Ritual

"Whether you are a goddess in very truth, or a maid most pleasing to the gods, to me you will always seem divine, and I shall confess that I owe my life to you, through whose will I have approached the world of death, have seen and have escaped in safety from that world. And for these services, when I have returned to the upper regions, I will erect a temple to you and there burn incense in your honour." - Aeneas to the Cumaean Sibyl. Ovid, ‘Metamorphoses’ 14.123

Every journey demands supplies.  Whether they are for hair and makeup, heating food, sleeping in, walking over, climbing up, or sitting still.  Anything you need for successful completion, from beginning to end is usually contemplated and gathered together.  If the journey is familiar, then you assemble what you know you need.  If it’s unfamiliar, you rely on advice, guesswork, intuition, or a mix of the three.  How the supplies are used is dictated by need.  The nature of their use may become ritualistic.

Ritual is all around us and the power of it is fascinating.   Every religion in the world has rituals and even non-religious groups create rituals whether they intend to or not.  On the surface, ritual induces uniformity and structure as it creates an environment of belonging and familiarity.  It also allows identification between groups.  Ritual turns into a tradition over time and becomes 'home' for someone who has been indoctrinated by it.  My wife sat beside me at a friend’s wedding.  It was a Catholic ceremony, which I had zero experience with and a traditional disinterest in.  I was from a family whose only ‘religious’ traditions were presents at Christmas and eating only hot cross buns, chocolate and fish at Easter.  As the ‘Vicar’, which I chose to refer to him as in my arrogance and deliberate attempt at quiet rebellion, said, ‘Peace be with you’, my wife joined everybody else in responding with, ‘And also with you’.  My head spun around with an, ‘Are you kidding?’ attitude.  She wasn’t Catholic, so there was no obligation to involve herself and I admit I had little respect for it.  Her indoctrination originated through her Catholic high school and college education and although she had been away from it for years, it remained within her, the way the smell of smoke lingers in fabric.  What fascinated me was I could see she derived comfort and a sense of belonging from joining the ritualistic chorus.

Over the years since I’ve watched the tribalistic observances and customs of various cultures, not just in the area of religion, but even in everyday practices.  So much of what we do culturally is embedded in us because many years of tradition dictate it, even though the original reasons for creating the tradition have long passed, they continue unquestioned.  Religions whether by design or not, create effective rituals and traditions by involving all of the senses.  Consider the use of bells, music, wafers, wine, incense, tilak powder, chanting, prayer, flowers and so on.  Similar works in everyday experience for all of us.  Most of us will suddenly be hurled back in time to memory when we hear a song or smell a fragrance, taste a certain recipe, feel a texture or a breeze, or see a sunset or a person who has the bearing and looks of another.  We are captivated by auto-ritual-engagement through life.  The smell of the herb rosemary reminds me of the back door of my grandmother’s house.  At the age of 12, I’d step outside and my fingers would pull along a thin branch and my nose would welcome the smell.  I now have a rosemary bush at my kitchen door and I pull on a branch in the same action and am transported to my grandmother’s home decades later.  Even her old teapot sends me back to her kitchen.  Ritualistic experience momentarily transports us into a liminal space.  Remember, liminal space is defined by being in a moment, created by ritual or practice, where the individual is on the threshold of self-realisation of their separateness from everyday life, different from before, yet not fully actualised into what they may become.

On our ‘practical journey of self-renewal’ we need supplies and to gain the greatest benefit of them, we create rituals using them.  Ritual’s power is its ability to quickly and effectively induce a state within you that serves you best and application of this is as simple as you want to make it.  A friend had a stressful job and although due to her circumstances, she knew it was temporary, she needed something to help her through.  The drive to work was a little over an hour each way, which she spent overthinking and getting wound up.  I suggested, by way of ritual, that she get a small bottle of lavender essential oil and over a period of time, carry it with her and smell it when she was at peace and happy.  She was a happy person anyway, so she found plenty of opportunities to create a happy association with the oil.  In the car on her way to work, she would put on some fun music she could sing along with and break out the lavender oil.  Her ritual would immediately transport her to a place of ‘happy associations’.  Stepping out of the car on arriving at work, she felt ready to face the day in the present moment, rather than having already been there for over an hour prior by stressing about it.  This is a great example of creating a ritual to support yourself.

We embed ritual by repetition.  It's a commonly held belief that anything that is maintained for 28 days becomes a habit, but it can happen sooner than that when all the senses are involved and the experience is powerful.  I have two ways of meditation that are effective for me.  Each is quite different from the other and I choose them based on what I want to achieve.  When I need to understand my feelings around other people, I plug myself into some music and I walk.  I set a song on repeat and create a rhythm of steps.  The song is always a new one that ‘speaks’ to me in some way.  I use old songs to reveal old patterns that are impacting me now and new songs for new issues to deal with.  Moving and meditation mix successfully because the movement unlocks stored memory or energetic wells of information, especially in the lower chakras, which represent the physical world.  My ritual for this is: to create the time: find the right song and a good flat track (just a footpath is fine) to walk on.  My second form of meditation has more involved ritual which engages all the senses.  With a mug of herbal tea beside me I put the same ethereal music on, light a candle, burn some incense, gather my usual cushions, collect an inspired selection of crystals and with a ‘ting’ of Tibetan prayer bells and the long ring of a singing bowl, I begin and go deep.  The power of sameness for both these rituals immediately gets me in the zone.  The less complicated walking meditation was created at a very challenging time when I had no home to go to and walking in a busy city was my only escape to go within.  I walked and walked going deeper, yet maintaining awareness of my surroundings.  I did this often and created the ritual quickly, which is now embedded in cellular memory.  The second method was created deliberately as a self-nurturing process.  Its intensity, using the valuable involvement of the senses, meant that although it wasn’t as convenient as the walking meditation it became ingrained in my cellular memory very quickly by way of the ritual I created.  All I need do now is light a candle or put on the same music and I’m in the zone.  By devising rituals you create doorways into states of being and worlds that serve you to become your fully integrated self.  Engaging as many of the senses as possible means that when you don’t have access to all the elements that are related to your ritual, even just one or two of them can gain you access the the doorway to your world.

As we move through the following chapters detailing esoteric and alternative approaches to reality, the approach will be to incorporate them into ritual where possible.  Some don’t translate into ritual, however, they can be doorways to alternative realities in and of themselves without the need for ritual.