Ceremony Is In Our Blood and Our Bones

I remember reading about ceremonies and rituals in other cultures when I was in high school and college. They were described as something that happened over there, in other parts of the world where people wore strange clothing or no clothing at all. We didn’t do ceremonies, we studied them. We looked at how important they were for the cultures we were studying, but never was there any self-reflective look at our relationship to ceremony.

My experiences of ceremony and ritual at the time, mostly in the Lutheran church, felt scripted and devoid of any life or meaning. Everyone just went through the motions. In 3rd grade, you had your First Communion. In 8th, your Confirmation. It didn’t seem like anyone felt anything. I certainly didn’t. But I wanted to. 

In an anthropology class in college, I read about the Yanomami people of the Amazon Rainforest. When a member of their tribe dies, they cremate the body and then put the ashes in a kind of banana pudding that they pass around and eat. As I read this, something in me quietly opened. I got it. 

I don’t remember why the Yanomami people do this, but for me, literally consuming my loved ones after they’d died meant they would be with me. They would feed me. Forever in my cells and tissues. It felt visceral, tangible, and deeply meaningful. I cried in my dorm room, my tears leaving wrinkled wet spots on the pages of my text book.

It would be nearly a decade before I began to step into ceremony and ritual. Slowly inviting both into my life, designing them from the ground up and the inside out. As I practiced, I learned that ceremony is in our blood and bones. If you go back far enough, it’s guaranteed that your ancestors engaged in ceremony. Regularly. You don’t have to look outside of yourself to create meaningful ceremony – in fact, it’s better to look within.

Almost always, in my ceremonies, I include something embodied, and concrete. I have yet to consume a loved-one’s ashes, but I bring in movement or self-pleasure. I might smell or eat something, or rip something to shreds. This brings ceremony to life for me in a way that the ceremonies I grew up with never did.

The kind of ceremony that we’re inviting you into in Eros, Ceremony, and Belonging will be yours and yours alone. We won’t tell you what to do, but we will provide you with guidance, structure, support, and encouragement. What you do from there is entirely up to you. You don’t have to have any experience with ceremony, you just have to feel the call, the longing, or even just the curiosity. Learn more and sign up here.