People often ask me why I do mushroom ceremonies and not just journeys…why does it have to be a ceremony? What is the purpose of ceremony and ritual?
The truth is that I probably believe more in ceremony and ritual than I do in the healing power of mushrooms (and I do believe deeply in them!). As we know from all the writing and research around conscious psilocybin consumption, set and setting are everything- the psychedelics don't do it alone…and I believe that the heightening of the experience and container of a ceremony with deep intent and reverence are a powerful way to consecrate the work being done with the magic mushroom guides.
Over the millennia we have lost the connection to ceremony and ritual in our lives, as they have been coerced into the state and dogmatic religion- people have forgotten their deeper power and all too often they are empty actions without energetic connection. But I believe this is one of the reasons why people are so unhappy.
We need to mark passages of time, we need to celebrate key moments, we need to be witnessed in rites of passage, we need to come together in communal celebration, we need to decide what is important as a collective and exalt it…
Without these moments of collective pause, shared honouring of a moment or transition or phenomena, we lose meaning and life becomes a long grey soup of unimportance, unpunctuated, bereft of magic and connection to self, other and spirit.
The thing is that we can’t just ‘go through the motions’, aping behaviours that have been passed down without feeling their importance. That's not to say that ancient rituals and ceremonies are not useful. In fact when the tradition has been truly kept alive by the people performing the ceremonies and rituals then the power grows exponentially. But we have to know why we are doing them and we have to believe in them. It is our personal power, belief and agency that we imbue them with that makes them powerful. For many of us, its time to re-imagine the power of ceremony and ritual in our lives…
Marking our time on this planet is so important to avoid the endless drudgery- we all need structure and anchors within our lives to be able to bring some sort of order to the chaos of existence. We still do this annually with birthdays and new year and religious holidays, however many of us do not deeply connect to these events and go through the motions of ritual practices without really understanding or knowing why- enjoying elements of them without honouring their meaning. When we reclaim these moments and dedicate our energy to them, they can really bring dynamic meaning to our lives, marking passages of time or growth as we look back at the same moment a year or a decade before when we were at the same point.
Personally I realised that these markers passed down to me didn't really resonate and so I chose to consciously work with the solstices and equinoxes, also the full and new moons, as ways to mark my time within life whilst also celebrating and honouring my connection to the natural world. I take time to remember where I was the year previously and celebrate my achievements since the last, and set intentions going forward. This helps me to feel more deeply connected.
Rites of Passage within a lifetime are also deeply important ceremonial events we have all but lost in the west. Luckily as women we have enforced rites of passage when we begin to bleed, when we give birth, when we go through the menopause- although these are often seen as inconveniences and not things to be celebrated. These profound transitions within our lives (as well as coming into manhood and also death) bring huge opportunities for reflection, review and celebration of all we have been, what we are letting go of going forward and what we are embracing in this new phase. When we come together in ceremony and create rituals to mark these moments we can truly examine and integrate their importance- learning from those before us and guiding those coming after us in these transitions.
When my daughter started bleeding I created a ritual for her by the ocean with her god-mothers and myself. We made offerings to the sea and spoke of what she was leaving behind and what she was coming into. We washed her and celebrated her. It was a small thing- but she will always remember it. I am so happy we did this to give a sense of importance to what was happening for her, to allow time for reflection of this massive transition into womanhood.
Shared meaning in community is imperative to bring people together. Historically, ceremony and ritual was about a collective remembering and honouring of what united the community. In a world where we are often celebrating (or struggling with) differences, I believe for us to find common importance is deeply needed. In the past it may have been a ceremony for the harvest (in fact the word ceremony comes from the word cereal), uniting the collective efforts to ensure the food supplies are safe, or it may have been a ceremony for a god or celestial body that guided the community. I think it is an important communal act to decide what it is we are all united in celebrating and exalting. Particularly in a world where many people feel disempowered, there is a collective democratic power in co-creating ceremony and ritual we all adhere to.
I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole, but the Gregorian calendar was designed around taxes, Roman leaders and control…so our celebration of new years is in a way an unconscious coming together of collective energy. We can reclaim this, as such a huge collective energy is deeply powerful. I would love for us to find alternative points of collective celebration. Again I come to the sun and moon on a global scale. In smaller community groupings maybe there could be more personal shared points of celebration. One of the reasons I believe India is so functional in its chaos is these huge connections of shared celebration. Regardless of religion, all come together for Ganpati (celebrating Ganesh) and Shivratri (celebrating Shiva) as well as countless more national festivals.
Community holding and collective emoting are some of the most powerful ways we can use rituals and ceremonies in our lives. This is how I work with the mushrooms and also in my death walker practices. When we come together as a community in our most vulnerable moments- in deep healing, releasing of trauma, in deep grief and loss (be that of parts of self, of another, of a place or aspect of our lives) we can support each other in shared experience. We feel held as we viscerally understand we are not alone in our sorrow or pain. We feel more empowered knowing there are others beside us, either also processing the same or there to hold and guide us through what they have been through before us.
To be witnessed in our grief and strife, or even in our deep celebration and joy gives our experiences deeper meaning.
To have our emotions amplified by the collective gives us a sense of ourselves as more than just this one body.
To be held and supported by the presence, words and emotions of the collective in times of deep personal transition allow us to know there is more than this moment, there is a journey ahead and behind and that we are not alone on the path.
To have elders and young ones around us in these moments allows for collective shared wisdom to be passed down through community lines.
To be held in a ritual or ceremony in these times of high emotion, allows for the primal and the spiritual to dance. We don't have to sit around with cups of tea and faces full of teeth wondering what ‘wise words’ to say. We can remember our animal selves and purge the raw emotions that are so needed in heightened moments of life. We can all hold each other in the non-verbal not-knowing of how to process and be with these huge feelings.
Ceremony takes us out of the mundane, the pedestrian. This is where we are at birth and at death, despite the western industrial complex’s deep attempts to make us think otherwise. These are the precious moments when we dance with the stars. We have no choice. But there are so many moments in between we can find that same wonder. Where we NEED to find it. When loved ones die, when we want to celebrate a sacred union, when we die to parts of ourselves that will never be again, when there is natural disaster or war or catastrophe, or huge breakthroughs of liberty. Here words are not enough. Here the emotions are high and the energy needs to be released, expressed and yet also somehow contained to allow for full release.
These are the moments we can connect to Spirit- when we remember that we are more than this day to day existence- the moments we will never forget as we collectively connect and express and exalt our magic. And all the magic that is all around us always and we pass by too busy to acknowledge. Ceremony gives us a moment to pause in the wonder of it all.
Ceremony allows us to give thanks. And as the indigenous cultures know so well this is what humans are here to do. The Earth nourishes us and we are here to praise her. That is our role. Reverence and witnessing and celebrating all that we have been gifted in this divine existence. This is how we raise the vibration of the universe. This is how we remain in harmony with the planet and ourselves and each other. This is how we stop ourselves from commiting unconscious acts of destruction and hatred. This is how we re-member.
So let us find all the moments we can to lift up our awareness.
To take a pause and to celebrate.
To find what we want to express gratitude for, to come together in being held in, to honour and to witness.
We can create rituals in the everyday- alone and with our guides.
And we must find ways to come together in a meaningful connection to life fully and to die consciously throughout each lifetime.
If you would like support in creating a ceremony or ritual for you, your loved ones or community please get in touch.
If you would like to join one of our ceremonies, also reach out.
If you would like support in creating the ceremonies, rituals and sacred container you need to die, I am here.
Love Always,
Tara
