Ritual is always our most trusted guide during times of change. When everything is unsettled, ungrounded, and unpredictable, ritual can refocus us back to what matters.
Day Schildkret
Welcome to Day Four of Revitalize Your Rituals, Revitalize Your Life
Some thresholds in life are abundant with ritual. Births, graduations, weddings, funerals — we seem to recognize the importance of ritual to celebrate, grieve, or sanctify these experiences. But life is replete with threshold crossings for which there’s no obvious go-to ritual — important, triumphant, or painful times when we’re left to navigate change without the comfort and steadying effect of ritual. We have rituals for marriage, but fewer for other types of partnerships or for when relationships end. We have few formal rituals to mark the beginning of a new job or the transition into retirement. And while some cultures have meaningful coming-of-age rituals, many do not. John O’Donohue writes, “Without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of people’s lives, the key crossings pass by, undistinguished from the mundane…” A threshold is a doorway. It’s a transition from one part of our life to the next. A meaningful ritual can move us out of the liminal space of transition and help us step through the doorway with clarity and courage. John O’Donohue offers a way for us to begin: “If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could have ever hoped for.”
Today’s Practice: Create a Ritual to Light Your Path
Begin today’s practice by enjoying the personalized handshake ritual that Barry White, Jr., former 5th-grade teacher and now principal, designed with his students.
- What specific elements of this ritual make it powerful?
- What do you imagine the impact of this transition ritual might be?
Step One: Identify a Threshold
What threshold are you facing in your own life right now? What doorway are you preparing to step through into new territory? The threshold you choose can be large or small, welcome or uninvited. Here’s a list of life transitions and thresholds to help prompt your thinking; these are things for which there are not already well-established rituals:
- Personal growth (releasing something to embrace growth, identify shift)
- Aging (new opportunities, physical changes)
- Professional change (working remotely, retirement, new direction or role)
- Cultural or environmental shifts (politics, climate change)
- Adjustment in home life (children moving out, renovation, moving)
- Relationship change (breakup, new friendship, disagreement)
Once you have a specific threshold in mind, close your eyes and imagine this metaphorical threshold as a literal one — a painted doorway, a garden gate, a stone arch opening to a new path. What is it made of? What colors or textures capture your attention? If you’re inclined, take a moment to sketch what this threshold looks like.
Step Two: Gather Your Resources
While crossing a threshold in life may not involve a physical journey, it depends nonetheless on signposts, guides, nourishment, and rest along the way. A simple but well-planned ritual can provide all of these things. To create this ritual, gather symbolic representations of the list below; these might include a photograph, a treasure, a book, a vessel of some kind.
- One thing you will be leaving behind
- One source of spiritual wisdom to guide you
- One replenishing form of rest along the way
- One person who will accompany or support you on this journey
Consider placing these objects somewhere visible and using them as guideposts during this transition.
Step Three: Envision
As you envision stepping across this threshold, what do you hope is waiting for you? If possible, pause here to light a candle, and allow the flame to represent this new part of your life. Take a few centering breaths, and visualize yourself on the other side of this threshold. Use the the following prompts to tap into how you hope to feel having crossed this important threshold:
- As I stand on the other side of this particular threshold, may my body feel…, may my heart feel…
- Having navigated this important change in my life, I will always remember…, and I will welcome…
Once you’ve written down your reflections, take another few breaths, remain in this space for as long as needed, and return to the flow of your day when ready. Moving forward, continue to build on your simple ritual as a way to light the way during important life transitions.
Scroll to the bottom of the page (or click here) to find the Community Conversation space where we invite you to share your reflections about today’s practice.
Deepening Resource
In For Those Who Have Far to Travel, poet and minister Jan Richardson offers guidance for how to journey into new and uncertain territory in our lives. In what way might you modify or deepen your threshold ritual to heed the poet’s wisdom? In particular, spend a little time with stanzas four and five. How might your ritual help you be “faithful to the next step,” “heed the signposts / of intuition and dream,” and “keep an open eye / for the wonders that / attend the path”?
For Those Who Have Far to Travel by Jan Richardson
Research Highlight
In their study of ritual, Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut have shown that in times of anxiety or stress, the repetition and structure of rituals provide comfort. When facing an important threshold, there’s always uncertainty. Even when the change is welcome, we have to move through a kind of liminal space in order to cross the new threshold before us. Rituals, Dr. Xygalatas reports, offer a sense of control amidst the unknown. Measuring heart rate and cortisol levels in their studies, both were reduced by participating in rituals.
Xygalatas, Dimitris. “Why People Need Rituals, Even in Times of Uncertainty.” The Conversation, 25 March 2020. Dr. Xygalatas is the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, 2022.
Photo by Marko Sun
Good Morning…i am also revisiting Day 4 before i launch into day 5. And so grateful to find again the poem from Jan Richardson…it so beautifully frames my threshold sense of a move we have made…for all the right reason…yet filled with so many changes we didn’t consider. The phrase Adjustments in Home Life – such a very understated set of words to describe all that has happened in this move. Just very grateful to have my pack members ….my husband and our dog and two kitties…to have served as a loving circle that stays together…the animals probably better examples for us two leggeds as to how to stay curious, open, and joyful with all the chaos of the move. I am so grateful for this Ritual Pathway and for this amazing community of pilgrims.
I am a little behind in the course but thoroughly enjoying it. Today is Friday and I’m just working on Day 4 but I’ve decided it is okay, this is a journey and I’ll make my way. I am standing on the threshold of becoming a grandmother. My daughter and her husband are expecting their first child, a little boy, in April 2025. I feel so happy and blessed. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the role of Grandma in my family and for this child. I will trust my spirit guide, my mom, who was a Grandma to many and her memory is beloved by her 10 children and her many grandchildren. She has been dead for 4 years but regularly visits me, especially when I am doing a spiritual practice such as meditating or enjoying a sound bath. I can feel how joyful she would be to know that Ellen and Mike are expecting a child. I also know that they have firm ideas about how they want to raise a child and my intention is to honor their rules and expectations. I love that I am now creating a ritual around this loveliest of thresholds. I hope to work on Day 5 later today but the real world calls me now. I’ll enjoy my tasks as I picture this transition and the rituals I am creating to make it the best connection I can make with this little being.
Well. To begin with I am a day behind…….I am at “Cross a Threshold” So sorry.
Hard to read, to understand, to digest, and to move forward.
I think, I am still mourning the elections.
My feelings are upside down.
Hopefully, there is light in the horizon. Hope. Pray. Trust.
But, I decided to take a few breaths. Relax. Challenge myself. And, read the Cross a Threshold section again.
Presently and mindfully.
Slowly and more aware of my reading……. and to my surprise, I read your suggestions again, and the Personal growth jumped out of me !!!!!
So, I am going to pick up my reading again. Bravo!!!
And, I am thinking to join a reading group, book club. So, I can feel more connected and in community.
Thank you for allowing me to express my feelings, emotions, and myself.
Last night I dreamed about my painting hobby, essentially that I was preparing to show my work and sell it if possible. This would be a new threshold. I have looked forward to a Thursday ritual of watercolor painting in a class setting at the local senior center for several months. It is a renewal of my interest in creativity and finding socialization with like-minded people. There was a time past when life’s issues, and ups and downs, put me in a different place and I didn’t paint for more than 10 years. I’m happy to say that this course on Rituals has helped me to recognize the importance of painting on Thursdays as a Ritual and further, it has made a significant difference in my attitude and approach. Just today, the instructor strongly supported my efforts and products, and I noticed that I too am doing work that I’m pleased with. A huge jump!
It takes time and gratitude and honoring of all the small steps along the way.
In August of 2023, I turned 50. I had envisioned a sweet celebration with close friends, but this was not the case. I had reached out to a friend to host a firewalk to honor this life transition, but months later I found out that she never got the email. I felt a bit disappointed at the time that this transition went largely unnoticed. My daughter had left for college the day before, and, shortly after, both my sons left. This past August, I changed my last name. It was a symbolic act honoring 25 years of marriage, and I finally decided to officially join the “Bradley” clan. These “key crossings” have passed by without ritual, and I do feel the absence. Saying goodbye to my 40s, my children, and my name while simultaneously embracing my 50s, my freedom, and my new identity warrants a “crossing of the threshold” of some sort — even if I’m the only one in attendance. 💜
I have been living with finding gratitude in uncertainty as I am a cancer patient in remission for 2 years and 3 days! I love thanking God for the gifts in my life. I try to do this often, beyond my waking up time. I want this to become more than a habit.
I have a new role in my job of 17 years. I love it. I am aging and now I can work at home. I supervise and train pre-k- 8th grade teachers and oversee (Quality Assurance) 6 school age programs. Our work has changed since COVID, leaving us and me with daily challenges. Yet, I love it and feel God’s hand is in this.
I left behind teaching and a classroom of kids. Now I work with adults, many of whom are aspiring college students. I try not to label them by seeing things from their window view. It is different. I hear their despair over the current election outcome. They cannot see my optimism. Or maybe they don’t want to right now.
I spoke to my Pastor friend about my joy and peace. No longer elusive, it permeates my life. I am in a good place. Dare I question this!
My level of sensitivity is untouched. Hallmark comercials, thoughts of my parents, and past experiences and friends still make me tear up… and sometimes cry.
Yet, I love my life.
I can still love.
Yes, in the mess, I can still love!
Like a sage warrior and pilgrim one can age with grace if we just pay attention. For to listen is to ‘see’ more clearly and understand with curiosity ‘anew’. This lesson resonates on many levels as my living and aging collides- the body changes, friends old and new are frequent changes especially if one travels, the mind get trickier, the children aren’t youth but adults and grandchildren come along joyfully and in the journey the expected surprise of grief comes. There seems to be a multitude of necessary transitions and I hadn’t taken the time to recognize how profound is this experience! Life is such a mix of blessings for which I share gratitude
I wonder if there’s a way for families of loved ones stuck in this liminality trap, to realize that and actually help out?
Blessings Mary. May new life rituals surround you
I sigh. I hug myself. I feel a strong tear behind my right eye. I have been wanting to know the experience of believing, and here is that crossroad. Do I believe that this writing comes to me to support a threshold I have imagined for years? Oh, Mary, believe. And use these resources to accompany you as you move to your new home.
You know how you have heard in your own belly that your current city simply does not reflect you? That it embraces much of that which you want to run from? But you have not. Not even walked slowly away. Yet now, at your current apartment, the fifth unpleasant thing (which would have demanded most folks to at least find another apartment) has happened and this voice within you, John O’Donohue’s poems and teachings from Anam Cara are bubbling up inside you. You almost visited another apartment in another state this past week. But another voice was stronger. That voice that has dominated your longing to be free to be you.
Yet by June 2025 you will be living in a new space. Mary, use these suggestions…create a ritual, read Jan’s poem often, listen within, act on what you hear within and perhaps if someone’s words echo your heart and soul, allow these to support you. Your 73 plus years carry you into this new space. A space that is unlike all other places you have lived. You are choosing this space from your heart’s whispers rather than another’s words or needs. Isn’t it simply wonderful that you are listening to your own heart and following her? Mary, yes, you will leave friends. Yet perhaps there is the real possibility that your friendship will grow stronger being away.
Mary, write the dreams and visions you embody about this new place
Trust you are encouraged by Light. You indeed will cross a threshold that truly gives you the longed for experience of wings, of flying. Trust this. For now. Maybe forever?
Yes Mary, Trust this forever 💜