The Importance of Creating Our Own Rituals

Friday night I performed the release ritual I referenced in the post Brick by Brick: Tearing Down Your Emotional Wall, and it was incredible. I had a genuine spiritual experience and I feel… different. I feel lighter, happier, and most of all (and hardest to describe) I feel love, like I received a shot of warmth straight to my heart. Now I fully understand the importance of creating our own rituals to heal ourselves.

As a reminder, I have been working my way through lesson #1 in Marianne Williamson’s A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever. I wrote in a notebook all the things that I feel resentful, guilty, ashamed and angry about; my fears and burdens, reasons I feel inferior; 18 emotions in all in an effort to rid myself of excess emotional waste. Once everything was written down, the book provides a prayer and visualization to surrender it to God (or a higher being). The release ritual was all my idea. I wanted something more involved, something a little more noteworthy and deserving of so much emotional shit. I wanted it to be an event. I’m a planner and I like things to be elaborate.

What is a ritual?

My husband teased me, referring to my ritual as voodoo and offered to bring me home some chicken bones. There’s something about the word “ritual” that makes people think of sacrificial offerings or dancing naked around a fire. Although rituals are often rooted in religion, they are solemn ceremonies or behaviors consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order. Rituals maintain tradition and offer closure; their formality is comforting. Sunday Mass and funerals are well-known rituals. To some degree so is surrounding someone with a cake in front of them and singing Happy Birthday.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Eat, Pray, Love that we do spiritual ceremonies “in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.” That was precisely my plan with this release ritual. This is why people lovingly design intricate scrapbooks to contain their precious memories, or burn photos in an effort to move on after heartbreak.

My release ritual

The morning of the ritual I thought I would awaken excited, but I felt agitated all day, apprehensive, not unlike a child who has done something wrong
and is equal parts defensive, ashamed, and afraid of punishment. I had been hiding from God for a while and I was nervous to speak to Him.

Later that night I sent my husband out so I could have total privacy. I lit candles and incense on my altar and settled in with my notebook seated on my zabuton and zafu (Japanese cushions used in meditation). I turned off the lights.

After a nervous and awkward start, I was soon spilling open aloud to God, sharing every negative action, thought, and memory. I sobbed and excused myself to blow my nose as if seated across from Him in a therapy session. Things began to make sense in a way they hadn’t when I wrote them down. After every emotion I felt a calm. Before turning the page, I would say: “Dear God, I surrender my (insert emotion here) to you. Please take it from me. Amen.”

When I was finished with all 18 emotions the book says to visualize a brick wall comprised of all the suffering and pain I had been carrying around, then ask God to help me break it down, brick by brick. I settled in to a calm meditation. It took some time to form a mental image of the Big Man, but when I did, He resembled a mix of Albus Dumbledore, Father Time, and Jesus Christ.

I won’t share all the details, but let me just say we had fun breaking down that wall together, karate chop noises and all. Afterward, we stood over the ashes of the obliterated brick and talked. It was the easiest conversation I ever had. Afterward, I recited a prayer from the book.

Next in my ritual I had planned to write each of the 18 emotions on my Buddha Board as one last visualization of watching them fade away (you write in water and as it evaporates, the words literally disappear), but I suppose God had other plans for me. I wrote something else, which I think I’d like to keep to myself (sorry!). I’m not sure if the words were His to me, mine to Him or mine to myself… I think perhaps all three. But they were the most perfect words.

Lastly in my ritual I ripped out the 18 pages from my notebook and headed outside with some lavender and a box of matches. I set the pages onto the fire pit, and sprinkled lavender on top. I thought those words would burn quickly, but I was wrong. The emotions, pain and suffering did not surrender easily. Rather each page seared and burned slowly from the corner back, one at a time as I repeated: “Dear God, I surrender these emotions to you. Please take them from me. Amen.”

I looked up, and was surprised by the number of stars burning over me. I did not head back inside until every ember burned out below me, concluding the ritual.

Marianne Williamson writes that “to spiritually surrender something is to surrender our thoughts about it. What we put on the altar is then altered.”

I literally placed my pain and suffering on the altar. I am now altered thanks to feeling empowered to create my own ritual.