Everyday (Rituals)

I love Halloween. You can take all of the other holidays, just give me Halloween. I like it because it feels like a day full of possibility and magic. It’s probably also because I’m a theatre kid at heart so I will dress up in costume at the drop of a hat. You don’t have to ask me twice. I had a Schitt’s Creek costume party for my birthday this year where I forced/invited all my friends to dress up as their favorite character. And I have fully covered my face and hands in green paint to be the Wicked Witch of the West. I went and found the body paint they use for the musical Wicked at the fancy MAC makeup store. And yes, I’m too embarrassed to show you a picture. It was not my best look. 

I think I also love Halloween because it is a socially acceptable way to dip our toes into the acknowledgment of death and horror. We get to dress up as the thing that scares us most or watch a scary movie with our friends as we eat mini hotdogs wrapped in crescent rolls made to look like tiny mummies.

With Halloween there’s an actual acknowledgment of death and suffering that gets to be witnessed by our community. Usually these are very lonely experiences and for one official month/weekend we get to make things that are usually scary and isolating, something very silly and connective. And I think it’s really important to have those intentional moments to help us name what’s happening in the world, alongside those of joy and celebration (which are also much needed) with the people who care about us. Or perhaps with the strangers dressed up as a skeleton or a hero from the Marvel universe. These yearly rituals are an important way for us all to mark the year.

A while ago, I worked with a woman named Heather Stringer who is a therapist and one of her specialties is crafting insanely gorgeous rituals for people. For a long time I’d thought of rituals only in the way they related to satanic practices and demons (thank you uber toxic cult-like religious upbringing). I did not even think about the fact that many people do rituals all the time in churches or temples (aka baptism, communion, Bar-Mitzvah/ Bat-Mitzvah... etc). Heather really helped me start thinking about the importance of marking things in a meaningful way for myself personally. And that our lives deserve to be marked and remembered, even in small ways everyday.

Francis Weller writes that “Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with trans personal 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 an embodied process.” (Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)

I was going through a particularly horrific period of grieving a few years ago and Heather helped me name what was happening by inviting me to enter into it with a few of my close friends. She crafted a beautiful ritual for me where we used artmaking, breathwork, and some good old fashion howling in the woods to express what was this roiling wordless grief that had felt stuck in me for so long. And you know you have good friends if they’ll go howl in some patch of woods in the middle of a neighborhood with you.

In an article in The Atlantic, Emily Esfahani Smith writes about researchers Michael Norton and Francesca Gino who studied the impact of rituals on loss at the Harvard Business School. They told people that one person in their group would win $200, made them feel attached to the money, and then had them write about what the money would mean to them. After the winner had been chosen and asked to leave the room, they divided up the subjects and had one group draw about how they felt (the control condition) and they had the other group perform a ritual. In the ritual condition, the subjects were told to draw how they felt, sprinkle some salt on the paper, rip up the drawing, and then they had to count to 10 silently five times.

Afterwards, the researchers looked at the level of grief in both groups. Although, losing money is no where near losing someone your love, rituals actually helped here. The people who did the ritual reported less grief than the no-ritual group. Smith writes, “even people who said that they don’t think rituals work benefitted from doing the ritual: They didn’t feel as bad about not winning the money.”

She goes on to say that, “rituals, which are deliberately-controlled gestures, trigger a very specific feeling in mourners—the feeling of being in control of their lives. After people did a ritual or wrote about doing one, they were more likely to report thinking that “things were in check” and less likely to feel ‘helpless,’ ‘powerless,’ and ‘out of control.’”

There is a scene in the 1998 film Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman (fun fact they filmed some scenes on Whidbey Island) where the witches are having to battle the spirit of an evil ex boyfriend… as you do. They end up inviting the women of their small town to join hands as they hold a protective space for a woman who is suffering from the possession. While we aren’t normally having to deal with that level of evil on a daily basis, the women in the film illustrate the containment that ritual can offer. It can be a container for our suffering when we feel out of control and alone.

“Rituals are a way of remembering and honoring the past and present so that we can also step into the future.”

Crafting rituals for ourselves can be as simple as lighting a candle at a specific time of the day or week and giving yourself a moment to rest and ground yourself. Or write names or thoughts on stones and throw each one into ocean. I was with a friend on the night that she quit a stressful job and we took a bouquet of flowers someone had given her and began to name things as she threw each flower into the Salish Sea. Things she wanted to leave and keep from the experience. She wanted a way to mark the ending of a huge phase of her life.

Even making a cup of coffee can be transformed into a ritual. A simple way to think about it is that ritual, as opposed to a routine, is done with intentionality. 

Ritual helps us concretize what remains wordless or feels unreachable in us (like grief and pain) so that it can at least be witnessed by ourselves and hopefully at some point by our community. So that we are not alone in it. And while it doesn’t fix the pain, it can actually ease the ache and can comfort us as we walk through this life by marking where we have been and where we currently are, as well as holding hope for what can be.