The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

Making room for play is about learning what things awaken joy for you, and making time for those special things.

My invitation is to turn those practices into regular, sacred times of sabbath. Put it on the calendar. Make it a rule.

When we keep a sabbath, we get to practice saying “no.” No one will enforce it for us.

We must be the ones to choose sabbath, and that is profoundly difficult!

Tricia Hersey, the creator of the Nap Ministry, describes rest as a form of resistance, because it pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. “Our bodies are a site of liberation,” she explains on her website.

I often say to myself that the work is not done, and yet it is still time to stop.

In sabbath time we get to know ourselves as we are. And with that comes great self-compassion. Sabbath gives us perspective. It reconnects us with our imagination. We can envision new ways in which the world might work.

Sabbath time will look different for each of us. Much depends on the caring responsibilities we have and the rhythm of our lives. But even if we can’t be alone, we can come to share time differently by simply creating a small ritual with a candle or a piece of music.

By keeping a sabbath, we can remember that all is well and that we are part of the invisible kinship of all things. That we are beloved and beautiful. Sabbath helps us connect with ourselves by reminding us that we are profoundly good enough—just as we are.

With one in five Americans saying they are lonely, relationships with our family, friends, and broader community help us live longer and happier lives.

it is not so much the number of relationships in our life, but their quality, that matters most. Living in the midst of conflict is deeply destructive for our health, while living in the midst of warm relationships is protective.

Finally, the study concluded that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains. When we feel like we can count on other people in times of need, our memory stays intact for longer.

In our research for How We Gather, we found two consistent community-building trends: people getting together to eat, and people getting together to work out.

There is no better way to build community than to eat together. For millennia, humans have shared food.

By sitting down together, we signal that we need one another.

Can you hear the echo of Heschel’s idea here: that the sabbath is a palace in time? In the same way, a sacred practice draws us out of our everyday habits and into a deeper presence.

The Dinner Party is no longer just a small regular gathering in Los Angeles: it is a worldwide community with ordinary people creating meaningful connections with one another.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously wrote, “In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined . . . turn out to be the same world.” In other words, ritual invites us to enter a way of life that we may barely glimpse, to be transported into a future that is simultaneously filled with our intention and yet remains delightfully unpredictable.

The irony is that in contexts where we’re pushed to be together, whether a dormitory or military basic training, we form relationships that don’t even need to be friendships. In dining halls all over the country, by eating together over and over again, we learn that we don’t have to like a person in order to love them. Cooking together, sitting down at a table to eat together, especially when that happens again and again over time, is the best way to create that kind of close continuous contact.

In other words, though we don’t need to declare which foods we can or can’t eat, we should repurpose a model of committing to those we eat with.

This practice means sitting down together even when we’re tired or in a bad mood, when we’re new and know it will be awkward, or when we’ve had a fight with the one we love. It means accepting that some gatherings will be boring or unpleasant and that we have to keep sitting down.

Imagine making the commitment to have someone who needs community over every Sunday night.

This is how eating together can become a sacred practice.

“our bodies can hold tension and negative emotions that can be released during physical activity.”

Our emotional brain is less inhibited when we’re exhausted, meaning that high-intensity workouts can give us a powerful emotional release. This, then, is the first practice that we can deepen through exercise: breaking down our vulnerability barriers.

This is what makes exercise a powerful connector, even among strangers—our bodies are doing the speaking. In a culture that values rationality and dismisses emotion as untrustworthy, it has become difficult to access our vulnerable core through words and thoughts alone. And especially in public.

West African spiritual teacher and writer Malidoma Patrice Somé explains that before beginning a ritual, you own the journey. You are in control. But “once the ritual begins, the journey owns you.” Somé argues that the lack of modern rituals in the West is in large part because many of us have an overwhelming desire to be in control, which is antithetical to ritual. “To surrender the sense of control can be terrifying.” Yet that’s exactly what spaces like SoulCycle offer: an experience of surrender.

We may come into a workout feeling the anxiety and stress, pressure and pain of everyday life. Exercising together can reset us in our own bodies, but also as part of a collective body. We remember our togetherness.

The key is to find a way to reflect on meaningful questions together during or straight after a shared, physically challenging experience.

So try and recruit a friend, set a time, and then—as with any sacred practice—intentionally start the activity not so much focused on burning calories but on how you can connect with your fellow adventurer. You might ask a question like “What’s inspiring you at the moment?” or “Who taught you how to keep going when times are hard?”

When we’re in the rhythm of the collective, we can be freed of our isolationist perspective. For a brief period of time, the lie of our separateness is exposed, and we remember that we are wholly connected to one another.

“Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships with parents, is different,” writes Vanier. “But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it.”

Why not take a cue from ancient traditions and choose one of these relationships and commit to hosting six meals for them in the coming year.

Search the hundreds of thousands of meetups, and choose five near you to check out, even if you go with zero expectation to return.

We’ll explore three ancient practices: pilgrimage, celebrating the seasons, and reimagining the distinction between our bodies and the outside world.

Pilgrimages of any scale follow the same broad architecture with three phases. The first is the setting of a purpose or intention.

The second phase is the journey itself.

In the final phase, the arrival and return, we integrate what we’ve experienced on the road back into our own lives.

This practice of circumambulation is a key spiritual tool to transform any journey into a pilgrimage. By making repeated circles around our destination, we create a sacred center.

Circumambulation allows us to see every angle of our destination or the object of our veneration.

walk you’ve taken before can become a mini pilgrimage if you infuse it with openness to transformation during the experience and a keen, observant attitude. Things get churned up by walking. You wonder. You reminisce. You question.

Pilgrimage can happen anywhere: a hike in the desert or a walk around the block, solo camping in the Rockies or a family trip to the dog park. What matters is setting an intention before we head out, paying attention to the natural world along the way—using all five senses if possible—and returning home again with a new perspective.

This isn’t new: philosopher and essayist Henry David Thoreau, who once wrote that “every walk is a sort of crusade,” famously walked tens of miles a day to enjoy nature and resolve writer’s block.

Our souls are free to create and invent. There are as many ways of honoring the dead, of celebrating life, of welcoming a child into the world as there are human beings. Just because things have been done one way for some time does not mean they should never evolve. What matters is whether what we’re doing feels alive, whether it is connecting us across the four levels of ourselves, one another, the natural world, and the transcendent.

Without a rhythm to our lives, we lose our spiritual sensibility. Simply celebrating the changing weather patterns and seasonal celebrations is a way to bring us back into harmony with our natural landscape.

My invitation to you is to deepen your existing practices and discover new ones to connect with the natural world. For most of us, the problem is that we are less and less engaged with nature, yet the good news is we aren’t completely severed from it. Depending on where you live, honoring the seasons might involve marking the start of spring, summer, autumn, and winter or celebrating the rainy monsoon and dry seasons.

Benedictine nun Joan Chittister refers to the repeating liturgical calendar as “an exercise in spiritual ripening.” Though the festivals don’t change, we do. Our lives are leavened with the yeast of celebration. The year comes alive to our imagination—meaning there’s always something to look forward to.

Of course, the power in these celebrations is not just doing it once. The wisdom of marking the seasons is that we return to them year in and year out. In doing so, we notice things in nature that we may not have noticed before.

The outer world becomes a metaphor for our own, unknown, inner landscape. Sometimes the bare tree in the drab, gray morning rain speaks to my sadness in a way I hadn’t yet found words for. Or my eye will catch a bird in its branches, flying back and forth, mirroring how my own brain travels back and forth, back and forth. In this way, we can look out at the natural world as if it were a sacred text, “rereading” the view from one window again and again to find new connections, new meaning.

Joanna Macy, the great Buddhist environmental activist, explains that “the world itself, if we are bold to love it, acts through us. It does not ask us to be pure or perfect, or wait until we are detached from all passions, but only to care, to harness the sweet, pure intention of our deepest passions.”