Ritual, Key #5: Meaning-making
[excerpted from, 9 Keys to Ritual for Self-Care: Transpersonal Psychology ?2023]
Ritual adds meaning to one’s life.
The presence of meaning has multiple benefits on one’s wellbeing, mental and physical health, and quality of life (Haugan & Dezutter, 2021) – so we do well to pursue it; ritual is one way of enhancing the meaning of even mundane activities, and of infusing one’s life with a greater sense of meaning, and of the sacred.
The relationship of religious rituals and the construction of meaning is obvious (Nugteren, 2019); those found in nature-based or other forms of spirituality also enhance presence of meaning (Sonnex et al., 2022). Secular rituals around birth, death, and other life passages clearly add meaning to our lives as they help us to acknowledge and share emotions (Wojtkowiak & Mathijssen, 2022). Even those conventional rituals, or shared patterns of behavior, to mark holidays and other special events provide yet another social source of meaning (Shoham, 2023).
Indirectly, construction of personal meaning is the purpose of all ritual. It contributes to a ‘handcrafted life’ in which we design and direct, to the degree possible, the life that we’d like and the self that we hope to be. We use personal ritual, spiritual or secular, to construct meaning and give purpose to our own life, just as religions use ritual for the same purpose. The use of ritual can also add a layer of significance to an otherwise routine activity.
Each morning as I ‘open my day’ with my 5-minute ritual, and do the same at close of day, I’ve given a frame to my day that injects it with a sense of the sacred. When I go weekly for a long solo trek on a nearby island, I do so as a form of ritual in which I embrace and am embraced by the natural world, as we are one. The ancestor shrines surround me throughout the day, and when I listen, I learn. Seasonal and full moon rituals connect me more deeply to the rhythms of the earth, while rituals for healing or for facilitating a sense of wholeness and integration provide me with a framework for personal growth, and those of honoring life passages provide milestones by which I know my life to be significant. Meaning-making.
A few years ago, I attended a shamanic ritual held for a community of traditional free-diving fisherwomen who had lost one of their number at sea; as the shaman stood at the sea’s edge, calling the dead woman’s spirit to return and exhorting the dragon god of the sea to let her go, I was struck by the poignance of the moment and the depth to which the woman’s community mourned her – as they also processed their own fears of a similar watery death.
Some few years before that, I was in another shamanic ritual, this time in the steppe of Eastern Siberia among the Buryat or ethnic Mongolian community there. An extended family group had had too many misfortunes; they hired a shaman to conduct an all-day ritual for and with them. As we gathered in the foothills, away from society, multiple family members present, and engaged in a full day of rites including the traditional sacrifice of a ram, the significance for this family was evident in the relief on all their faces by day’s end.
In a group ritual 20 years ago, I unexpectedly found myself in deep mourning for my beloved grandmother who was not yet dead but severely ill, sobbing and calling for the spirit world to take her because she was ‘so broken, so broken’. She had many ailments which rendered her debilitated, and was ready to go; 5 weeks later, she directed her own death with a hospice doctor’s help, to which I was a witness.
Meaning. A life of ritual is infused with meaning.
We can develop personal rituals to help facilitate meaning in our lives. Perhaps you create a ritual within which you ask yourself, in this special and set-apart context, “What is the meaning of my life?” or, “How can I enhance meaning in my life?” or even, “When I finally come to the conclusion of my life, will I be able to say, it was a life well lived?” Rather than answering, you listen – to that inner voice, to the spirits or ancestors, to your deity, as you choose.
We may also create ritual to better identify and understand the ways in which our lives already hold meaning. We can enhance these sources of meaning by creating rituals to honor them. And we can use ritual to set goals related to our purpose as we see it, and to help us achieve them.
So, in addition to the meaning that ritual imbues when conducted for any purpose, we can use ritual specifically in the search for and to strengthen the presence of personal meaning.
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Exercises:
As ever, we begin with a process of clarity. In meditation, contemplation, journal-writing, mind-mapping, or similar, ask yourself: what are my current sources of meaning? How can I strengthen any of these? What do I hope to add? Perhaps even the more existential question, if so inclined: what is meaning?
Even if using another method for clarity initially, be sure to engage in meditation for deep insight. You can use multiple methods over a period of days, in fact, as this is a complex topic.
Design your ritual (including some method to alter consciousness, and visualization / guided imagery as appropriate), prepare as needed, imagine it from start to finish – and afterward, reflect in some way and integrate into your daily life – as always.
In your altered state or quiet mind, visualize current sources of meaning in your life one by one; envision acknowledging, celebrating, and strengthening each in turn. Then, visualize other sources you’re aware of and would like to have, but are not yet integrated into your life (do you imagine an intimate partnership or marriage? birth of a child? change in career? new spiritual path? mentoring? volunteering to help others in need?); envision as fully as possible, embracing, integrating.
?Use guided imagery to travel to a ‘sacred’ and/or natural place, meet a Wise One there, an ancient woman or man, sit with her/him for a while and ask for guidance. Or: visualize going to the ‘source’ of all knowledge – a deep well, a brilliant light, the cosmos, your deity of choice – and ask for insight.
We can create more active ritual too, in that we open our ritual, then engage in activities of meaning-making – song, dance, perhaps poetry-writing or storytelling, acts to honor the sources of meaning in our lives –any kind of ceremony that feels significant to you, to strengthen our sense of a meaningful life.
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References:
Haugan G and Dezutter J (2021). Meaning-in-Life: A Vital Salutogenic Resource for Health. In: Haugan G and Eriksson M (eds), Health Promotion in Health Care – Vital Theories and Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63135-2_8
Nugteren A (2019). Introduction to the special issue ‘religion, ritual, and ritualistic objects’. Religions 10:3, 163. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10030163
Shoham H (2023). Deep conventionality, or, tracing the meanings of conventional rituals. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221145025
Sonnex C, Roe CA, and Roxburgh EC (2022). Flow, liminality, and eudaimonia: Pagan ritual practice as a gateway to a life with meaning. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 62:2, 233-256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167820927577
Wojtkowiak J and Mathijssen B (2022). Birth and Death: Studying Ritual, Embodied Practices and Spirituality at the Start and End of Life. Religions 13:9, 820. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13090820