Episode 18 - The Importance of Personal Ritual (And, How to Do It)

Rituals may feel like a thing of the past, but they are absolutely essential tools for modern day people…especially the modern mystic! Learn why ritual is so critical for every human being, the elements of ritual, and how to put together powerful (relevant) rituals for yourself or others.

As yoga teachers, and spiritual leaders, when we work with students, what we’re really doing is leading them through a ritual. Rituals have been a part of human culture since time in memorial, and they hold a very important place not just in our development as human beings, but in our psychological health and well-being.

Ritual as a word usually brings up connotations of strange practices things that are embedded in the cold or deeply religious practices that perhaps we have some judgments about, I hope to turn that perception of ritual around today. And diminish it all together. If that is something that you feel when you hear the word ritual ritual is any kind of practice that helps to usher us from one state of being to another, but the elements of ritual are critical to understand so that you can move into this new data. Being now every single culture throughout history in every single tradition has had ritual ritual are some of the earliest things that we see when humanity organized itself into tribes. Ritual is an elevated way to behave or act in order to access something bigger or greater than ourselves, but it also brings us together as tribe members rituals hold communities together, they get us holidays, they give us a rights of passage. Rituals are very important in every single society rituals, have, for a long time, but associated yes, with religious or spiritual practices, but they don’t have to be.

And one of those struggles that we have in this modern day age is a loss of ritual in greater and greater numbers. We are walking away from our original religious or spiritual traditions.

One of those struggles that we have in this modern day age is a loss of ritual in greater and greater numbers.

If you want a little bit more background on why this is or why more people are walking away from these traditions or what that means for us. Check out podcast number eight. But what we have is essentially this spiritual gap for modern day people when we walk away from our native traditions when we walk away from our native religious practice, or spiritual practice, we usually also walk away from the rituals that are associated with it, and often we feel negativity toward ritual practice, because we associate it specifically with our initial upbringing or any negative experience we may have had with that. This is very common, this may not be you, you may be stoked about ritual. So, I don’t want to speak for everybody, but if you work with students and clients you may run into this. So it’s important that you’re aware that there’s a bit of a stigma around the idea of ritual for many of us here in the West. Now that’s too bad because it doesn’t have to be associated with a specific religion or a specific spirituality and in fact it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be associated with something. We still need to do it. Rituals are still so important for us now, let me talk about some of the rituals that perpetuate in modern Western society regardless of the fact that we have walked away from religious or spiritual traditions.