The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

Rituals, in my view, are patterned, repeated ways in which we enact the moral emotions—of compassion, gratitude, awe, bliss, empathy, ecstasy—that have been shaped by our hominid evolution and built up into the fabric of our culture through cultural evolution.

“When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping. . . . Unchecked loneliness fuels continued loneliness by keeping us afraid to reach out.”

Deep connection isn’t just about relationships with other people. It’s about feeling the fullness of being alive. It’s about being enveloped in multiple layers of belonging within, between, and around us. This book is an invitation to deepen your rituals of connection across four levels: Connecting with yourself Connecting with the people around you Connecting with the natural world Connecting with the transcendent.*

So, though you may take the dog out for a walk numerous times a day, ticking off the repetition component, it isn’t a ritual practice if you’re also on the phone because you’re not really paying attention to your pup and the walk you’re on. It’s simply a habit. Or, you might read every night before bedtime, but not really bring any specific intention to it.

Surrounded as we are by hundreds of advertising messages a day and the pressures of social media, we move through the world with our bodies shamed and our attention drained. We can barely go to the bathroom or stop at a traffic light without checking our phones. I even struggle to take a shower without having a podcast playing in the background! Writer Annie Dillard teaches us that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And this way of life is unsustainable. It is making us unwell.

we live disconnected from this inherent knowing, we get caught in cycles of performance and achievement, trying to please others’ expectations or our perception of what is wanted of us.

We can treat a book as sacred not because we’re going to believe that the storylines within it somehow explain the mysteries of the universe, but because they help us be kinder, more compassionate. They help us be curious and empathetic. And they offer us a mirror in which we get to reflect on the motivations that live behind the actions we take every day. This is the power of reading books as a sacred practice: they can help us know who we are and decide who we might want to become.

It wasn’t a book club conversation about what we thought about the plot, or why such-and-such happened when Mr. Rochester had said so-and-so in the chapter before. No, we were asking questions like, What can we learn about suffering? How can we better understand mental illness? What does the text ask us to do in our own lives?

It’s weird growing up knowing what evil has done to you, and what a stranger’s hatred has caused you. It’s weird growing up missing someone you’ve never met. Harry’s undying love for Lily and James reassured me that it was okay for me to miss my dad, even though I had never met him. It was okay for me to mourn the loss even though I hadn’t been aware of it when it first happened. It is okay for me to still struggle with it and with some PTSD even though it’s been 22 years and I never met him.

I feel a weird connection to Harry due to the nature of our losses, and your invitation to take that connection seriously has been so healing and soothing for me. It’s also led me to see Harry’s grief with very different eyes. It must be so difficult for him to navigate this world in which so many people he’s never met know so much about his parents and remember them so clearly, and he just has to take their word for it. When I found out some stuff my dad had said and done that goes totally against what I believe in, I thought of Harry watching James bully Snape. It was so comforting knowing that James Potter wasn’t perfect when it came to admitting to myself that my dad wasn’t either. It deepened my connection to this story and this character, and I am so grateful I had that anchor when everything else I thought I knew was falling apart.

This letter illustrates that so much of what coming home to ourselves involves is the reminder that we are fundamentally okay, that our experience is valid...

if she read a sacred text her goal was not to finish reading it, but instead to read only as much as would stir her mind to prayer.

“the fulfillment of reading [began] in the moment the reader [lifted] her eyes from the page and [took] an active part in what [was] now a dialogue.”

What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story? What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you? What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind? What action are you being called to take?

Of course, there are other similar practices that bring us home to ourselves, and it’s different for everyone. Long-distance speed-skating, chanting, double Dutch, ballroom dance, rock collecting, going for walks with your dog—what works for you might be ridiculed or seem insignificant to others. But take heart! Have conviction in your practice, no matter what others or your insecurity may tell you. There will be days when your practice feels empty. Pointless, even. Vanessa explains that in these moments we have to trust our former selves, who in times of clarity and conviction decided that this practice was the right thing to do.

Canadian researchers have demonstrated that staring into screens leaves us distracted, distant, and drained.

I’m constantly responding to everyone and not really responding to myself.

Sabbath isn’t a time to catch up on tasks. Nor is it simply a time of rest to prepare for a busy week. It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being. The sabbath “is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor,” Heschel writes. “The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. . . . The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of sabbath.”

to think of sabbath time as the apex of the

week, a “climax of living.” I started to look forward to the times when I’d read for the sake of pleasure, rathe...

Sabbath inverts some of the most destructive stories we tell ourselves: that we are what we do, that we’re worth only what we create.

We can take time to ponder things, to think thoughts through to the end without interruption. In silence and solitude, we rediscover childhood passions. Sabbath is all about remembering who we truly are.

Sabbath from collective busyness not only frees us from distraction but gives us time alone so that we can dip down into our experience consciously, letting our minds wander. I’ve found myself pulling out paper and pastels or a songbook. Now and then I write a poem. With this luxury of sabbath time, we get to explore creative parts of ourselves that the everyday keeps hidden under lock and key. In the Age of the Screen, there is little room for amateur creativity. We feel no permission to sing or dance because we’ve seen what it should look like when professionals perform. We’re never free to learn a craft because the horror of someone seeing our imperfect work is paralyzing. In sabbath time, our creativity is not meant for performance—but for enjoyment, and perhaps

even as an offering of thanks for the time and freedom we have.

Second, it is not so much the number of relationships in our life, but their quality, that matters most.

This is the power of a short ritual moment before eating. It re-centers our attention on one another—our interconnectivity. Ideally, that emphasis on relationship then also stretches beyond those gathered around the table by noticing our dependence on the people who have sown, grown, picked, sorted, and transported the food.

“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.”

Over dinner with friends, follow Priya Parker’s advice in her wonderful book The Art of Gathering and cause some “good controversy” by sharing a stimulating, gently provocative idea or story without requiring others to expose themselves emotionally more than they want to. In my experience, nearly every authentic attempt to build community is welcomed.

On the few times that I go out for a run, I try to turn something I struggle with—exercise—into an opportunity that brings meaning and connection.

It isn’t, at its heart, about just asking for what you want. And it definitely isn’t confined to words said while kneeling at our bedside, palms touching and head bowed. 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.

Scholar Mark Jordan reminds us that what is most important isn’t

how we feel during prayer time, but what happens afterward. But this prayer of contrition can also be enormously refreshing. Finally! 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.

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.

them. 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.

That is the power of supplicatory prayer. It creates a place for fear and simultaneously puts fear in its place. It allows us to say what scares us without allowing it to overwhelm us. A spaciousness appears, a bigger perspective on our suffering. Maybe our timeline lengthens, seeing this moment in the context of a much longer history, or our individual perspective widens so that we’re considering the interests of other living things besides ourselves.

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.

we assume religion is all about what you believe. That’s part of it, of course, but most of the rest of the world—and certainly most of history—points to a different way of thinking about religion: that it’s about what you practice.