If you guide rituals, you’ll know that much of the process is intuitive. At the same time, if you’re designing and facilitating rituals without a foundational understanding of the core principles of ritual healing, it’s likely that your rituals might not be as powerful as they could be.

This video is the first in a series about the five different components of a ritual. In this video we’ll talk about preparation.

If you’re interested, I also have an online course on this topic so you can learn more there.

About preparing for a ritual: Let’s say you’re asked to support a family by guiding a ritual to help them adjust as an elderly parent moves out of the family home into long term care. That’s a huge transition, with so much adjustment for everybody in the system, and a ritual can really help them.

Part of the role of a ritual facilitator is to hold the container. We work with an energetic field, it has its own dynamics and agency, but we support it and contain it and relate with it. It’s that container, that energetic field, that determines the strengths of a ritual. That’s what we say when we talk about being in sacred space. That we’re in that field where we can really feel that ritual activity happening.

The role of facilitator is to strengthen the field, to strengthen that container. There are many ways to strengthen that container and some of them happen before the ritual starts.

A really important task is around the intention. It’s critical to get clear on your intention, because if you’re fuzzy the field will be fuzzy and the ritual will be fuzzy. Get your intention clear enough that you can articulate it in a sentence or two. For this family it might be about helping Mom say goodbye to life in her house. This is about a relationship with the house itself, with the land, with the wider family. If Dad’s in the picture, part of the intention is about helping him to adjust. It’s a reconfiguring of those relationships. A saying goodbye to an old way of being and making way for the new one that’s coming.

Clarify your intention, and it works almost like a golden arrow that we shoot through time from today to the day the ritual will happen. When we hold that intention clearly, the field starts to feel that and the energy coalesces so that by the time we’re gathered, the field itself is prepared. We’ve palpated it in a way, we’ve brought it into focus.

If we don’t get clear about the healing we’re asking for, it’s hard for the field to bring it to us. Intention is one way of working with the field of a healing ritual before it happens, there are lots of others. Really being aware that as soon as you set that intention, things start to happen, and the ritual begins. How you’re conscious about that activity in the time that leads up to it can have a really powerful effect on the healing power of the ritual.