The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

Macy in her book World as Lover, World as Self.

I’ve learned to understand moments like this as prayer. I’ve always been suspicious of that word, but I’ve discovered that prayer practices are beautiful, powerful, and perhaps even necessary for us to feel deeply connected to what is beyond us.

Prayer wasn’t just ridiculous—it seemed actively harmful. It belonged to a time when we didn’t understand how diseases spread or how weather patterns changed. Prayer was, in short, for fools. But today, I understand it differently. It still isn’t a heavenly jukebox.

Instead, the practice of prayer is about being conscious of—and telling the truth about—how we really feel and think, taking what has been unconscious and bringing it into open awareness.

I love this definition of prayer so much!

Prayer is about listening to what our hearts know to be true: the deep loves and longings that live within everyone.

In this chapter, we’ll look at four types of prayer: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication.

Sometimes people worry about gratitude seeming selfish or self-involved, as others have so little. Brown argues the opposite: “When you are grateful for what you have, I know you understand the magnitude of what I have lost.”

Gratitude isn’t just for yourself, ironically. Being grateful actually helps us show up for others. It won’t surprise you that recent research suggests that gratitude improves our mental well-being, too.

gratitude is an affirmation of goodness:

Giving thanks to that source of goodness outside ourselves—whether a specific person, the luck of a certain opportunity, or something more deeply spiritual—contributes to reorienting our lives away from the dominant cultural narrative of our own successes, desires, and ambitions and toward a perspective that is more holistic.

love to follow Jack Kornfield’s Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) meditation practice, where we repeat three intentions over and over again. We start with ourselves, then turn to someone we love, then to a stranger, and then to someone with whom we are struggling:

May I be safe and free from suffering. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be. May I have ease of being. May [she] be safe and free from suffering. May [she] be as happy and healthy as it is possible for [her] to be. May [she] have ease of being.

Prayer is like a workshop for the soul. In it, we get to work out all the kinks and knots of life. It can soften resentment and make space for forgiveness. What we do might not magically change other people or the world outside, but prayer certainly changes us.

Supplication can look like intentional well-wishing, but it can also simply be the process by which we lift up the things in life we need help with.

That is the power of supplicatory prayer. It creates a place for fear and simultaneously puts fear in its place.

A spaciousness appears, a bigger perspective on our suffering.

Zen Buddhist teacher and writer Cheri Huber takes this practice one step further. She explains how you can use your phone to record yourself speaking aloud all your fears, pains, and angers—describing all the frustrations you feel in great detail. Then, after taking a short break, listen to the recording, as if hearing someone else’s problems, and bring to them the kind of compassion and love that you would to a friend or stranger. After listening through loving ears, record a loving message back to yourself with some words of wisdom and care. Then, after another break, listen to that second message.

A true blessing affirms two things. First, our blessings affirm our inherent wholeness. A blessing is never about developing ourselves or becoming more holy and enlightened. It is the gift of helping one another to remember our ever-present enough-ness. And second, our blessings affirm our inherent interconnectedness.

O’Donohue describes blessings as “a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen.” In this, he drew on ancient Celtic spiritual practice. The Celts drew a caim—a circle—around themselves in times of danger.

Spiritual growth doesn’t depend on doing more than the soul is probably already doing, but on doing the same things in a design instead of in a muddle.

A Rule of Life is a way of centering our commitment to a way of being and the rituals and practices that help us live our lives in this way.

Brother David Vryhof called Living Intentionally: A Workbook for Creating a Personal Rule of Life.

Rest is necessary. Without it, pleasurable things become chores. Priorities fall out of sight, and I fall into destructive behavior patterns. Rest is a responsibility—to the work I care about and the people who look to me for leadership.

In sabbath time, I can lay down my grasping nature and enjoy every breath. I sing. I draw. I write. I sleep. I walk. I eat. I talk. I listen. I am quiet. I ponder. I light a candle.

After all, what we practice, we become.

Spirituality and religion always deal with tensions, ambiguities, and mysteries. To some extent, that’s what they are there for.

As we live out our longing by setting intentions and engaging our practices of deep connection, it can start to feel like another item on the to-do list.

But nurturing a lifestyle that acknowledges the soul, that makes space for connection, and that heals isolation can be reframed to be less about work and more about organic growth.

We don’t manufacture connection. It grows, like a tree, with time.

For him, connection is remembered, or revealed, because we are already “dangerously involved with each other in an incredibly intimate but unseen way.” That’s what it means to be human. Connection just is. We are each connected to every other thing.

Connection, for O’Donohue, is about love awakening in our lives.

And here is the paradoxical secret: connection and isolation are bound to each other.

We simply cannot know connection without also experiencing disconnection.

Remember that both are true. The vast emptiness and the eternal connection. The sense of total aloneness and the interdependent belovedness. It is the paradox in which we live.