I was saying. He began to see how his clinging to the grief excused him from the risk of loving again, of venturing back out into a world that could hurt him once more. As we explored this further, it became clear that we needed to find a way to help him move in the direction of being engaged with the world. We arranged a ritual with his community and made the necessary preparations for the event.
