Reclaiming Ritual

D.N.A. Candle - Vanitas II by GlendonMellow

This holiday season I am discovering the joy of reclaiming ritual – realigning my holiday plans with my desire for genuine connection, rather than following the rote scripts of how holidays are “supposed” to be celebrated. For many years I rejected the traditions of most holidays as I decided that it did not make sense to blindly follow a prescriptive observance created by people with values quite different from my own. This decision, however, led to many years of sterile holidays – holidays that had been stripped of traditions I did not feel connected with, and yet still empty because I had not replaced these rejected traditions with new ways of celebrating. This year I am working to realign my holiday celebrations by developing meaningful rituals that speak to my own deep truths and to the essential value each holiday is trying to honor.  I have been learning how to create rituals for the past year or so, and the ceremony that marked my 30th birthday last February was the first time I designed my own ritual. Redesigning Hanukkah is my first experiment of this year, and so far the new celebration is incredibly meaningful for me. This year’s observance feels more alive and vibrant than any Hanukkah I’ve ever experienced, and is also a much more accurate reflection of my own spiritual beliefs. Additionally, the process of co-creating the ritual has been an unbelievably powerful experience. In order to create this new ritual, we needed to reflect on what Hanukkah means to us, and what aspects of the holiday resonate for each of us personally. This was a difficult task for me because I have many layers of fond memories and connection to particular moments I spent with people on Hanukkah that mean a lot to me, but aren’t actually connected to the holiday observance. Going through this process has helped me to separate those positive memories from the holiday rituals I do not find as meaningful.

I have been on a journey of spiritual discovery for the past several years, trying to figure out where the religion of my childhood fits into my adult spirituality. I am not religious, but do feel a powerful connection to all beings, to my ancestors and descendants, and to the ineffable mysteries of the Universe. Growing up, I always felt connected to the ritual aspects of Judaism, particularly to the ritual objects and ways of marking time in community. As I continue to explore the power of ritual in my life, I am starting to see how I can merge the Jewish calendar and connection to family and community with more authentic and meaningful rituals in my life. This new approach of reclaiming holidays is leaving me with a much more satisfying experience than my previous tactic of rejecting them outright. I still haven’t figured out most American holidays such as Thanksgiving, which continues to be a rather distressing day of overconsumption and chit chat, but hopefully by this time next year I’ll be ready to create a more meaningful Thanksgiving experience as well.

The Power of Reframing

Photo by Liz Acosta

As I continue to talk back to the negative voices in my head, I am discovering how effect it is to reframe the shadows in myself that these voices condemn. There is a purpose and positive aspect to all of my struggles, and embracing this is a powerful means of counteracting the negative voices with gratitude rather than with an internal shouting match. For example, yesterday I was struggling to redirect a negative coping strategy of overeating, replacing it with journaling to figure out why I was feeling the need to numb my emotions. I was successfully able to intervene at that moment, and to discover the subconscious emotional issue that I was trying to avoid thinking about. In that moment I felt a deep gratitude for the more destructive coping strategy, because it is a powerful indicator that can tell me when I have needs that are not being met. This gives me the opportunity to reassess the present moment, adjust what I’m doing, and actually improve the situation rather than continuing to suppress my own reality. These older habits are actually beautiful gifts that afford me self-awareness, and are therefore incredibly valuable. I have never felt this way about habits I am trying to shed, and it was a moment of deep liberation.

In order to rewire my brain, I am studying the neural pathways that already exist so that I can better understand how to adjust the structure of my brain. One of the ways I can study my own brain is to re-read old journals. I have kept a journal since I was 5 years old on and off, and very consistently since I was 15. I was re-reading my journal from 15 to 17 years old yesterday, and was amazed by how well I knew my self and my issues then, and also by how quickly I believed they could be healed. At 17 I was surprised and dismayed to still be dealing with the same issues as I had been at 15. Little did I know I’d still be addressing many of them at 30! At 17 one area I was working on was patience. I thought I needed patience because I was almost an adult and still not fully self-actualized as the person I wanted to be, so I was working on having patience with myself as I continued to improve. I imagined it would take another year or two to “solve” all my problems and be exactly who I wanted to be – my highest self. This timeline seems laughable now, but I can still remember how long one year felt at that point, and how old I thought I was, how far behind in my process I imagined myself to be. I continue to struggle with patience at times and with unrealistic expectations for myself, and yet I have so much compassion for that naïve 17 year old, and for the still developing 30 year old I am today. 

Now I am reframing my process not as a goal-oriented struggle that has to be completed by some deadline, but as a lifelong journey of joyful liberation and gentle self-actualization. There is no “end,” at no point will I have achieved my goal of reaching my highest self. There is always more to uncover, more to discover, more to create, more to enjoy, more to envision, more to give and more to receive. Patience isn’t about being able to wait longer, it’s about seeing every moment as precious just as it is, without waiting for the “good” moments and numbing the “bad”. It’s about being here, now, in each moment as it unfolds. I am very excited by this new reframing technique, which I think can extend into many areas of my life. Have you used this technique successfully in your own process of self-transformation? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section if you have.

The beauty of wobbly beginnings

newborn fawn just 2 minutes after birth by Clay Junell

Each day that I engage deeply with my process of self-transformation is an opportunity to learn more about myself and grow as a person. This can feel really exciting and empowering, yet also disconcerting and unsteady as I dig deeply into the hidden parts of my psyche. While I try to engage in this process with a beginner’s mind, with not needing to be an expert in order to feel a sense of worthiness, I find it difficult to maintain this outlook at times. The more I yearn for a particular change inside myself, the harder it can be to accept the reality of my current experience. For example, I struggle to name my emotions as I’m experiencing them, often needing to refer to a list of feeling words to try and find the applicable emotion on the chart. The dissonance between where I am and where I’d like to be in this process can feel overwhelming, and the voices of self-judgment take the opportunity to reappear. I am working to shift from resistance to acceptance of where I am in my process by seeing the beauty of wobbly beginnings.

I want to view my own early stumblings and tentative steps like the endearing wobbliness of a baby fawn just learning to walk. The tender vulnerability of that moment is beautiful and precious, and is always happening at just the right time. The critical voice inside my head disagrees – it proclaims that perhaps wobbliness is indeed beautiful in a baby, but that I am too grown to be a beginner at anything. The voice says that it is too late for me to improve, and that I should just feel shame for where I am and never let anyone see me until I have everything perfectly formed. This is a very familiar voice, one that I have lived with for as long as I can remember. It used to sound like my own voice, like this was my own true belief. The more I have worked on self-compassion, however, the more I am able to externalize this critical voice. Now that it is no longer a constant companion, it is easier to recognize it as distinct from my own voice. Once it starts talking, however, it sounds so familiar and so personal that it is very difficult to disbelieve what it says. So today I am trying a new tactic – giving this critic a funny voice and unfamiliar accent – to emphasize that it is a foreign entity trying to infect me with negativity rather than a part of my true self. Today I choose to not just accept, but to celebrate, the beauty of being a beginner in order to counteract the judgments running through my head – in a strangely high-pitched Australian intonation.

HeART for Brains One Year Later…

By Stephanie Costa, Creative Commons-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One year ago today, I began an experiment to reconnect my mind, heart, body, and soul. I started with a 90-day intensive period to create new habits of self-reflection, self-care and connection with folks in my life who are also committed to self-transformation. Grounded in neuroscience and with a growing connection to my spirituality, I have been cultivating faith in myself – a belief that it is possible to create radical change in any aspect of my life and myself. Through this process, I have also found faith in the potential we all have to heal and transform our selves, supporting each other in community. As an activist and educator, part of my true self has always believed in the possibility of real change personally, interpersonally, and globally, and yet there have been so many dark nights and so many negative voices in my head countering that worldview of infinite human potential. Many times I have felt weighed down by the enormity of the problems we all face – of my personal pain, of the ways in which my communities harm ourselves and sabotage our own liberation, and the overwhelming scale of human suffering and degradation in the larger world. Through what I have witnessed this year in myself and in the supportive role of my communities, however, I have birthed a deep belief in the resilience of the human spirit, of myself, and of the world around me.

As I try to make sense of the work of re-wiring my brain, as I strive to explain the “results” I have seen from this process, I find myself crying, laughing, and shaking my head in amazement, overwhelmed by the changes this year has brought about in my life. Even this reaction is a testament to the efficacy of this process. In reconnecting to my heart, I have newfound access to the emotional highs and lows that were once so far from my conscious experience. Growing up in a mind-dominated culture, in an intellectually oriented family, encouraged since birth to dissociate from my body, spirit, and emotions, my capacity for emotional experience was quite limited. I was numb, frozen, and experiencing the world from behind a wall of ice. I was here, but not Present.

For most of the past year I was at war with this wall, combatting it and trying to topple it roughly, aggressively, with self-hatred as the fuel. I saw this wall as evidence of my brokenness, something that had to be fixed for me to be okay, for me to be lovable to myself and to others. I had envisioned this clear wall to be made of plexiglass that I needed to shatter. This approach involved violence, struggle, and resistance, which are all qualities I am releasing from my life. I was conceiving of change within the same destructive framework I had always known. Now I see this barrier between myself and the world as ice rather than glass, re-visioning plexiglass as permafrost. Although this metaphor may sound ecologically suspect given the environmental threat that melting icecaps plays in our world today, on the personal level this metaphor is apt. This frost has always existed around my heart and melting it is causing significant and frightening shifts to my internal landscape, and yet this change is crucial to my life’s journey.

I am now focused on embracing the ice that encircles my heart, melting it into a pond of clear water with the power of self-love. This technique feels much more aligned with my new practices of self-care and self-respect, and has also created a noticeable impact in a much shorter time than my previous method of self-abuse masked as self-improvement. This radical shift in my approach happened only a few weeks ago, after almost a year of cultivating this new outlook, these new techniques for growth and change, and a group of like-minded supporters who can help me navigate through the treacherous roads of my old neural pathways while I’m in the process of building the new ones.

Through this process, I have come to see how slow change is actually be fast, when I zoom out a bit. The foundational work I did in the first 90-days of this year led the way for much more dramatic shifts to occur many months later, including shifting my view of the wall around my heart from one made of plexiglass to seeing it as a layer of permafrost. This is just one example of how every step of this process is based on previous assumptions, which are really just neural pathway ruts. As new neural roads get built and older ruts get filled in with dirt, I am able to form radical new ideas that would have been impossible to conceive of when I was still working with the previous architecture of my brain.

After one year of brain rewiring, I feel ready for another 90-day intensive period of building new habits that can help support me in this growth process. I’m not entirely sure yet how this new 90 days will work and what role this blog will play, but I do know that I am ready to add new habits to my life, to expand the role that self-care plays in my daily existence, and to do more work on the foundations of my neural structures to allow for further growth. I am also in the incubation phase of figuring out how to offer the wisdom I have gained from this process to others. There are many changes to come and I look forward to sharing them with you, and to hearing more about how your lives are changing as well.