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Reflections on Ritual: Remembering forward for generations to come

Words by NICI HARRISON

Founder of The Grief Space

“What you encounter, recognise or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.”

― John O'Donohue

I’ve just returned home from a week attending, receiving, co-creating and dreaming at a Rooted Healing retreat. Next month we will gather back together on these lands for a collaboration grief tending retreat. But this past week was a rare opportunity for me to take my own medicine – and pause. To let myself be in the experience, rather than hold it. I have been in deep reflection since I’ve landed home and I’d like to share some thoughts on ritual, why we do it and what is restores. 

For me, insights from the retreat have landed somewhere beyond the teachings I expected. Instead, it was the simple and profound experience of gathering in community, reverence, and reciprocity with both each other and the land that has truly shifted something in my being. I am reminded of Francis Weller’s teachings when he says that at the heart of our grief is a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, where a true entanglement with home should be. As we moved through the various workshops, movement practices and ceremonies, it was this deep, unmet (and often unspoken) longing that I touched.

We only have to look to indigenous teachings and ways of life to recognise where the West have got it so wrong. Our ideology of individualism lacks the richness of our true inheritance, which is to be a truly participatory self, entangled with the whole of the animate world. Though I spend much of my life and work sitting in circle and ceremony, this part of me remains hungry. Starving for a way of life that is imbued with connection and intimacy, embedded in the wider fabric of everything.

Our home for the week was A Quinta, a regenerative eco farm and co-living space based in the coastal natural park in South Western Portugal. Just ten years ago these lands were so degenerated they couldn’t even be used to graze sheep. Now, with the stewardship and vision of its founder, soil erosion is reversing, reforestation is thriving and the people living there are coming into harmony with the earth and each other.

It was medicine to walk these lands, to sleep beneath the song of nightingales and to nap in the wildflower meadows. My whole being drunk it all in.

The thread of our week together centred around ritual, and more specifically communal ritual. It has got me thinking about what ritual space actually is, why we need it and what happens when we don’t have it.

Although we have forgotten a lot of ritual practices and traditions, there is something ancient and familiar about coming home into these spaces. Ritual offers us a place to connect to something bigger than us. It offers us a language, a way to bridge transpersonal energies for the sake of healing or transformation. Ritual helps us stay connected to the mystery.

Of course, ritual is infinite in its variety. As Rumi says, there are “hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground”, yet, to help us arrive on the same page. When I say ritual, I’m talking about an intentional experience that moves people from one state through to another. Ritual is meant to be powerful. Ritual is an invocation of the sacred, it invites us into a radical state of presence. And, most importantly for grief work, it is a place where all our shadow and shame are welcome.

This, I believe, is why ritual was always so central to community across cultures and history. Ritual gives space for us to be with the forgotten and banished parts of ourselves – rage, fear, anger. In doing so, these parts come back into healing, wholeness and welcome. A lack of ritual space contributes to these energies to becoming repressed, building up and acting out in war, violence and oppression.

So, you can see, dear reader, how I flowed between the micro and the macro this week. How I felt my own longing and desire for community, connection and a way of life that embedded ritual into its very heartbeat. And how, simultaneously, I felt this deep inner knowing that if we had more sacred rituals for healing and reconciliation, we wouldn’t have so many of the horrors we have today. Our true inheritance has been described to me as the wisdom trail and the communal trail. The wisdom trail is what helps us develop into robust individuals for our community, able to share our gifts and participate in life. The communal trail is our shared experiences of grieving together and celebrating together. These two trails are what would have, and should have, shaped us as human beings.

It's a lot to think about what we’ve lost in community and in connection to each other. It’s also a lot to begin to allow ourselves to dream into this way of being. Again, Francis Weller speaks of how we must remember forward.

We must make ourselves porous enough, receptive enough to allow the dreaming earth to speak through us and reconnect us to our deepest longings and desires.

I am so grateful for my week with Rooted Healing, but my commitment to myself is for this to not be an isolated week. It is for me to find ways to connect to community and land in the everyday and the ordinary.

I am committed to dreaming forward,

my children are calling for it. 

You can listen to Nici share on similar themes on the Rooted Healing podcast in our episodes Our Earth Needs Us to Grieve and The Art of Grief Tending.

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