• Home
  • About
    • About Sarah
    • How this works
    • Media
  • Work with Me
    • If you’re dying
    • If someone you love is dying
    • If you’ve experienced a sudden death
    • If you’re struggling with a deathly issue
    • Mentoring for death practitioners
  • Courses
    • All courses
    • Caring, Death, and Loss in a Pandemic
    • Crossing The Veil
    • What Happens After We Die?
    • Grief and Loss as Initiation
    • Doing Death Better
    • Ritual Skills for Living and Dying
  • Resources
    • Free resource kit
    • Videos
    • Interviews
    • Articles
      • All articles
      • Client stories and rituals
      • Ceremonies for pets
      • Natural death care
  • Contact
    • Get in touch
    • Book a session
    • Subscribe

Soul Passages

Death Doula | Death Midwife Training | Death Healing Rituals

With Sarah Kerr, PhD, Death Doula and Ritual Healing Practitioner

Lesson #3 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 #3, June 2019

Ritual Healing as Animist Medicine

In this lesson

•  What is animism and why is it valuable for ritual practitioners to understand?

•  How does an animist perspective give us a more powerful framework for designing healing rituals?

•  What becomes possible when we approach ritual healing from an animist viewpoint?

•  What does it mean to live and die in an animist way, in relationship with the land, the spirits, the ancestors and the future beings?

Watch an excerpt

> Show transcript

You may have heard the word animism, and wondered what it meant, and why it might be relevant for ritual practitioners, especially those of us who work with people at the end of life.

Animism is a worldview, it’s a way of looking at and making sense of the world around us. It comes from the word “anima”, which is Latin for soul, and it has the same root as the word “animate”. If something is animated, it is living. Animism is a way of seeing the world that recognizes that it’s all alive, and that it’s all conscious.

In an animist worldview, living human beings are just one kind of people. There are also cloud people, and tree people, and ancestor people, and all varieties of different people. A healthy community is one in which all those different people are in right relationship with each other.

Animism is in contrast to the Western materialist worldview, which says that living human people (and particularly some more than other living human people) are people, and everything else is a thing. This view says that we are unique, and we are the ones whose relationships matter, and that the world exists around us. What that means for healing in a Western perspective, is that Western approaches often separate.

This view has 25 different medical specialists who work with different parts of our body. If something’s wrong with the body, this approach wants to break it down, find exactly the substance that’s missing and then add that. It’s a very separating, dispersing view. It’s not wrong, it brings us lots of useful information, but it’s not a whole picture. The other half of the picture is the way of looking at the world that says it’s about relationship, it’s holistic. This part of my body is related to this part of my body.

Rituals, by definition, are a holistic healing approach. It’s an animist healing approach. Rituals are about bringing parts of a system back into relationship with each other. Parts of a family, different members of a family, different members in a community, the living and the dead in right relationship. Putting us in right relationship with the spirit realm, with the land. Even building right relationship between the past, and the present, and the future.

The roots of the word “healing” are related to the roots of the word “holy” and “whole”, and ritual really brings a “getting larger” view, as opposed to separating and a “getting smaller” view.

Especially when you’re facing the end of your life, or the end of the life of someone you love, it’s too much to understand that from a small perspective. If we take it apart, it will never make sense. But if we can find a larger perspective and a larger way to make meaning, if we can connect with a larger spiritual whole, with community, with compassion, with nature, then there’s a way to find healing through that process. That’s an animist approach and rituals help us do that.

 

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.

Purchase Lesson #3

$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.

"Sarah’s way of holding the rituals isn’t a template that she’s adopted from outside. She lives it, and that’s the difference."
~ 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

"Sarah is educated and trained. There’s a real acknowledgement of the lineage that she’s part of and a respect for who has gone before her."
~ 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

“Sarah makes complex things simple and clear; her teaching style makes what I'm learning really useful and interesting.”
~ Sophia L.

Purchase Now

Buy Lesson #3

$25 CAD (~$18 USD)

 

"Sarah has given me the inspiration, motivation and confidence to move forward."
~ Deb S.

About


  • About Sarah
  • About working together
  • Honouring my ancestors
  • Honouring my teachers

Offerings


  • If you’re dying
  • If someone you love is dying
  • If you’ve experienced a sudden death
  • If you’re struggling with a deathly issue
  • Training and online courses
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube

Connect


I’m available for in-person sessions in Calgary, Alberta, or by phone or video.

Book a Session


Subscribe

Copyright © 2021 · All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2021 · soulpassages on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in