Good healing work can happen individually with an experienced psychotherapist or coach, and there are some things that can only be healed in the context of a larger container. Engaging in ritual or ceremony calls in support and help from many others seen and unseen to align with nature and access all of the energy and wisdom we can access. Often in ritual, we create community so that healing doesn’t have to happen alone, further groups of people amplify the energy and allow deeper healing to occur. In ritual and ceremony, our container is vast and includes people, the natural world, and support from the unseen to provide a big enough space for healing and expansion beyond what can be imagined.
“We need ritual because it is an expression of the fact that we recognize the difficulty of creating a different and special kind of community. A community that doesn’t have a ritual cannot exist. A corporate community is not a community. It’s a conglomeration of individuals in the service of an insatiable soulless entity.”
― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community
What is the difference between ritual and ceremony?
In a ceremony, we have an expected outcome and often expected steps. For example, when we go to a wedding or graduation ceremony, we expect that at the end two people will be married or a diploma will be conferred. Ritual can happen on your own or in community and involves some prescribed steps and a desired intention, but requires we open ourselves up to the unknown to co-create the process in the moment with all involved and may have an outcome that you did not expect, but usually is in alignment with your intention and what is best for the growth and healing you need.
Ceremony or ritual may be done to:
- Release and transform stuckness, blockage, unhealthy patterns, or dis-ease from your life.
- Learn more about who you are and what unique gifts you carry.
- More fully align with your unique purpose or passion.
- Claim new ways of being, new relationships, new roles, more self care and self love.
- Transition from younger less mature or unhealthy states into more mature, wise, and connected states. Specifically from adolescence to adulthood, or young adulthood to middle age, or middle adulthood to elderhood.
- Connect more with specific plants, animals, elements, or nature as a whole to access guidance and wisdom.
- Clean and bless home or business spaces
- Heal and transform relationships and relational patterns.
- Grieve and let go.
Some of the rituals and ceremonies we offer are:
Vision Quest/Rites of Passage – to mark transitions in life and to seek guidance, vision, or purpose.
Grief Ritual – for cleansing and healing of losses, wounds, trauma, dreams never realized
Fire Ritual – for releasing, giving offerings, communicating with ancestors/spirit, other transformations
Water Ritual – cleansing, purification, peace, reconciliation, and nourishment
Earth Ritual – for deep healing of the physical body, reconnection to the ground of the earth, remembering belonging
Sweat Lodge Ritual – combines aspects of all of the above for wholistic purification and deep healing of body, mind, and spirit, connection to ancestors/spirit, remembering ancient ways
Pipe Ceremony – utilizing a sacred pipe to communicate with the unseen world asking for assistance, guidance, prayer, or other needs
Infinite other small rituals based on nature and various world traditions for specific needs and purposes which can be done on your own, with one or two people, or larger communities.
“When the ceremony was over, everybody felt a great deal better, for it had been a day of fun. They were better able now to see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds.”
― John G Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition
A note on lineage and sources of these offerings
This is a broad overview of some of the ritual and ceremony we can offer. These offerings come from over a decade of training and apprenticeship with various ceremonialists elders from different traditions which continues to this day. Our work as a student is never done. Some of these rituals come directly from teachers who have given explicit permission to conduct these processes and for these rituals the lineage is respected, acknowledged, and honored whenever offered. They won’t be named here because I do not want to be misunderstood as representing any particular teachers or traditions. As a western raised person with broken lineages as most of us come from, engaging in ritual and ceremony is both important for our collective healing and complicated as much has been lost, taken, or disconnected from. We do our best to continue engaging in reciprocity, support, and relationship with the mentors, people, and communities from which we gained this knowledge, offering what we have been given permission to and respecting the limits of what we can and can not do.