Excerpt

Opening to the Mystery

You are a spiritual being who has chosen to have a human experience. Your soul deemed it necessary to experience life on earth, but when you are too busy to marvel at earthly miracles, you fail to feed your soul what it came to experience.

Your body came from the earth. It is composed of the same clay and salt water that make up the land and the seas. The water in your body responds to the pull of the moon, just as the sea tides do. But you have forgotten this. Your body responds to the light and dark of the seasons as do the bodies of hibernating animals. Yet you usually do not notice. You have forgotten the deep joy of celebrating your earthiness. You have forgotten that when you leave one stage of life for the next, changes happen at the physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. When you don't acknowledge and celebrate these changes, your life becomes less full than you deserve.

The act of ritualizing the events of your life allows the inner you to keep pace with the outer. Rituals take you to a place deeper than words. They satisfy in ways your spirit understands but your mind cannot.

A ritual is a conscious act that represents something deeper than the act itself. It can be as simple as deliberately experiencing the sunrise and knowing that, on this particular day, it means a whole new beginning for you. It can be as elaborate or humble as you choose.

The underlying significance of the ritual is its sacred meaning. The tangible expression of a truth that addresses the relationship between spiritual and physical experience will naturally reinforce your link to the sacred. The shift that happens in a powerful ritual moves you from ordinary space and time into a way of experiencing that which is formless and timeless. As you participate in a ritual, you may begin to understand such sacred principles as:

I am connected to all of life.

I am changing the course of my life now.

I am witness to the miracle that is happening.

I surrender to the changes that are occurring.

My blessings overflow.

Many of life's experiences are so profound that they are difficult to describe in words. These are the precise experiences you invite when you perform a ritual: you move yourself into change or unity, surrender or gratitude, in ways that are so powerful that they are beyond words. You experience true spirituality.

Though not associated with any particular denomination or philosophy, the essential nature of ritual is sacred. The rituals in this book speak to the experiences that we all share just by being born on this earth. We share the seasons of the year and the seasons of our lives. Built into these cycles are sacred lessons that you are here to experience--lessons of unity, creation, change, and release. The sacredness of a ritual allows your spirit to inhabit these lessons in a way that goes deeper than words; that is the blessing of ritual.

It is also part of the mystery. By consciously participating in the physical world of form, you understand the truths of the spiritual world, that which is formless. For example, when you create a ceremony around the emergence of spring, fully experiencing the changing angle of the sun, the sprouting flowers, and the melody of the first birdsong, you come to experience your own immortality at a deeper level; that, too, is the blessing of ritual.

Real Life Rituals, pp. 3-5