Ritual and ceremony

Of all the things that are weakened or missing in how we do death and other transitions in dominant western culture, the loss of ritual and ceremony is the most deeply felt to me. We often don’t know what we yearn for, and yet we know something’s missing.

Maybe we don’t know what to do next when our person has just died. Maybe we feel empty and exhausted after a funeral. Maybe our loved one asked for no service, and we are left feeling incomplete and lonely. Maybe we are rushed and overwhelmed by jumbled emotions and exhaustion in a hospital or hospice room and just want to catch up with ourselves for a moment. Maybe we are navigating a big life transition and are not feeling seen or held.

Ritual can be a support in such situations. It involves small concrete actions or gestures that embody greater shared meaning because of the intention we bring to them. Ritual helps us locate ourselves in time and space. And move through them. Pause. Mark changes. Ground. Be in family or community. Process what has happened. It helps our psyches and soul-selves catch up to events in the material world.

And for the dying or newly dead, ritual helps move them through the time and space they are navigating.

A ritual can be as simple as intentionally placing our hands on our heart, closing our eyes and taking three deep breaths to release whatever we are holding. Ahhh….everyone can learn to use ritual in life’s big moments.

Ceremony is an energetic container holding several rituals strung together for a specific intention, to tell a story. I aspire to live in a state of ceremony myself - by acting and speaking with intention and attention and great love and by creating meaning from the smallest gestures and actions of everyday life. To see and feel the sacred in the ordinary. I bring this aspiration to my work as a death doula - integrating ritual into other aspects of how I work with people.  I draw on Centre for Sacred Death Care, Circle Way  and Be Ceremonial as resources and inspiration in this area of my practice.

Here is some of what I can offer, teach and support you with – whether I create and lead something, or co-create it with you, or coach you to manifest your own. Or offer referrals to others. Or some combination:

• Rituals for waypoints along the way – diagnosis, move to hospice, nearing death, the moments after death

• Rituals for vigilling with the actively dying

• Rituals after a sudden death

• MAID - specific rituals – before and afterwards

• Anointing before or after death

• Altar-building

• After-death rituals including body viewing, green burials and information about home funerals

• Grave decorating and tending

• Rituals to mark deathdays (deathiversaries)

• Using guided meditation, poetry, and readings to create a sense of ritual

• Memorial events and celebrations of life – or your own creative ceremonial spin on one

• Living funerals or life celebrations – before death

• Ceremony for ‘unseen’ losses such as divorce or miscarriage

• Ceremony for big transitions – moving house, menopause/Croning, or opening/closing a business