Ritual for Self-Care, Key #1: Ritual & Healing

[excerpted from, 9 Keys to Ritual for Self-Care: Transpersonal Psychology ?2023]

The use of ritual for healing, and for wellbeing, is our first key.

Naturally, I must state upfront: this is not in any way intended to replace medical care or the advice of professionals. Nor, for that matter, is it a ‘New Age’ approach of magical thinking in which we simply wish away our illness – or be told that we’re weak, if we cannot.

Instead, in recognition of the psychological power of personal as well as collective ritual, this application is primarily for emotional healing. As we’ve seen, ritual has been shown beneficial in resilience and in coping with stress, and even in pain tolerance, as well as in reframing our thought patterns that don’t serve us – all of which contribute to healing in many forms.

We can use ritual, then, to heal our emotions from old, unresolved grief; in letting go of resentment and being able to forgive; in healing the response to trauma, and more. We can apply it to ourselves, our relationships, our societies, and our natural world.

No, wishing won’t make it so. But it does have the potential to alter the landscape of our own psyche. And, in the Buddhist belief of becoming our best selves, and even transcending self, in order to contribute to the health of all humanity and thereby the planet, we can do our part by healing our emotional wounds.

When I was a very young adult, just 22 years of age, I found myself the focus of a group healing ritual. I had not yet completed even my first psychology degree (though I’d been working in health care since the age of 16), but I had begun my own exploration of personal ritual. In this setting, as 5 other women held their healing ritual with me lying in the center, and which I’d entered with no particular objective, I suddenly found myself contemplating an old wound from childhood and the perpetrator; as I focused on this image, just as suddenly I experienced an opening sensation in my chest, an empty space and a lightness of being – and when I tried after the ritual (which was conducted in silence, by the way, so no one was directing my experience apart from myself) to bring forward the woundedness and resentment I’d been carrying for years, it was entirely resolved. Much like one’s tongue searching for the tooth that’s no longer there, as I thought at the time, I couldn’t call up that old pain even when I tried.

There are numerous examples of ritual used for healing, and the mental health and wellbeing outcomes of religious healing rituals and prayer have been well documented across religions (Dein, 2020).? The shaman in Africa heals in ways that can be correlated with principles of transpersonal psychology (Marovic & Machinga, 2017); religious as well as secular rituals of healing are longstanding in Greece (Dallas et al., 2020).

Rituals have been integrated into couples and family therapy (Imber-Black (2019), and have helped family systems to become more resilient (Harrist et al., 2019). Healing rituals have been used to identify and transform shame in both individual and group contexts (Mayer, 2019), and in a unique form known as ‘moral injury’, such as in veterans who, in the course of military duty, committed acts against their moral code and must find a way to forgive themselves (Brock, 2020; Ramsay, 2019).

Ritual has also been used in clinical settings for both patients and professionals. It’s been applied in palliative or comfort care, when cure is no longer possible, as a means of emotional healing (van der Weegen et al., 2019). And it’s been used by hospital chaplains as a means of healing for medical staff in distress and burnout – such as in our recent pandemic (Klitzman et al., 2022).

So, what would a healing ritual look like?

Naturally, it can take whatever form suits you, your belief system, and your purpose. As a sample, following the preparatory phase as described in our introduction, you could begin by altering consciousness with a focus on deep and steady breathing, while in a reclining posture; this may be followed by visualization in which you imagine yourself lying in a meadow of wildflowers, with a warm sun above and a gentle breeze wafting as butterflies flit around. You might then envision the appearance of a personally significant healer image (Mother Mary? a shaman? your grandmother? yourself?), who sits alongside. Placing your own hands on your chest in a self-soothing gesture, you can then take the imagined scene through to its natural conclusion of being healed by this figure, of releasing whatever emotional content needs healing, allowing for transformation to occur. When the body of the ritual comes to a natural conclusion, a gentle reentry to the waking state occurs, followed by reflection.

This is but one example. A suggestion is to write a script of such a scene in advance, and record it in your own voice, soft and soothing as if speaking to an anxious child, filled with love and compassion. As you go through such an imaginative experience, you can listen to the recording of your own voice—you, talking to your inner self, a powerful message to the unconscious.

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Exercises:

First, a process of clarity: what needs healing? Even if known, nuances and detail may be useful in directing your ritual more specifically (e.g., you may have a physical condition – but there may also be heretofore unknown emotional content attached). To gain clarity, you can meditate on this question of ‘what needs healing?’ or do some journal-writing on the topic; or, you can conduct a mind-mapping brainstorm session with ‘healing’ in the center of the page surrounded by as many associations as possible, with lines drawn between them denoting connections.

Once you’ve gained clarity, design your ritual. Simple or elaborate? One part, or several? Short or long? Details? Meaning? The more personally designed, the more powerful its impact.

Do you need props? Candles, incense, flowers, significant objects, foods, music/sounds, poems? Again, your choice – whatever makes the ritual feel more significant to you. Again, this is your conscious mind communicating with your own unconscious.

Consider how you want to prepare, open, close, reflect; most importantly, what will the main phase of the ritual look like? And, what method will you use to alter your state of consciousness?

Once designed, take another few moments to sit quietly and imagine it, from start to finish – while allowing for flexibility in its execution.

In other related rituals, you can vary your script and approach – for other forms of healing, or this healing from other approaches, and so on.

One option: a visualization of yourself in a natural setting, as mentioned above, but being healed by nature itself. Another: receive a reiki or other type of healing therapy session, but within ritual context (i.e., design and prepare your ritual; open it, receive the healing session, and close the ritual).

The most basic form: open your ritual (i.e., set the tone); lie down, and imagine golden light within you, filling and warming you, cascading over you like sun-filled warm water; stay with this as long as feels right, then slowly ‘emerge’ and close the ritual. If heat (e.g., fever or inflammation) is something you’re already experiencing, you can cool this down; imagine the light as a pale blue, cascading over and cooling you instead.

Or: same as above, but envision yourself as a balloon, letting air (negative emotion) out little by little; or similarly, but imagining your body as a bag of sand, with a tiny hole from which sand (again, unwanted emotion) sifts out slowly. If seeking added energy instead, the opposite of each can be used – balloon slowly filling with air; sandbag body filling little by little until substantial.

You get the idea. Play around with the concept, as it works for you.

9 Keys to Ritual for Self-Care, by Anne Hilty, ?2023

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References:

Brock RN (2020). Moral conscience, moral injury, and rituals for recovery. In, Moral Injury and Beyond (pp. 37-52). Routledge.

Dallas T, Baroutsa NM and Dein S (2020). The power of the divine: religion, rituals, and healing in Greece. Mental Health, Religion & Culture 23:8, 718-732. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2020.1825363

Dein S (2020). Religious healing and mental health, Mental Health, Religion & Culture 23:8, 657-665. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2020.1834220

Harrist AW, Henry CS, Liu C et al. (2019). Family resilience: The power of rituals and routines in family adaptive systems. In: Fiese BH, Celano M, Deater-Deckard K, Jouriles EN, and Whisman MA (eds), APA handbook of contemporary family psychology: Foundations, methods, and contemporary issues across the lifespan (pp. 223–239). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000099-013

Imber-Black E (2019). Rituals in contemporary couple and family therapy. In: Fiese BH, Celano M, Deater-Deckard K, Jouriles EN, and Whisman MA (eds), APA handbook of contemporary family psychology: Family therapy and training (pp. 239–253). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000101-015

Klitzman R, Al-Hashimi J, Natarelli GDS et al. (2022). How hospital chaplains develop and use rituals to address medical staff distress. SSM-Qualitative Research in Health 2:100087. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmqr.2022.100087

Marovic Z and Machinga MM (2017). African shamanic knowledge and transpersonal psychology: Spirits and healing in dialogue. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 49:1.

Mayer CH (2019). Healing Rituals to Transform Shame: An Example of Constellation Work. In: Mayer CH and Vanderheiden E (eds), The Bright Side of Shame. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13409-9_34

Ramsay NJ (2019). Moral Injury as Loss and Grief with Attention to Ritual Resources for Care. Pastoral Psychology 68, 107-125. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0854-9

van der Weegen K, Hoondert M, Timmermann M et al. (2019). Ritualization as Alternative Approach to the Spiritual Dimension of Palliative Care: A Concept Analysis. Journal of Religion and Health 58, 2036-2046. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-019-00792-z