RECLAIMING RITUAL
“Ritual is the passageway of
the soul into the infinite.”
~Algernon Blackwood
“I Chose To Reclaim Ritual”
Similar to the First Nations, the Aboriginal peoples of my homeland and birth place Canada, I do not consider my spiritual practices, rituals and ceremonies to be ‘religious’. Neither are they connected to any specific religion. I believe that rituals and ceremonies adapt and evolve as necessary, alongside the changes that humanity experiences.
Ceremony and ritual have been around for thousands of years. In fact archeologists would argue that our ancestors have been partaking in these events for over 10,000 years. There are Paleolithic cave panting which are said to capture practices such as fertility rituals and ‘rites of passage’.
Today, from what I have observed, many have lost touch with ritual and ceremony. And the ones that we do practice seem to have faded in potency.
My story begins one wintery day in London, England. As I stood there in my friends bathroom with the buzzing sound of the electric head shaver humming in my brain I watched my hair drop to the ground. “Was I really doing this? I guess I was.” In order for it not to be such a shock I had started with scissors. I gave myself a fringe. “This is quite fun!” Then I cut large chunks off one side of my hair. “An interesting hairstyle, but it certainly wasn’t staying for long.” Then the real deal. The serious shaving machine that glided over my head and swept up all my hair and left nothing behind it.
But let me stop you for a moment and rewind. A bit further. A month or two before this.
Having received my divorce papers the reality hit. “I am now officially divorced.” It wasn’t that I wanted to be married again. It was just the realisation that it was final. I was divorced. I had failed. I have broken my promise, my vows, I have severed the ties to the man I gave my word to. I was heart broken, in so many ways.
I could go on…. but I digress.
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For me, this was huge. I knew I had to do something in order to move on, to clean the slate as it were, draw a line in the sand.
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“I need to create a ritual, a kind of ceremony, like a ‘rite of passage’. So that I can forgive myself for promises broken and move on with my life.”
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And so I did. I started to research about different cultures and their rituals and
ceremonies. I realised that many cultures consider the hair to be a persons symbol of power, including the Sikhs and the Native Americans. Both for a very similar reasons; it is the creation of God, Great Spirit, and a symbol of (spiritual) power.
For my new beginning I also wanted to honour the moon and her cycles. So I decided to ‘do this act’ on a new moon
"Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
…we associate the ritual with a major life passage,
the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation."
~Abraham Verghese
