Ceremony is one of the oldest “technologies” used by humans. As long as we have been living together, we have used ceremony to mark occasions, weave communities together, create meaning, facilitate transformation, and bring the Divine into our lives.

Every society on Earth has used, and still uses, ceremony in some form. Historically, ceremony was incorporated into many facets of life, including marking the change of seasons, divining the best planting times and locations, transitioning elders to the spirit world during death, rites of passage into adulthood for young people, and harmonizing groups before important decisions. In our modern world, most ceremonies are confined to either the religious realm or the Big Three—Marriage, Birth, Death.

In ceremony, we leave the everyday world behind, journeying to a sacred space for a period of time. In this sacred space, we can connect to collective consciousness, the wisdom of ancestors and natural elements, and our own intuition. We each carry inside us the wisdom of all humanity, though we have trouble remembering this wisdom on a daily basis.

By leaving our daily worries behind and journeying outside of time and space, we can touch our inner wisdom, which creates healing, acceptance, and purpose in our everyday lives.

A ceremony is a series of actions taken in a specific place, with an intention, by a group or an individual. The intention, the specific location that becomes sanctified through symbols, and the awareness and focus of the participants create the conditions for transformation or healing to occur. During ceremony, we can say that we enter an altered state in which we are more receptive to new meanings, patterns, and ideas.

Though ceremony is performed in this Earthly realm, the healing or transformation can occur in other realms or levels of consciousness. Many symbols used in ceremony hold meaning across realms and can help carry messages across the boundaries between realms. In this way, during a ceremony, you may experience wisdom or healing from your ancestors in the past or from forces unknown to you from the future. This wisdom may not be apparent to you during ceremony, and it requires a bit of openness and faith to receive this wisdom, even when you cannot feel it or understand it in your conscious mind. This is the power of ceremony.

Read: The Book of Modern Ceremony

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