Lesson #4 in the Ritual Skills for Living and Dying series.
Ritual practice is a complex and powerful healing modality.
I created this series of lessons to broaden the conversation about ritual healing as a response to life losses and transition.
While much of ritual is intuitive, there are important foundational models and principles that determine how effective a healing ritual is.
These teachings will deepen your knowledge and strengthen your skills for creating healing rituals.
I hope you find them useful.
With much love,
Sarah
Sarah Kerr, PhD
Ritual Healing Practitioner
and Death Doula
People are coming to recognize the power of healing rituals, but there's a shortage of deep teachings on how they actually work.
Lesson #4, August 2019
Ritual Design Part 1: Preparation
In this lesson
• How does good preparation help you facilitate more powerful rituals?
• What preliminary work will initiate the healing dynamics of a ritual before it begins?
• When should you hold your ritual, and what is the impact of timing (solar, lunar, personal, or cultural)?
• How do you use the time leading up to a ritual to strengthen the healing field?
Watch an excerpt
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.
How does it work?
• This lesson was taught in a small-group webinar setting
• Recordings are ~1 hour each, and include a lecture and Q&A session
• Each lesson includes video and audio files of the same material
• Files can be downloaded, or accessed via the online library
Add these teachings to your ritual toolkit
If you facilitate (or would like to facilitate) rituals, these teachings will help you strengthen the healing impact of your work.
$25 CAD (~$18 USD)
Learn the what, why, and how of ritual healing
These lessons explore the foundational principles and structures of healing rituals.
Drawing on archetypal wisdom, transpersonal psychology, animist philosophy, mythic insight, anthropological literature, and personal anecdotes and storytelling, these teachings bridge the theoretical with the deeply practical.
~ Audrey S.
A deep dive into the nuances of ritual practice
• Explore techniques for diagnosing the soul-affliction that's asking for healing
• Discover principles for designing effective and targeted ritual interventions
• Learn tools for working with individuals, families, and communities
• Develop skills for reading and strengthening the energetic architecture of ritual space
Demystify ritual techniques, and facilitate more powerful rituals
~ Kate M.
This is not a cookbook approach
While the material in these lessons is inspired by diverse ritual practices and energy medicine principles (rooted in both historical and contemporary traditions), we will not be learning to "replicate" established rituals.
Instead, these lessons teach you the energetic principles behind healing ritual gestures. You'll learn how the energy in ritual space works, and how to collaborate with it.
With an understanding of those principles, you can design unique and meaningful rituals, that grow out of the experiences and needs of the people they serve.
Examples of healing rituals:
• A sharing circle to help a community integrate the shock of a natural disaster
• A goodbye ceremony in the family home before an aging parent moves into long term care
• An accountability and new beginning ritual after someone declares bankruptcy
• A healing circle before beginning chemo or radiation, or when it finishes
• A euthanizing ceremony for a beloved family pet
• A letting go and moving on ritual after the end of a long court battle
• A celebration after positive test results, or when health is regained
Rituals help people connect with each other, and with a deeper source of meaning and grace
~ Sophia L.
~ Deb S.