Credit Jeppe Hove Jensen
Episode Summary
Looking for a way to respond to COVID-19 beyond social distancing? Here’s a simple ceremony that can help you find your center again.
Basic Steps of a Ritual for Balance
1. Breathe
2. Center
3. Connect with something bigger
4. Presence & release fear (shake, yell, cry)
5. Connect with strength
6. Create a touchstone (art, writing, music)
7. Close in gratitude
8. Eat
9. Be gentle for the next few hours
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About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
Listen If
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Full Transcript
This week I know we’re all dealing with major disruptions due to the coronovirus COVID-19. A friend recently asked me what a ritual to cope with the changes would look like. I jotted down the first things that came to mind and sent them off to her. Then came her response: So when are we doing this?
Ceremony has the power to can create a container to hold the strong emotions that are a natural part of life transitions. That’s what makes rite of passage rituals so helpful to us as we grown and change. But rites of passage are not limited to coming of age ceremonies. We can create our own rituals as the need arises. Well, I would say the need is here. We are in a big transition. And ritual can help.
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas.
Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Ok, so wow. We are in some kind of transition right now. Oh my goodness.
As of today, my husband and I have been in isolation to prevent the spread of the coronavirus for 3 weeks. Schools are closed. Many people are working from home. The Tonight Show is being taped in Jimmy Fallon’s living room. Workers in essential service fields are on the front lines, providing support in infrastructure industries, hospitals, fire & police stations and grocery stores. We have been asked to stay 6 feet away from one another to slow the spread of the virus.
These new limitations alongside the stresses of an unknown future have birthed a great desire to reach out to the people we love, and that need has birthed an explosion of creative ways to connect. Meetings and classes are being held online. Families are group chatting. Couples are live-streaming their weddings. This week I attended a wide variety of online events including work meetings, meditation circles, a talking circle, a mini high-school reunion, a disco party - and that COVID-19 ceremony I mentioned at the top of the show.
I’m here to share the ideas with you that first came to me when my friend asked about creating a ceremony about COVID-19 and also to let you know how the ceremony turned out.
The first thing we need to do in a ritual to find balance amid COVID-19 is to reacquaint our nervous system with the concept of the breath. Think about it. When we are hovering close to a fight or flight response, or just really scared, our breath becomes much more shallow that it is in regular life, which for most of us is pretty shallow to begin with. So one of the very best things we can do right now is to breathe. And I don’t mean just take a few deep breaths, I mean dedicate a chunk of time to consciously breathing. Reacquaint your body with deep belly breaths.
Let’s give it a try right now. Let’s take three very deep breaths together just to practice. It's okay, no one is watching. Just breathe with me. Okay, we're going to breathe in... nice and deep. And breathe out. Okay, another... breathe in... all the way, all the way... and breathe out. And one more time, breathe in... all the way in... and out. Good job! Thanks for giving that a try.
Now, I invite you to keep breathing deeply throughout the rest of this episode. You might notice that your body is resistant to breathing deeply if you’ve been running a lot of fear energy. That’s normal. But trust me, you will actually be able to handle all manner of challenges with greater flexibility and resourcefulness if you are breathing well.
So this fear we have been feeling, it's not just ours. That's one of the reasons it's so strong. Right now there is a great deal of collective fear and trauma world-wide. So the second thing we need to do in a COVID-19 ritual is to unplug from that. And that actually also requires us to unplug from any past traumas that are currently reactivated. Easier said than done. But possible. So step one is to breathe and step two is to unplug from the network of fear and center back in our selves.
You probably have innate ways of centering in yourself. Running may center you, or meditating, connecting with a higher power, or thinking about the people you love. Whatever it is, that's our next step. It's helpful to connect with something that's bigger than ourselves as we center. It helps us feel less alone and fragile. Keep breathing.
Now, once we are centered, our next step is to presence and release our emotional energy and fear. Loud music can help here. We will shake, yell, cry, let our bodies just shake. it. off. Again, we're not only shaking off our own fear, but the fears we've absorbed from the people around us and the media we have consumed. We'll give it a good 5-10 minutes of dedicated shaking, dancing, stretching, and moving until we find ourselves at the core of all that junk. Just the selves we've always been. Just plain old us minus the overcoat of fear.
With the fear released or at least lessened, we can now connect at an even deeper level with our center and begin to remember how strong we are. We can call on images and people in our lives that speak strength to us. Wonderfully strong historical figures we admire. Ancestors who overcame great challenges in their lifetime. The strength of crocuses pushing up through the snow. Okay, another breath.
Now that we have connected with our true nature and called in our strength, now is the time to let our creative selves draw, paint, write, collage something that captures that essence, the essence of our center, the essence of our strength. What we are really doing now is creating a reminder of how we feel in this moment, this vacation from the emergency, when we are fully connected back with our deeper self, all resources fully intact. Because we will go back into the day-to-day world after the ceremony, and this piece or art or writing will be our touchstone to remember this moment of peace and quiet knowing.
The final step in our ceremony is to close with prayer or gratitude or another centering activity. In closing, we thank and release the power that is bigger than ourselves, the power we called in earlier and we will prepare to transition back to the regular world.
And then, we eat. Eating is very important after ceremony because it connects us back to the physical world and raises our blood sugar which may have been lowered during the ceremony. Dedicating some time to being gentle with ourselves for the next few hours is also important. Activities like resting, reading, taking a bath, doing yoga or taking a long walk give us time to reflect and absorb the shift we just made. Drinking a lot of water can helpful just like we're told to do after a massage because we are detoxing the fear in all levels.
So those are the steps I wrote to my friend as a sketch for a COVID-19 ritual. The actual ritual which was held this past weekend, was an opportunity to try them out. We held the ritual on Zoom. We took time to check in, center and ground. We went over a few guidelines to make it a safe and confidential space. We used trauma sensitive language. The dancing moved our fears. Te art helped us concretize and anchor the clarity we found once we were centered. We agreed to hang our art in a place where we would see it daily. The ceremony connected us to one another in this rather precarious time and it connected us back to ourselves. So, in short, a success. And a wonderful opportunity to practice ceremony making in a moment of great need.
So as you can see, this was pretty simple. There were just a few steps involved. I invite you to consider how ceremony might benefit you and your community right now. Send us a note at shamepinata.com and let us know how it goes if you do create your own ceremony. You can also sign up for our mailing list to be notified if we do another ceremony. And, consider adding an audio note to our side project Community Mail Box to share what’s helping you stay connected, sane and creative right now. You can also check out a resources listed there. Find the link in the show notes. In the meantime, keep breathing!
Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or share it with a friend. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.