Ritual for Self-Care, Key #2: Ritual & Wholeness

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

Our second key: the use of ritual for integration, to better achieve a state of wholeness.

Modern life tends to fragment us. We feel like a very different person from one circumstance to the next, and while the core self may feel consistent, we can also easily feel scattered.

A common experience of the shaman in training, also a universal motif in the world’s mythologies, is one from fragmentation to wholeness. A god gets torn into pieces and must be put back together again, piece by piece – or is killed, begins to decompose, and is then resurrected. The neophyte shaman in trance finds him/herself shattered and made whole again – while the master shaman goes into trance to travel to the spirit world, find the part of a client’s soul that has gone missing, return to consciousness and reintegrate that missing part into the person’s whole being.

We all know this feeling. We can use ritual to put the pieces together. A sort of ‘defragmentation’ if you will, just as our computers do – and as some theorists propose our brains do, as we dream.

This is a means to bodymindspirit, if you will – integration of our physical, mental, and spiritual selves. Or, an integration of our animus / anima, as Jungian theory identifies the masculine and feminine characteristics in the psyche of each individual. Or, we can use this for shadow work – another Jungian concept, referring to all those parts of ourselves that either we, or others, or society told us were unacceptable, so we hid them away in the dark recesses of our psyche – and can retrieve them, and integrate them once more into our whole, complex being.

In 1970s US, when I was still a child, second-wave feminism was on the rise (the suffragettes a century prior, fighting for women’s right to vote, having been the first), and began with ‘consciousness-raising circles’. Women at that time largely didn’t understand that they were subordinate, that a part of their large and beautiful and complex selves had been sublimated as ‘unacceptable’ – and the first step was to find that missing part again, to identify what was missing. Only then could they begin to reclaim those parts of themselves, and then work toward their wholeness both as individuals and within society.

Neriya-Ben Shahar (2019) describes Jewish Orthodox women creating new ritual for themselves, to explore and develop their spirituality in ways their religion doesn’t readily allow. Sauca (2022), meanwhile, explores ‘blood rites’ in which women create rituals related to and reclaiming their menses, in a direct 3-day communion with nature and according to transpersonal principles.

We can absolutely change the self through the use of ritual. Indeed, this may be one of the most obvious applications. Kress and Kerr (2019) report the use of ritual within transpersonal psychotherapy – what they term, ‘psycheritual’ – and ritual can surely, and perhaps even more easily, be applied for personal use.

I myself have used ritual for this purpose countless times over the past 4 decades. In one such, many years ago, I was reconciling a good deal of shadow material, created by the restrictions of my fundamentalist religious childhood, with the liberal, secular woman I had become –many fragments to be found and reintegrated. I created a series of rituals (with 2 decades of suppression behind me, I knew one would not be sufficient), in which, one by one, I reclaimed these characteristics of my personality; in trance, I envisioned myself in an ancient temple surrounded by nature (wounds caused by religion are best healed in an imagined neutral and nurturing religious setting, I’ve found, and/or one in the natural world), and in each ritual I took in my hands the formerly rejected aspect of self, gazed at it with ever-increasing love, then held it to my chest until it was absorbed into my being.

To this day, I continue shadow reintegration, alongside ancestor veneration (more on that in a later key), at the dark moon each month. We can also time our rituals to natural phases – seasons, moon phases, high or low tides if near the sea, natural phenomena such as a rainstorm, eclipse, or meteor shower – or simply time of day: morning for beginning something new, evening for letting go, and so on. There is no script (don’t believe those who say otherwise); personal rituals are meant to be exactly that, though not a random and careless ‘anything goes’ but well thought out and carefully chosen for one’s specific objectives.

This is you, your unique self, your conscious and unconscious mind in ongoing dialogue.

From fragmentation to wholeness.

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Exercises:

In all such, we begin with a process to gain clarity, before designing our ritual. In this case, use journaling, meditating, mind-mapping, or similar to ask yourself: in what way(s) is wholeness or integration needed? Do I feel scattered? Too many identities, roles? Is a part of me missing? Since when, and because of what? Do I want to reintegrate this characteristic, and if so, how would that play out in my daily life?

Design your ritual, prepare as needed, imagine it from start to finish – and afterward, reflect in some way and integrate into your daily life – as always. Consider what method you will use to alter your state of consciousness: breathing, music or other sound, meditation, or--?

Develop some form of visualization or guided imagery; if the latter, write your script (or find one you like and modify it to suit you), then record it in your own voice. Give a minute of silent lead time, which in the ritual will allow you to start the recording, then settle into an altered state before the speaking begins.

One option: imagine yourself as a puzzle, putting pieces back together one by one, to completion. Or, if soul loss and retrieval feels appropriate: go into your quiet mind, seek what’s missing until you find it, then envision a process of reintegration – typically, of absorbing this ‘missing part’ back into your body. This is shadow work; another type is that of discovering things we’ve hidden from ourselves, qualities that perhaps we don’t like to admit having – maybe we aren’t always honest, for example – and in ritual, to take this out of hiding, find some way to imagine its transformation, and let it then disintegrate and float away from you. Our ultimate goal is not to reintegrate all shadow material, but that nothing is hidden from the conscious mind.

Integration and reflection after the ritual are always necessary, but especially essential for this ‘wholeness’ or reintegration work. Make sense of what you’ve just experienced, looking for insight; and, explore how you can further support this reintegration in your daily life.

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

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References:

Kress R and Kerr M (2019). Changing the Sense of Self Through Ritual. Integral Transpersonal Journal 12:12, 68-105.

Neriya-Ben Shahar R (2019). “We Need to Worship Outside of Conventional Boundaries”: Jewish Orthodox Women Negotiating Time, Space and Halachic Hegemony Through New Ritual. Contemporary Jewry 39, 473-495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-019-09295-1

Sauca ML (2022). Blood rites - reconnecting with the innate feminine: An interpretive phenomenological analysis. Consciousness, Spirituality & Transpersonal Psychology 3, 128-143. https://doi.org/10.53074/cstp.2022.41

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