What do you think of when you hear the word ritual?
A ritual is an outward action taken to represent an inward shift in consciousness. As I developed and explored what ritual was for me as a Priestess in training, this was starting to feel true for me. I love the idea that there is an internal shift in consciousness, a change, an opening, and expansion of ideas and ways of knowing that needed to be honored by more than just having the thought. Rituals are physical actions that holds this consciousness shift in the mind while the body moves through movements and actions to honor, represent and recognize the inward shift.
My pre-priestess self was not operating with this in mind. She was using ritual to shift her life, rather than using ritual to honor an inward shift. To me, the subtle shift of using ritual to honor a shift rather than using ritual to shift feels really empowering.
Have you ever had ideas or ah-ha moments in life when you just get something on a deeper level? You have an empathetic insight about a co-worker or about the ways in which you’ve been thinking about money in your life, and all of a sudden a stream of new ideas and understandings come with this new insight. You deepen into your relationship of what it means to be a woman in her 30s, an archetypal mother, without children. Your last child moves out as she heads off to college and you feel so much spaciousness and challenges as you begin embracing your cronehood. This is the shift in consciousness. You’ve changed and your awareness has changed. Now, using ritual, you honor where you’ve been, and invite in what’s next to come. You do a special activity with a sense of reverence and sacredness to honor the shift, the change.
By taking physical action, you are taking the sparks from the neural network in your brain and moving those sparks throughout your body. Your ideas come to life as you act them out, move them out, draw or art them out in ritual. Moving your body moves the initial spark that shifted your consciousness throughout your body.
Ritual is an embodiment of your changed, more deeply aware self.
Do you often have insights and ideas, but don’t take specific action dedicated to this new idea because it gets lost to the business of life and the world around you? Part of the role of Priestess in one’s life is to help them create and honor the spaces of change that are already happening within. To honor the evolution that humans are so designed to explore. Ritual takes those ideas and makes them real in your life.
In lighting the candles, writing about your insights, creating an art pieces specific to your changes and shifts that you’ve made, you are physically moving your body, taking your ideas through your arms and legs and onto the page. You’re taking that spark of insight and moving it through your body.
Moving your changes through your physical body helps you to embody these insights. Creating something that you can look at (like an art piece) further supports your mind and body in integrating this shift, even if you don’t quite have meaning for it yet. It helps to ease the growing pains that comes with evolution.
Ritual also honors the world around you as sacred, magical, connected. It’s a song to the world that you’ve learned something new, that you’ve shifted your consciousness, that you’ve changed and you’re ready for the Web of Life to support you in this shift of awareness.
As a Priestess, I support others by crafting rituals for them to honor their changes. I listen deeply and then create an activity that is deliciously unique to you. The Rite of the Womb is a Rite of Passage that incorporates several different rituals throughout the journey. I also craft rituals for women that are less about a culturally defined rite, like the Rite of the Womb, and more personal, specific to you, where you are at in your current soul journey. I always use art in rituals, because art to me is a practice of personal discovery and embodied wisdom while also being fun, imaginative and playful.
What ways do you honor the shifts and changes in your life? Maybe you’re already doing something to honor changes—like getting a haircut after you’ve been through a big transition. Getting a tattoo or piercing to help the outside world see that your inside world is different now. Maybe you rearrange your furniture to allow for different energy flow in your house after a particularly difficult season in your life. There are lots of ways to practice Ritual, from really simple to extravagantly complex, but it’s the habitual act of honoring your shift in consciousness that makes ritual so powerful.
Finally, I think there is something to be said for taking special action to honor an inward shift. It respects and communicates with the Web of Life, saying “hey! I’ve changed. Will you know and recognize me in this change? Will you help me when I forget that I’ve decided to make this change?” This invites in deeper communication with the larger world, with All That Is, with the more expanded parts of yourself. It’s like communicating this change, to the farthest places of the cosmos and the deepest cellular parts of your body, that you are evolving. And there is a really special and mysterious thing that happens when you do this. The world starts to recognize you in this new way, and starts to interact with you in this change. It takes into account your deep interconnectivity with everything else, and that when you change, everything changes. By taking your change from your mind and acting it out, creating and moving your body from this changed place, you act as the trees and plants and animals act. You move as you’re meant to, as all life moves. You begin drawing your dreams and desires to you and the world around responds with delight.
