The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

Our emotional brain is less inhibited when we’re exhausted, meaning that high-intensity workouts can give us a powerful emotional release.

“Today is the day where you recognize that your dream is valid. It’s already in you! It’s already been downloaded in your DNA. The capacity to be what you are called, created, and destined to be is in you!”

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.

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.”

For a brief period of time, the lie of our separateness is exposed, and we remember that we are wholly connected to one another. It’s not that our individuality disappears, but that we are no longer blinded by individualism.

This is the guiding principle of a healthy, meaningful fitness community: a community can flourish only when each individual member flourishes. Nobody is forced to surrender their identity or level of skill and confidence.

Aldous Huxley famously saw dance as particularly important to human culture.

“Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other,” Huxley wrote. “It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.”

Though we long for connection and love from others, we also fear it the most. It means taking the risk to be vulnerable and open.

We worry that we’ll be constricted by the relationships of care, that our creativity will suffer. We want to belong and then fear the little sacrifices that this belonging will demand of us as we make space for others around us.

We want to be special. Different. Unique. We fear the discipline and commitment t...

in the moments of loneliness, we know that the cost of staying afraid and disconnected is too great. This is a time for...

A pilgrimage isn’t defined by distance, but by transformation.

Pilgrimages of any scale follow the same broad architecture with three phases.

The first is the setting of a purpose or intention. This might be healing, marking a loss, asking for forgiveness, exploring a new life phase or transition, or simply reconnecting with joy.

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.

Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton wrote insightfully, “Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful.

conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.”

“Tradition is living and active,” Merton writes, “but convention ...

We have permission to create new practices, to adapt old ones, and to mix them together.

liturgical time is a never-ending circle. I love knowing that, however I succeed or fail in whatever venture or relationship, liturgical time, together with the seasons, will return again and again.

doesn’t mean it’s the same each time, of course, so perhaps a spiral is a better shape than just a circle.

When we see nature’s purpose as serving our needs—or as an impediment to our success—we condemn it to destruction. We focus on our own individual spiritual growth without understanding the interconnectedness of all things.

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.

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

the first step to deeper awareness isn’t about introspection. It’s about getting radically away from ourselves, to decenter our individual experience and seek to place ourselves in service of, or to become part of, something bigger than us.

There’s a sense that my body is caught up in a movement that is larger than myself. I have surrendered to a power, a force, a source of inspiration that I can touch or tap into, but that I can never fully control. It’s not mine alone. That’s the starting point for us.

contrition. Here we bring to awareness the ways in which we have fallen short of how we want to be and behave in the world.

What have I done that has caused pain or suffering? What have I left undone that might have served others? For what do I need forgiveness?

Think of it as a chance to adjust your sails while speeding across the water. Realizing we’re off track and making changes now, as best we can, will save us enormous efforts later on when we’ve gone much further across the sea.

A chance to be honest, witnessed by the great beyond, about what’s going on and confront the way we want to show up in the world: braver and free.

Think of personal-growth programs like the Landmark Forum or Harvard Business School professor Bill George’s True North small groups, where people can gather to have in-depth discussions and share intimately about the most important things in their lives.

The gift we can offer one another is our loving, listening presence. A group flourishes when it is neither invasive nor evasive. It walks the delicate line of support and accountability,

Ideally, the groups are small in size and high in commitment. You have to be able to rely on one another.

thanksgiving, in which we list the people and things for which we are grateful.

Brené Brown affirms in her book Braving the Wilderness, the key to joy is practicing gratitude.

Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis,

gratitude is an affirmation of goodness: “We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received.”

The crucial second half of the practice is about recognizing “the sources of this goodnes...

acknowledge that other people—or even higher powers, if you’re of a spiritual mindset—gave us many gifts, big and small, to help u...

Diana Butler Bass in her book Grateful.

“Gratitude is not a psychological or political panacea, like a secular prosperity gospel, one that denies pain or overlooks injustice, because being grateful does not ‘fix’ anything.

Pain, suffering, and injustice—these things are all real. They do not go away.”

What gratitude does, however, is dispel the idea that this is all that life offers, t...

A memento mori practice is like a camera lens that zooms out. Remembering that we’ll die, and confronting the reality that it might be today, helps us see our lives with greater perspective.

The problems we’ve been paying such close attention to and worrying about don’t disappear, but they do fade into a broader background.

The final stage of this prayer sequence is supplication, in which we mindfully hold someone or something in the presence of the divine.

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.