Ritual for Self-Care, Key 3: Ritual & Initiation

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

And now, an old standard updated for personal use: ritual for initiation, rites of passage, and other life events.

How can we mark all those events that give our life meaning? And what’s the benefit of doing so in ritual format? (Hint: it’s the meaning-making itself.)

As I write this, I am approaching my 60th birthday. This is often seen as entering one’s ‘third-third’ of life, or Third Act – in my view, letting go of adulthood and entering a more exalted stage, elderhood. (With an eye toward ancestorhood. But more on that later.)

And so, I am ritualizing my transformation – in this, my chrysalis year, with another year thereafter of integration. I’ve devised a series of rituals throughout this lead-up year, focused on processing this transition in a conscious and contemplative way, considering what I want from this third stage and how I’d like to enter it. It’s an adventure, a period of wisdom and self-transcendence, of intensive personal development and mystical experience – and not without its challenges and anxieties. So, I choose to enter it in a sacred way, one that recognizes and honors my transition – as transformation.

Exciting! This is magic: the use of ritual, to acknowledge and intentionally facilitate change.

So, what life passages are we talking about? Those traditionally honored in most cultures include birth, death, marriage, and a rite of passage to maturity. (Today we add ‘graduation’ – at multiple points, it seems.) I think we can do better. In addition to my series of rituals ushering in elderhood, we can use ritual to acknowledge the life passage of divorce, widowhood, retirement, one’s own birth in retrospect, menopause, the children we never had, the new job (or new book) or any achievement – any significant, even life-changing, event.

This is for personal ritual, but we can also extend this to community – any major change or accomplishment of the social group can be honored collectively in ritual. In fact, returning to the theme of rituals for aging, as we age the storytelling and shared experience of rituals can help in facilitating our sense of community and our acceptance of the aging process itself, stage by stage (Nelson-Becker & Sangster, 2019).

We can think of this as initiatory ritual: in each case, we are initiating a new phase as we say farewell to the previous one. In such transition, we step through a doorway, cross a threshold – and for a time, therefore, we’re in liminal space – universally sacred. When we think of the classic use of the term ‘initiation’, it can guide our ritual creation; what are we initiating? How do we want to undergo a ritual of initiation? How do we welcome the new, and say goodbye to the old? And how do we make the most of the liminal space, the rich in-between?

We’ve had a lot of practice, in fact – with every new year, as we usher out the old to make room for the new, that last week and then first week representing the transition. We may not ritualize it per se, but we all acknowledge it nonetheless – in annual ritual of the global community.

But why bother with ritual? Isn’t it just a lot of work, and not a little superstition, for no practical purpose? We do it, and it comes highly recommended for reinstatement where possible, because ritual, however simple, imbues and enhances meaning. It acknowledges major shifts in life, rather than letting them slip by – and that’s a more mindful and conscious way to live. It also reminds us that our very lives are, paradoxically, both insignificant and sacred; the humanist or atheist as well can use ‘sacred’ in this sense, to denote meaning and value.

Perhaps the most profound rites of passage are birth and death, and in each case, we need others to facilitate this ritual on our behalf. Pregnancy and childbirth have been ritualized by women in a number of cultures, often involving prayers and offerings to a goddess of childbirth. We can also create modern, secular rituals of this nature, honoring the coming child and at the same time, calming the anxieties of the mother (Wojtkowiak, 2020).

We do the same in death, conducting rituals to honor the departing loved one and to calm our own death anxieties. Funereal rites can be found in every culture and religion, and of course have changed over time (Mitima-Verloop et al., 2021). How we honor our dead is powerful ritual indeed, as we console ourselves and others who mourn their passing – or celebrate their passing, yet acknowledge our loss. We may also be consoling the dead and helping their souls to pass, if aligned with your belief system. In shamanic funeral rituals I’ve observed, interspersed with lamentations of the living are special rites meant to console the spirit of the dead; these are held again at several intervals during the year (or sometimes three) after death, to help them move fully on to the afterworld and not get ‘trapped’ in this one as a hungry, unfulfilled ghost.

Sometimes, as mourners our grief is prolonged and unresolved, especially when death is untimely or particularly tragic. Rituals of healing would be appropriate, yet it’s directly connected to this category for life passages as well. When we find ourselves unable to heal our grief, stuck in place or consumed by emotion, we can create rituals that combine healing of our hearts with that of consoling the dead and helping them to pass on to whatever is next (Wojtkowiak et al., 2021). If unable to do the former as our grief remains unresolved, we can focus on the latter – consolation for the dead – for an indirect healing of our own hearts.

On a related note: as we know, we humans are the only animal with foreknowledge of our mortality – and that can fill us with existential dread, or death anxiety; this typically becomes more exaggerated as we reach old age, of course, and ritual can help (Pandya & Kathuria, 2021). Buddhists meditate on their own death, an intense experience; we can create personal rituals to view our funeral, or to imagine floating in the ether of eternity, or envision the afterlife if we have such belief, or conduct a ritual of letting go of life – in the abstract. The possibilities are endless, the need to move past such anxiety essential to our enjoyment of remaining years; rather than a focus on death, we look it square in the face and let our anxiety go, in order to focus fully on life.

And so, we honor our life passages and significant events, by imbuing them with a deep sense of meaning – through ritual.

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Exercises:

Our process of clarity: in meditation, journaling, mind-mapping, or deep contemplation, ask yourself: is this an upcoming passage? If so, what do I want from and for it? Is it a previous one that wasn’t acknowledged? How can I fill this gap? (We can conduct a ‘coming of age’ ritual in mid-adulthood, for example, if it feels useful.) Do I want to replicate and celebrate my own birth? Acknowledge my entry into elderhood? Rehearse my own death? Or maybe you’re starting a new project, or ending a relationship?

What’s most relevant to you and this passage? What do you anticipate, and hope to embrace or accomplish? What do you need? How can you give that, symbolically, to yourself? What guide(s) do you need? Talk to Grandma, a Wise One, your former or future self?

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, with a 1-minute lead of silence.

Some suggestions: you can use mental time travel to envision yourself in either past or future as required. You may approach menopause or other later life passage in a manner similar to that of coming-of-age or entering adulthood –as this is another ‘coming-of-age’. By that, a very conscious approach to one’s elder years is essential to aging well. If your own birth or childhood was traumatic or unhealthy in some way, consider rituals of a ‘parallel life’ – one in which you revisit your birth and all goes well; one in which you give yourself as a child all that you needed.

This type of ritual can take forms of celebration, mourning, reframing, accepting, and many others. Consider the purpose of your ritual and how you want to acknowledge this stage or transition, whether it’s occurring now – or in the past, or future.

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

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References:

Mitima-Verloop HB, Mooren TTM, and Boelen PA (2021). Facilitating grief: An exploration of the function of funerals and rituals in relation to grief reactions. Death Studies 45:9, 735-745. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1686090

Nelson-Becker H and Sangster K (2019). Recapturing the power of ritual to enhance community in aging. Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging 31:2, 153-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528030.2018.1532858

Pandya AK and Kathuria T (2021). Death Anxiety, Religiosity and Culture: Implications for Therapeutic Process and Future Research. Religions. 12:1:61. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010061

Wojtkowiak J (2020). Ritualizing Pregnancy and Childbirth in Secular Societies: Exploring Embodied Spirituality at the Start of Life. Religions 11:9:458. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11090458

Wojtkowiak J, Lind J, and Smid GE (2021). Ritual in Therapy for Prolonged Grief: A Scoping Review of Ritual Elements in Evidence-Informed Grief Interventions. Frontiers in Psychiatry 11:623835. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.623835