Ceremony is as old as recorded human history. Paleolithic cave paintings dating back more than 10.000 years ago show our ancestors performing fertility dances around the fire or taking part in spiritual ceremonies praising the hunt. The act of ceremony and rituals has been following us through the ages. No matter which religion, culture or ethnicity you belong to, every group of humanity has their own traditions, ritualistic practices and specific ceremonies to create distinctiveness in the ordinary routine.
However, in our day and age, ceremony and rituals have become less and less important. In a time where everything seems to be explainable by science, the magic of ceremony has been frowned upon and displaced to religious institutions or native tribes exclusively.
Certainly, our need for ceremony in an information-based digital culture is not as big as those of our Stone Age ancestors. They held ceremonies to pray for success in hunting, fertility and good weather for the harvest. The rituals gave them structure in a world they couldn’t comprehend. Today, we just need to take a look at our smartphone and know its gonna rain tomorrow, track our fertility via an app and we are vegan anyways! Everything is accessible and explainable for us, but that also takes a lot of the magic of life away.
Contrary to our ancestors we lack one very important thing that ceremonies and rituals provide. An element that is crucial not only for our personal happiness but also for the maintenance of a healthy society: community.
Ceremony is a basic human instinct
Just like we need water, food, love and shelter for human survival, we also need ceremonies and rituals to survive, as they create a sense of belonging within us, which is a need deeply embedded within our DNA and critical for survival. Ceremonies remind us that there is something greater than we are able to perceive. They create an awe of the universe and help us understand paradigms of unity, connection, continuity and devotion. Rituals are a gateway of relating to the power of existence, they connect us to the divine, to that which is incomprehensible to our minds.
We therefore need rituals to thrive in our life, to give us sense and direction in our human existence. Rituals connect us deeply to ourselves and to the higher source that gives all life. It gives us the comfort of feeling we belong somewhere, of engaging with a community. Ceremony creates unity instead of separation and shows us how we are all longing for and striving for the same things in life.
Even though we are able to explain many previously mysterious processes with the help of modern science, we still have the urge of belonging to a group and we still feel deeply inside us that we are not the highest power there is in the universe, that there must be something bigger. People tend to escape into ceremony and ritual in times of change and transformation: think of the death of a loved one, a marriage sealing the bond of two lovers or the inclusion into adulthood.
Why we have abandoned most rituals
While there are certainly some rituals still present (but diminishing) in our society, like weddings, funerals and even birthdays, we have abandoned many of the rituals that kept our ancestors alive. The reason for this is that we simply do not need them anymore.
Most of the traditional instituted ritual forms no longer serve our complex contemporary lifestyle. Old outdated rituals do not communicate to our deepest-felt needs and longing for meaning anymore. They have served our ancestors in times where technology didn’t exist and science was still in its baby-shoes, unable to find appropriate answers to the questions of life. Unfortunately, the abandonment and absence of significant rituals leaves us feeling disconnected from ourselves, our culture and our society. Consecutively, being stripped of these structural events, we feel left alone, lost, confused, wondering what the essence of life is, but receiving no answers. The spiritual safety net of our forebears is gone.
And still, especially in the rapidly changing and confusing time we are living in, rituals and ceremonies are extremely important as they invite us into the present and provide fertile ground to better deal with the challenges at hand.
Welcome to the 21st century: Create what feels good for you
What to do when the old rituals seem outdated and unfitting and their are no new ones yet? Create your own! This is the beauty of our day and age. We have so much more freedom of thought and to express our true nature than our ancestors did. Today, no one forces us to follow strict doctrines or set of rules regulating how to behave and in which ceremonies to engage in to be our best selves. We don’t need priests, rabbis, shamans or gurus to direct our important life events.
We have the ability to look at our own very unique life paths and create our own rituals and ceremonies, based on what we need. We all have the resources within us to create ceremonies that fit our order of existence. Trust in your abilities to know what is right for you. If you examine the patterns you have created throughout your life, you can identify and claim the ways you might have (unintentionally) already created a ceremonial structure for yourself and your community.
You can develop the ability to listen to your inner voice, trust your intuition and study your dreams. Build on this knowledge and ask yourself questions like: What do I like? What am I really longing for? What do I need right now? Answering questions like these will guide you to gain more clarity and help you to create rituals for yourself and within your social system that are meaningful through the passages of your life. By freeing ourselves from the conditioning around us of what is regarded right or true, we are able to tap into our truest self by creating special events that deeply resonate with our own meaning, grace and energy. Often what we find is that creating new rituals is just as important as remembering and honoring our ancestors and where we came from, by returning to sacred rituals involving movement like dance or taking place in nature, praising Mother Earth.
Ceremony and rituals add depth and dimension to our life. They are vital for to integrate and thrive in a community. We need ceremony to add extraordinary to the ordinary, to ground us in times of change and trouble, to remember, to honor, to feel and to connect.
Setting aside the time to create and participate in ceremony helps us to transform our perspectives and our reality. If you would like to experience the beauty of modern-day ceremonies that honor our deepest connections, join us for our next ceremonial events at The Conscious Club.
You can book your ticket here: http://theconsciousclub.com/book-now.
Written by Clara Malzer