How to Keep Your Ritual Sacred
With two meeting cancellations in front of me, I opted to lay down in the grass for about 30/45 minutes instead of rushing back to work. I didn’t time it, my body just knew and wanted to get up. I turned my phone off and laid down in the grass. I wrote for a little bit and then gave myself permission to lay back and stare at the sky.
Laying in the grass, looking at the sky is a sacred ritual for me.
I could see a small butterfly and two hummingbirds fluttering about their business. The leaves on the tree near me were swaying in different directions as if to say hello and a brilliant amount of clouds were moving past the sun, making shapes and reminding me how in love I am with life.
Ritual helps you fall in love with life.
My mother first taught me to gaze at the sky as a child. She reminded me that we were living an abundant life because we had the sky, the rain, and the trees surrounding us and talking to us. I want to be clear that we were part of the working poor immigrant families of the late 70s and 80s. I was too young to understand that concept fully. For me I had everything. Everything in the sky. I thought and still think that the wind is my closest relative, talking to me in so many ways every time I step out the door.
I grew up feeling abundant. I grew up thinking that nature was one big sacred act.
It was later that ritual became formalized. It began with altars, ceremonies at a Babalawo or Santera’s home, and my own prayerful whispers to ancestors in the night sky and at church, back when I was a devout catholic. I was dedicated to my ritualistic process. I heard my guides clearly.
I also lost sight of the simple rituals in life, like pouring someone a cup of tea, greeting a neighbor with a hearty buenos dias or a soft linda tarde, or giving and receiving the blessing of another family friend. I lost the power of daily ritual in my daily life and with others. Many people have forgotten rituals and think they are unattainable, unimportant, or only for gurus or spiritual leaders in our communities.
Ritual is an important part of connected, community life. It helps you give each moment and person in your path an intention and allows you to connect with your own sensations. By connecting to yourself through others and that gentle good afternoon, you create intentional moments and intuitive connections, allowing everyday experiences to become rituals.
Some of the best rituals in my life are getting together with a friend over a meal and being totally present. Sitting with a peer from work to imagine what life would be like if we had a job or a world that included us. These things are also rituals.
When rituals become stagnant
Over time, rituals can become stagnant because we start to take them for granted. We take the ritual for granted because we are disconnected from ourselves, from the idea that we are sacred and that we matter.
We can lose sight of our sacred being when we take on jobs or careers we dislike. I recently met an anthropologist-turned-tailor. We had a long talk about how the pandemic had left him unable to reach indigenous communities in his area, leaving him unable to do the investigations required of his profession. The downtime actually gave him an opportunity to evaluate two things - How tired he was of commuting to reach communities in remote areas and also a passion and love he had for sewing and tailoring clothes. I was deeply moved by the great sense of fulfillment he had in finding his passion again and centering his life around sewing.
I could feel the power, grief, love, and weight of having made such a decision and how his family, well-being, and creativity came into focus by making this change. To break from the “career track” and the expectations of being a “professional” in Mexican society is not so easy. I felt the weight in me as I remembered what it meant to preserve my dignity and health over what seemed like “success” after walking away from three different careers.
For me, this “sastre” or tailor had engaged in a sacred ritual – someone who had passed through the fire of transformation and remembered what he most wanted in life. His life experiences since childhood, his ancestral histories, his love of his family, and his power to be still, by choice or force, are likely to have informed this big pivot.
The offering of yourself as ritual
You and I, we are also sacred rituals walking around trying to find our way back to who we were and what was possible when we surrendered to the authentic experiences in our life. This kind of ritual is not driven by external perceptions of power or the cultural pressures of our communities. This is driven by a more profound longing, one indigenous seed and food sovereignty activist Rowen White talks about when she describes the grief of losing all we know to be our legacy.
For me, the loss of multiple tribal languages and affiliations is devastating, losing time with my grandfathers and grandmothers to learn how they saw plants as medicine is a longing only a bolero and cold glass of rum could ease.
But don’t be sad for too long.
Remember, longing is the fuel for ritual. Longing helps us remember what’s missing and with any luck, our heart will say, “levantate” and then we’ll get up and go look for it. When we give ourselves permission to look for the answers to our longing, we welcome a ritual in process.
Food for thought.
I wrote this, so you would not forget that you are a sacred ritual walking around just trying to remember where you came from and building the courage to go where you want to go.
If you can stop and stare at the sky for a little while, your body and heart will remember what to do next.
Who needs to hear this? Send this to those people in your life who might need a reminder.
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