Ritual and Healing
In the context of healing, ritual and ceremony are ways to give meaning to events and relationships. Ritual can affect transformation and bring about a certain sense of awareness, presence, ceremony, and empowerment. Ritual can take you to a different level of consciousness. Ritual is often felt in the body as sacred. Rituals are involved in the celebration of seasons, utilized in religious or spiritual ceremonies, used to celebrate accomplishments and rites of passage, effective in connecting or building relationships with others, ways to celebrate the passing of time and the phases of the moon, used for remembering and celebrating the ancestors, and involved in creating connection with spiritual guides.
Ritual and Emotions
A ritual or ceremony can be a catalyst to get you in touch with your feelings and emotions when everyday life seems to get in the way. For an individual that keeps their feelings and emotions on a tight reign and buried deep inside, it is a way to access them. In many ways, systemic family constellation work is ritual. It’s used to shift unhealthy relationships into healthy relationships; release old emotional burdens you share or carry for others; open the flow of love where it is blocked in the family system; accept and honour parents, ancestors, and other family members; connect emotionally to others; and transform. It’s a visceral creation of new ways of being. Ritual can symbolize the death of one state of being as you prepare to shift and begin another.
Rites of Passage
As a component of rites of passage, ritual is frequently overlooked in our busy, highly technological world. Even ancient rites like the funeral are going by the wayside in the lives of many individuals. Some are even foregoing a celebration of life when they die. People begin to live together as a couple without any rite of passage. Rites of passage include, but are not limited to, the celebration of pregnancy, childbirth, naming the child, celebration of childhood development stages, stepping out into the world with school, puberty for boys or girls, first menstruation for girls, graduations, the passage to adulthood, bonding with one another, marriage, entering a partnership, separation, divorce, letting go, death, and a final celebration of life.
Releasing Childhood Emotional Patterns
Many tribal communities celebrate the passage into womanhood or manhood. For many of you, there was no rite of passage to celebrate this important emotional transitional time in your life. The years pass by and nothing was done to signify the emotional shift that is meant to occur between childhood and adulthood. Without a rite of passage, many of you never emotionally shifted from childhood to adulthood. The same emotional response patterns of infancy and childhood are evident in your adult emotional responses.
When you are confronted with emotional triggers such as stressful, painful, or traumatic events, you respond just the way you did as a baby, as though your survival is threatened in some way. Your childhood fears are able to linger for a lifetime, always in the background behind all of your adult thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, and decisions.
Your infant and childhood emotional response patterns served you well in helping you survive emotional uncertainty, fear, stress, and trauma when you first entered this strange new world. These emotional patterns became locked in the cells of your body back then, but they need not stay there for life if they are no longer serving you well. I am suggesting that ritual may play a significant role in helping you to shift from your childhood fears and emotional response patterns to new empowering ones that embody an adult perspective and emotional response. You’ve been in the world for a few decades and you no longer need to fear for your survival at every turn when you feel emotionally triggered by something or someone.
Whatever it is you feel you need in your life, ritual has a strong role to play alongside systemic healing and family constellations. Ritual can be involved in purification, clearing, or cleansing; sacrificing or giving up something; transformation and rebirth; letting go of old ways of being; celebrating an intention; communing with the source of all energy; connecting to Self; highlighting the death of one way of being, letting go, and opening to another way of being; and to open and connect the body, mind, and spirit.
Ritual in Systemic Healing
In the systemic approach to wellness, ritual can be a catalyst for:
Opening to the concept of wellness;
Connecting to universal energy;
Taking responsibility for your own wellness;
Gaining awareness of what is in the past;
Accepting family of origin;
Completions with family members and other individuals;
Connecting with your inner child;
Connecting with your wounded Self;
Creating energetic self protection;
Creating healthy boundaries;
Healing from victimization;
Completing with a perpetrator;
Connecting with your survivor Self;
Releasing anger, fears, worries, sadness, guilt, shame, or grief;
Passing back shared or carried burdens or fates;
Softening any rigid emotional armour;
Honouring parents, grandparents, ancestors, or other systemic family members;
Accepting Self;
Transformation;
Empowerment;
Expanding your healthy Self;
Celebrating the return to authentic Self; and,
Connecting with support.
Connecting With the Body
For many who experience systemic family constellations or any other healing modality, taking the conscious learning and insight into the body, mind, and spirit is often a conundrum. When the experience is not accompanied by a body-focused therapy or any form of meaningful ritual or ceremony, many get stuck in their head, unable to proceed forward with the valuable insight. Healing is not effective if you stay in your head. Healing has to take place in the body, the unconscious mind, because the childhood or ancestral trauma is stored in the cells of the body. Body-focused therapeutic work, along with ritual, will assist you to get into your body if you’re used to splitting off, armouring off, fragmenting, dissociating, or intellectualizing to avoid feeling. Remaining in your body when life gets emotionally difficult by attuning to your energy, breathing, feelings, emotions, and deep authentic Self, the more emotionally well you will become.
Stay tuned for my next post on planning a meaningful ritual.