As October ushers in crisp morning breezes and everything pumpkin spice, I’ve been thinking a lot about rituals and why we love them. Every October, children and adults alike anticipate the tradition of dressing up in disguise and begging for candy. There are annual pumpkin carving contests, haunted houses, and hayrides.
There is a collective sadness about not being able to do these things in the same way this year.
We humans take comfort in repeating ourselves. There is something calming about knowing what will happen next.
Rituals require repetition. Yet, are rituals more than just habits or traditions? Could they be fundamental to mental and spiritual well-being?
Rituals Create Meaning
Writer Christina Baldwin states, “Ritual is the act of sanctifying action – even ordinary action – so that it has meaning. I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need.”
Rituals utilize symbolic gestures to replace language when our emotions are too great to be carried with words.
Rituals Help Us Mark Time & Remember
Engaging in a ritual can memorialize something that has occurred in the past that is significant to our collective identity. Celebrating Jewish Passover and the annual reading of the names of those who died on 9/11 are two examples.
Rituals can usher in something new, such as a Bar Mitzvah or the countdown to the New Year. We engage in rituals to invite our hopes and dreams for the future to actualize.
Rituals Help Us Through Transitions
When getting sober, we establish new rituals to help create a strong foundation for recovery. We must leave the old behind, such as going on that bar crawl the night before Thanksgiving and finding the new.
If we don’t replace the old rituals with something meaningful, we are in danger of leaving empty spaces in our lives that our addictions will try to fill.
Rituals Help Us Grieve
These past few years have been difficult for many of us. In a post-COVID-19 pandemic world, we are still limited in our participation in many social rituals that typically bring us comfort. Gun violence continues, the political landscape is overwhelming, and global headlines and natural catastrophes continue to dominate headlines.
My dear friend died unexpectedly at the end of March at the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine. The absence of a funeral or memorial has been difficult. Her family is not the only one who has lost someone and has not been able to have a funeral.
At the time of this publication (*initially published in October 2020), over 200,000 people have died from COVID-19. The majority of them were separated from their loved ones at the time of their passing. Still, many others have been killed as a result of violence, accidents, or lack of access to routine health care.
Overdoses and suicides have also risen due to an increase in social isolation. Many experts predict that incidents of domestic violence and child abuse will continue to rise due to economic uncertainty.
We are in an age of deep grieving as a nation. This year has been collectively traumatic as much as it has been individually so.
Rituals Provide Emotional Release
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, wrote, “This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.”
Here’s the beauty of it all: we can create whatever rituals we need to cope with whatever feeling is too great for us to hold in our hearts.
Moreover, we can eliminate any ritual that no longer holds meaning for us or causes us pain.
Our rituals can be small in scope, such as lighting a candle before we pray, or solitary, such as time spent alone in the morning or evening.
We can also co-create rituals with our chosen communities of people.
For instance, several people have created “Thanksgiving After Thanksgiving” parties with their friends to help them recuperate from Thanksgiving dinners with their families.
My dear friend and I created Saturday Night Zoomvie (watching a movie together over Zoom) to stay connected and build community while social distancing.
Rituals also help connect us to the sacred and remind us of the important things in life.
“The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and small human rituals can connect us to its presence. And of course, the greatest challenge (and gift) is to see the sacred in each other.” -Alma Luz Villanueva Read more by Alma Luz Villanueva here.
Rituals Promote Well-Being
But rituals can also ground us when we feel overwhelmed by the pain of this world or when we are overcome with fear and uncertainty about the future. They can serve as a reminder that “this too shall pass.”
Ari Honarvar, founder of Rumi with a View, says: “We learned to bring meaning into uncertainty and chaos by maintaining grounding practices and developing new rituals. Rituals have been instrumental in building community, promoting cooperation, and marking transition points. Rituals reduce anxiety…and even work on people who don’t believe in them, research shows. Additionally, rituals benefit our physical well-being and immune system.”
(Find out more about Ari Honarvar here. Interested in purchasing one of her pieces? You can feel good about this #addtocart decision.)
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