Ritual and Ceremony

Ceremony can support us to live life more fully and to connect with other realms.
Hilary Kneale

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
If you block it, it will never exist… The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is
nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

 
Martha Graham, dancer
 
 
Ceremony is a girding and a gathering.

The more I sit amidst gatherings of people that come together as a ‘Medicine Circle’ under the umbrella of the study and practice of shamanism, the more I perceive real difference in the map that is each unique human being.

I sit in the circle alongside people who perceive the world in very different ways. I see that some people actively work with energy, while others work through dream, I sit with others who find wisdom and understanding through their acute sense of smell or other senses, each living within different rhythms in a unique bodily structure. Some remember every teaching they are given, and others cannot remember or make real sense of a single word, until the teaching is lodged in their body, beyond the need to ‘remember’ with the mind. I see that our diverse maps are coloured with our different personal histories and stories and that through these, our perception of time and space is also mutable. I am learning to see all our different ways of learning and perceiving, to see our many perspectives and to see each as a truth.

As I become more aware of the ways that we humans experience all life, through these myriad ‘ways of seeing’, I see above all our different relationships with our home the earth, the places where we emerge out of the ‘great mystery’ and into our difference. I liken these gatherings of mysteries, to the multitude constellations of stars and around the earth, each human a unique constellation. I see beauty in these clusters of stars, and perceive them as maps of all possibility.

I see myself as one of the ‘earth walkers’. Through my body and through physical relationship with the living biosphere of the earth, I seek answers to my questions. I receive information when I walk, I call for information in preparation in advance of offering a healing session, at other times I sit with the earth in preparation for or while in ceremony. Through these practices, I am learning to attune with ‘all my relations’, all beings living within the collective consciousness of the earth. I am learning to be guided, earth is my body and energy is my language or medium. I am learning through this of time past, time present and time future, all present at once within ‘energy time’.

‘I visit a deep ‘bowl’ in a wood, a place where over many years I have walked and have also sat quietly in contemplation. I am learning here that I also am a part of the landscape. I see new leaf emerge from the trees and see the old leaves falling, I see the shoots and leaves and flowers of blue bell emerge from the earth and see their moving back into seed and then their dying back to the earth again having given their seed. The badger tracks and my own tracks now cross each other again and again, the Spring undergrowth around our Winter tracks is new and fat with water. I move through the wood at ‘animal height’, crawling, rolling, sitting, sniffing, re-entering and re-introducing myself to the bowl. I witness the growers and the nesters, hear the singers and the crawlers, I sense my breath and watch my breath mingle with the air and fly with the wind. As I move, I remember that this wood is also ancient coral reef once washed over by ocean, residue of ancient shells in fossil form, fall from the rocky outcrops, are dug out of badger sets. Here in the wood there is a very slow turning to renewal, when I look in contrast to the renewal of tidal landscape, washed anew twice daily. Here in the wood any vigorous action may stay as mark or track for more than a moon.

Each week I visit the same place in the wood and enter a new landscape, all is in motion. I bring my own changing weather and seasons to the shifting weathers and seasons of the wood. I am falling in love with rain.’

I come to my practice through everyday ritual as well as ceremonial ritual. My grandmother would often refer to ‘the daily round, the common task’ prayerful action amongst the quotidian, her words are often with me.

From my perspective, ceremony is a key to entering ‘another way’ and a move towards a unified field within the self and within a gathering of humans, a gathering in which all parts are heard and where all present have a sense of equality, a portal created by ceremony and or ritual comes with a strong call that can bring us fully into the here and now.

‘Rock skin. Smoothing of the surface. Moving of the surface. A live skin washed smooth, rattled by pebbles and grazed by snails. The warm rocks invite me to curl around them. I am supported by the undulating skin. Pebbles fill the crevices between the places where I am in contact with the bed rock, I lie as if I too have been washed countless times by moon pulled ocean. The pebbles hold me gently along the edges of my body as I shape myself against the soft rounded rock. I move and rest, move and rest and within this resting I am supported. I become a part of the landscape and see landscapes meeting, their edges blurring and merging into each other, earth meets ocean, meets wide rocky tidal land, meets snail land meets microscopic microbe land and sky meets the edge of my skin and enters my lungs where it enters the surging movement of blood. My heart beats, my breath enters and leaves, my limbs melt into the surfaces of the bedrock. I move the large pebble over me as if water, it is folded and enfolded in my limbs, we enter the pool, slip out of time and enter the pool.’

In time, with experience built through practice, I have found it possible to begin to support and to guide other ‘seekers’ toward healing, through healing ceremony, Vision Quest ceremony, Rainbow Lodge ceremony, fire ceremony, journey work, medicine song and medicine dance.

The song of ceremony.

We are gathered in a circle and the drum sings the rhythm of a heart beat and we begin to enter the song. Quietly at first we sing the familiar sounds that speak through us from the past, words that were given to the ancestors emerge from our throats. We sing the words but we may not yet feel them or sense them. The song continues to make its call upon the circle.

It has been after many years of singing familiar and ancient songs that I have begun to hear them and feel them as though through us, they are sung by the ancestors who first gave them sound as they emerged from the heart or earth or waters or sky.

I am sung in deeper and deeper by the song, the echo that emerges from my drum is older and older, on and on we sing. There is an urgency that builds in the spaces between the sounds and the beat of the drum, the urgency transforms time and space and all present, human, ancestor, breath, heart and spirit become one. Sound begins to stream out beyond those gathered and to weave itself, mending and healing and opening and releasing and building and shaping. The singing ends, and in the deep filled quiet we continue to hear and see and feel all that is remembered.

Ceremony is an alchemists garden.

Imagination, vision, adventure, intuition, clarity, and heart are some of the tools that I carry into ceremony. Ceremony can open portals into the beginning.

The art and beauty of ceremony creates a strong call to be present. The power of ceremony is in the present, is the present. Ceremony can hold all that has gone before and all potential in the future within the present moment. Nothing of the self can be left outside the ceremony if we are to serve the power and healing potential of ceremony. Ceremony is created within the sacred dream of life, is filled with the power of vitality and integrity and then enters the present moment. All potential is available in the present moment that is ceremony. Ceremony can be called out of the web of life and as it recedes again, we hold the residue awake in our hearts.

As we enter ceremony, we ‘build’ a place in time and space to inhabit, this place is ‘built’ through raising energy and is protected so that all present can stand in their full potential within the present and be enabled to work within the intention for the ceremony with hearts clean and clear. Ceremony is created through the beauty of the heart.

One form of Ceremony that I am passionate about guiding for others, is Vision Quest, which is also called Vision Fast or Wilderness Quest. I trained with Northern Drum to guide and become guardian of Vision Quest in 2009 after taking part in many quests on my own behalf. Since the Guardianship training, I guide at least one Vision Quest yearly with Rick Lockwood (Hollow Bone www.hollowbone.co.uk ), I continue to take part in at least one personal Vision Quest ceremony each year. I am committed to bringing this rich work of remembrance into the lives of others.

I value the rich experiences I have received through Vision Quest ceremony. The teachings that have come to me from time alone with Mother Earth sit within my body and have grown to inform my daily life. Mother Earth is deeply generous with her medicine if only we take the time to ask her for teaching, to guide our intuition and then take time to integrate and receive the healing and balancing that she offers. I see that I experience and live life differently, more heartfully, more peacefully and more present, as a consequence of time spent in ceremony alone with the earth.

Guardians of Vision Quest, guide Seekers though their preparation, are along side them in this. Guardians prepare camp in the ‘beauty way’, feed the Seekers well in the days of preparation and offer teachings for their tool bags. With teachings to support them, and days of deepening ceremony to prepare them, the Seekers are guided toward the gateway. Intention is a crucial ingredient in the ceremony, Seekers are supported to formulate an intention and then hone it down to a few words to be spoken and worked with as a powerful ‘prayer statement’ during the Quest, this can become the tip of the arrow that breaks the air for the Seeker to be guided by and to follow during their time alone.

When the dawn of the day to pass through the portal arises, the Guardians will have done their part, they will now support the Vision Quest through keeping the sacred fire alight day and night and through prayer. Mother Earth is the true healer here, she will welcome her children home.

The Seeker will pass through the gateway alone, intention, medicine tools, water and tent, is all that she will take. Three days and three nights she will spend in solitude with the earth, sitting, walking and ‘praying’ inside a small circle that she will trace around herself and stay within, day and night. Mother Earth will hear her and she will send her signs of support and she will give her healing. The Seeker will return to her life renewed. After the Quest the Guardians and the other Seekers will witness her medicine story.

After ceremony ‘no trace’ is left, any trace is internal and within the spirit world.

The work truly begins now that the Seeker has begun to ‘remember’ who they truly are and to take steps to find ways to live in line with the truth within ‘ordinary reality’.

‘Six months after Vision Quest’, these words came from a ‘Seeker’, who speaks of bringing a newly received level of consciousness, initially perceived during Vision Quest ceremony, into ‘ordinary reality’.

‘This has been an extraordinary year, so much precognition, will before consciousness. My time alone had a profound impact, seemed to open a portal to the fertile void, an unthought known ‘knowing’. It feels like I started to ‘understand’ at a cellular level, at a heart level, what I have ‘known’ the theory of, for some time. The mantra ‘I step out of fear and doubt into heart wisdom’ has been my companion and ally and, the ‘clearing everything out of the space’ experience, in my circle, has been a powerful metaphor to live out. Things, pieces, somethings, have been dropping in all year, and I feel real clarity for the first time in my life as to what really matters, the ‘one thing’, the oneness. It feels like I am fully inhabiting the life that I have and the days that I’m gifted with bring reverence and deep appreciation.’

These words and others like them, writ alongside my own experiences are what bring me to work with ritual and inside ceremony, this ‘remembering’.

I willingly enter the Alchemists Garden again and again.