Ritual: A Deep Connection To The Sacred

I love creating a global community and this week I had Alli Mary Epp, a certified ceremonialist from British Columbia on my show, Beyond Birth Trauma – From Burden to Brilliance. 

I was so happy to learn that her initial trip to Peru with me in 2009 that takes us all into the depths of beautiful Andean shamanic mountain practices, awoke something inside of her: a deep connection to the sacred.

In Peru we were laying on the land in ceremony together and calling in the energy of the land, which definitely was a new concept for most, but it’s like calling in parts of yourself that are there dormant, waiting to be re-awoken and reconnected with on a grander scale.

When we can connect to the sacred within ourselves, but also the

sacred of the land, and the sacred rhythms that we all

interweave with each other. It helps us understand our purpose and our connection here on earth in a much more profound way. 

She was inspired when she attended a baby blessing ceremony, not the lighthearted baby showers we are accustomed to, but the celebration and honouring of the rite of passage of becoming a mother.

Alli explained how they were all surrounding the mother to be with words of love, with poems, or a story, or a blessing for the soon to be mother and baby. They sang songs together and braided her hair with flowers, and massaged her feet. She said the amount of love she felt in that circle and hearing the different experiences of what it would mean going into motherhood, felt like both an awakening and also a deeply familiar sense.

When we’re pregnant that baby in utero is having that dance and connection with the mother the whole time and why shouldn’t that mother deep dive into that kind of connectivity and embrace that in a sacred way instead of simply celebrating with cake? I mean, nothing against cake! 

Alli said sitting in circles of women, creating a magical container, was something she needed in her life. So when she became pregnant, she felt the same calling. Craving on the deepest level,

the spiritual component of becoming a mother. That’s what her  heart wanted. 

At the time this practice was harder to come by, there were

threads of it but it wasn’t really a thing, so she started to explore more of that and did two prenatal yoga trainings, ritual training, and deep connection with the earth training. A natural apprenticeship with the elements. 

And she started offering circles, which organically grew and began honouring so many life passages, and big life events, evolving into birthdays, threshold moments, and other celebrations.

People tend to think about ritual as something sort of religious or rigid or very serious. So, we’re defining ritual in a whole other way. Ritual can be a very liberating force in our life. 

Alli read a quote from one of her beloved local authors, Toca Paterner, “Ritual is an ancient technology which helps us connect the unseen to the scene realms, connect deep with our inner and outer rhythms in a way that weaves greater togetherness.”

I love that.

A weaving together of the inner and outer worlds and it’s that acknowledgement, that sacred pause, to recognize we are cosmic beings. We get so caught up in our day-to-day, and the mundane, and the things that we need to do to make the world move forward that ritual and ceremony become important causes for us to recognize ourselves and who we are, and to help us connect with

ourselves. 

And it’s not just a connection with ourselves. It’s also a

way to have deeper connection with the earth and with our world,

It’s very shamanic.

Ritual doesn’t have to be a big huge thing. I’ve disciplined myself to pray over my food, to bless my food, because in that moment,

I’m connecting to the very first seeds of its becoming on earth, to fill it with light, and make it the most alkaline for my body, to create a new dance between the food and me, and to send the spirit of the food back to source, and that it’s clean and creates cleanliness and unity to go back to the earth to start the process all over again. And that is a ritual, even though it’s just me, and my food. 

I bless my car every time before I drive it to make it a safe and wonderful journey and container because I want to be in connection with everything. This can take literally 60 seconds. Ritual can be quick. 

It’s something that we’ve done for millennia. A part of being human, part of our connection, and presence, but a lot of us have lost it, unfortunately. 

You can have a ritual shower and picture yourself being cleansed with white light imagining all the old energy and stuck energies being released from you. 

Alli has a daily ritual of lighting a candle in the morning, and taking a moment to think of things that she’s grateful for, and then she goes into prayer and meditation as well. But something simple like that, lighting a candle, thinking of three things that you’re

grateful for. That could be a profoundly devotional practice if you’re doing it every day. Ritual is more about the intention of things.

We have our rituals with ourselves. You can have your ritual with your child, your friend, your partner, with spirit. It’s absolutely beautiful. 

It’s up to you how you integrate ritual into your own life and how you bring your children into it. There’s no hard and fast rules. 

Ritual helped Alli tune in to her sovereignty, her own personal power, and sense of agency in the world. And I know so many people are struggling in their lives feeling like they don’t really own their lives. 

Like we’re not the main character, we’re victims of all these things happening outside of our control, the politics, the chaos. You know,

there’s so much that we could just get swept up into. 

And ritual is constantly a reminder and re-reminder again and again that you can come back home (hand on heart) anytime you wish. Ritual is there and it’s the ritual of coming home to your body, and to the earth.

Alli lives by the ocean, so the ritual of just throwing a stone with her

blessing into the water; she doesn’t need to pay anybody for that, or need to ask for permission or have any certain belief system, religion, lineage, or ancestry to connect with that. What a gift! 

That’s available to all of us and feels so empowering when there’s,

a real soul hunger for so many of us. Especially for those in the West that weren’t raised with ritual. They weren’t raised with these shamanic practices or with ritual that felt aligned for them. 

Maybe some had religion and maybe that was beneficial or maybe it was traumatic. And I know a lot of people feel averse to ritual because of some traumatic experiences with religion. So I feel like that ritual becomes a beautiful, very personal thing that they can reconnect in a way that feels aligned and congruent for them.

There’s no priest, no guru, no one saying how it has to go. It’s you and your spirit, whatever your higher power is. It allows you to stop running away from yourself or escaping into one thing or the other at least for a few moments. 

If you know that you have a strong sense of self, that you’re grounded and aligned and that your energy is flowing properly, you can come home to this silent space within. That’s why everybody’s always talking about, “Oh, meditate, meditate, still your mind…” except there’s many ways to do that too. 

Ritual is a beautiful way to still your mind because it’s giving

you something to focus on, even the act of lighting a candle or lighting the Palo Santo wood to smudge your energy. Or gardening, for example, can be very sacred because your hands are in the earth and all of these things can be seen as ritual and self -transformative meditative time with yourself, your higher self and spirit. 

Rituals are happening around us everywhere, weddings, funerals, holidays. Sports! I think because people are hungry for it, they look for it in different ways, maybe even subconsciously not knowing. 

I always start with the moon because we all have some kind of connection with the moon, whether you’ve established that relationship or not, but that’s just an easy one to start with,

because at the new moon, that’s such a beautiful time to plant seeds for calling in what you’re setting the ground for, for the next month, for bringing in your vision, your prayers, and wishes, into manifestation.

And then the full moon. Creating a ritual around the new moon and full moon, because full moon is all about celebration, that harvest and accumulation of all your hard work, and then also the release. For me, I like having a fire ceremony because fire transmutes energy to light.

What are you not letting go of? What what are you ready to let go of before you enter this new cycle? And even that simple connection of looking and seeing what the moon is doing. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling?” It’s an invitation to reflect. It’s an invitation to go within and again, have that self sovereignty. What a beautiful gift, a pause to check in.

We’re coming up to the Pink Full Moon on Sunday the 13th.

Pause, check in with yourself, reflect.  What do you need? 

More inner connection? Book a free call.