Episode Summary
In those significant life changing moments, like becoming a parent or losing a parent, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded. We might think to ourselves, “Yeah, ceremony could maybe be a useful thing right now, but where do I start?” Well, there’s an app for that and it’s beautiful!
Additional Information
→ Be Ceremonial Website: https://www.beceremonial.com/
→ Be Ceremonial App (App Store): https://apps.apple.com/app/be-ceremonial/id1582513679
→ Be Ceremonial App (Google Play): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beceremonial.app
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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.
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Full Transcript
Sheldon: Here’s a wedding ceremony and you follow it step by step and here’s a funeral ceremony… and I wanted to blow that out of the water. And so it’s like a choose your own adventure experience where… here’s a bunch of things to inspire you. Pick and choose the ones that you like and then change them if you want.
In those significant life-changing moments, like becoming a parent or losing a parent, it’s very easy to feel lost and ungrounded. We might think to ourselves, “Ceremony could maybe be a useful thing right now, but where do I start?” As the saying goes, there’s an app for that and it’s beautiful.
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today I’m excited to invite you to join me on a behind-the-scenes look into Be Ceremonial, the world's first ceremony creation platform. It’s an app you can download from the App or the Google Play Store and it lets you build simple, customizable ceremonies for any purpose.
Just to give you a sense of how it works, I’m going to open the app on my phone right now and tell you what I see. So on the homescreen is a list of latest offerings including new ceremonies and free virtual workshops. If I click on the “Create” button, I can open a free sample ceremony and customize that or I can choose from a list of ceremonies with a defined topic, including trying to conceive, mother blessing, miscarriage, abortion, wedding, divorce, terminal diagnosis, or sitting vigil - and that’s only a partial list.
Okay, so here’s how building a ceremony works. If I click into the free sample ceremony, I’m asked to choose if this ceremony will be for me or for someone else (I think it’s cool that you can actually gift a ceremony to a friend). Then I’m asked to choose if it will be me doing it alone, with other people, or virtually. And then I can begin building my ceremony which is structured in 5 parts: opening, past, present, future, and closing. For the opening, the app gives me three choices: Opening Space, Candle Lighting, and Three Breaths. I can click into any of these to see what they’re about, what materials and preparation I’d need to do them, and a list of steps to follow. And I can look through all of the offerings until I’ve found the flow that works best for me. For example, I might choose to take 3 breaths to open my ceremony, release the past with a fire release ritual, take a ritual walk to honor the present, and then ceremonially cross a threshold to step into my new future, and finally close with a water ceremony. Once I’ve chosen all of the components, they will be available as a step-by-step list that I can have with me as I prepare and actually hold the ceremony. It’s actually very cool and user friendly. And it takes some of the guesswork (and groundwork, really) out of building a ceremony so that I can really focus on what is moving in me and choose ritual components that match that flow.
Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into the app itself, let’s come back out to the bigger picture so I can bring you into a conversation I had last spring with Megan Sheldon, the co-founder and CEO of Be Ceremonial. Here’s a listen.
Thomas: I'm curious, how did you find your way to ceremony in life?
Sheldon: I've always been a community seeker, a connector, a convener. I was recently at a retreat that I was hosting around ritual and a girlfriend of mine from high school was telling me about these, you know, we didn't… we didn't call it ceremonies then. But she's like, “You would host these gatherings and you were so intentional in the questions you would ask and the way you would bring people together.” She was the first of any of my friends to have a baby. And she remembers, I had forgotten about this, but she remembered I gathered all of her girlfriends around in the room and I'd found this little owl shaker and I passed it around and asked everybody to infuse it with, well, you know, wishes and blessings for her. And that was, you know, 12 or 13 years ago. So I'm constantly reminded that this path hasn't been an A to B kind of path, it's been an unfolding.
When I was 20 years old, my mom went through breast cancer. And my mom and I are very close. And I was living in Montreal and she was here in Vancouver. And I remember getting the phone call from her and just like every instinct in me wanted to just get on a plane and come home and be with her. But she didn't want that. She… I was in the middle of exams and she really needed me to stay where I was, so she could focus on herself. But what she ended up doing, I now see as ritual, is she would find these books, and she was introduced to Yungian kind of theory and Marion Woodman and Women who Run with the Wolves and all of these books that, you know, she was just discovering, and she would buy two copies, and she would send me one in Montreal, and I remember I'd get these books and I would be reading them at the same time she was reading them on the other coast of Canada. And opening up this kind of world of the Divine Feminine and what it means to connect with your Ancestors and your roots and your heritage. And I'm… a white settler stolen lands here in Canada and I have really struggled with my place in this… in this part of the world. And where do I fit? Where do I belong? I think that need for belonging has been a huge theme in my life. And these books kind of taught me how to connect with that part of myself. And with my mom and with her mom and with her mother's mother and this beautiful lineage of women and men. So it's a tricky question and one that continues to evolve. But if I am being completely honest with myself, I have always been ceremonial, I just was never given the language or the permission to kind of see myself that way. So I've had to really come into it on my own and reclaim that space in a way that feels like me.
Megan echoed one of my own ideas about ritual, that of it be self-organizing. That we know how do ritual together, it is one of our inherent gifts. We might have just forgotten.
Sheldon: It's so interesting because people always say to me, “Oh, I could never do what you do. I could never do this!” And I think, “Do what? This was just like… I'm actually not doing…” I always say to people, “I'm actually not doing this, I'm setting the container, you know, I'm offering the invite...” I've studied a lot under the Art of Hosting - I don’t know if you know it - it’s like a global-wide kind of way of gathering people and their philosophy is like, the invitation is everything. If you can send out an invite and let people know what to expect and what to prepare and how to feel empowered in the space so that they're not having to look for the leader like, “Who's in charge?” Like, that's… that's one of the worst ways to convene is to have that hierarchy. So the idea of the Circle Way of having everybody step in and be responsible for co-creating the ceremony, the ritual environment has always guided me. And I'm a firm believer, and I say that every time I can be in a ceremony or a retreat, or rituals with friends, I, you know, I focus on the invitation, and I say, we were all stepped into this and we are now going to co-create this space together. And if you need to be quiet, if you need to walk away, if you need to scream, if you need to do anything that is okay. Like this is you're making your own experience. And I think that's just a way of thinking that we haven't really been taught in our capitalistic patriarchal culture of, you know, the top-down, right? This feels rebellious for a lot of people so yeah…
Thomas: And it's kind of the same principle with the app, right? Because you've created this technology that people can... there's tools, there's framework, there's structure, there's examples, there's ideas, all this kind of thing…. But you're not there helping somebody in person, helping somebody create a ceremony and they can create a ceremony… Like, I created two today that are really important to me but I'm not ready to do them yet but I have the framework set for when I'm ready to step into them. And so you won't be with me when I do them. I mean, unless I could call you later and talk to me because I know you…
Sheldon: Please!
Thomas: …but like, you won't really be there with me. But yeah… you've created the… you've given the invitation and you've created the container.
Sheldon: Yeah, and it took me a long time to see how ritual and ceremony, which for me is so sacred and so precious and so important in my life and in the lives of those that I serve and that I work with to see it as, you know, bridging with technology. So backtrack a little bit, my husband and I decided to get married eight or nine years ago now and we looked at the wedding kind of template that was in front of us and we've been to so many weddings before, and they were so lovely and so wonderful. And they weren’t us. I never was like… oh… this felt exactly like me because it was exactly like my friend or my family member. So I really wanted to learn how to intentionally craft a wedding that represented our values. So that was our first ceremony to co-create together and I think we did a really wonderful job. And shortly after our wedding, we tried to get pregnant and we did. And, you know, seven weeks later, we miscarried. And then we got pregnant again and miscarried. And a third time, miscarried. And each time it was like this invisible loss that nobody knew. It was just, I mean… this was seven years ago. So it was just starting to kind of get a little bit more traction in terms of the media and people talking about it a little bit more, but nobody was talking about a ceremony where I could honor and say goodbye. I was never even offered any of the remains from the hospitals after my DNC procedures. It just… I know now I could have asked for it and they would have had to have given it to me. I didn't know that then. I didn't know my… what I was allowed to do. Everything felt so kind of, you know, the health care system owned everything, right? You don't ever think of it as being something there that you can challenge or that you can confront.
Thomas: Yeah.
Sheldon: So I started to create my own rituals around my loss. And my husband, Johan and I, we created our own rituals and ceremonies to acknowledge not only the loss of life, but also the loss of the stories we'd started to tell ourselves. I had a lot of growing anxiety. What was happening? Why was my body doing this? Will I ever get pregnant? You know, it was in my mid to late 30s at that point, so that… you know, there was this time pressure that was both external and internal. Yeah, I think that time for me it was really about learning how these things that I naturally wanted and needed did in my life were rituals. It was ceremony. It was, you know… I wanted to sit with my girlfriends and not only share my story, but hear their story. I wanted to, you know, every year on a due date or on a loss date, I wanted to have something that I could do that would connect me so that I wouldn't forget that I wouldn't grow… grow further away from it.
Thomas: At the same time that Megan and Johan were dealing with pregnancy loss, they were also losing Johan’s father to ALS.
Sheldon: There were so many invisible moments along that journey that we did not know how to recognize. You know, a diagnosis when you first… when he first received it, but when he first told us like, what do you do in those moments? How do you bring ritual and bring ceremony to that moment when the floor comes crashing out from underneath you? And then over the next, you know, six months and year and two years as he started to lose his capacities and we started to lose that kind of feeling of hope for the future and… There were so many of those moments that I did not know, at the time I could have brought ritual into, I could have been kind of slowly building out that kind of legacy. So we went through that experience. And then when the pandemic hit and my husband was, you know, found himself at home, and I really wanted to imagine something new. He's a problem solver. He's like, “I just want to build something that will help people.” That’s just has been his driver. It has been a really interesting experience to bridge ceremony with technology and one that I continue to learn about. But I'll get emails from people on a weekly basis about how, you know, they were gifted something through this experience, or they discovered something. They were able to honor, you know, a death anniversary in a way that they never thought was possible. And I know for 100% of… I know without a doubt that I would never have crossed paths with that person had it not been through technology. You know, they'll be in Australia, or Belgium, or St. Louis and they'll be reaching out because this app touched them in a certain way, it impacted their experience. So yeah.
Thomas: Wow, you're inspiring me now. I'm thinking I have a lot of my good friends, I have their death anniversaries on my calendar so I remember to reach out to them. I would love to share your app with them.
[MUSIC]
Thomas: So as people check out the app and they get started with it, do you have any guidance for them on how to start the process?
Sheldon: Yeah. So the app is Be Ceremonial and you are invited in and there's two pillars that make up the app environment. And one is the ability to create your own ceremony, like a DIY approach. And we started with the birth and death aspects, the two areas of life, because they're the two thresholds. They're usually the places where people are seeking ceremony the most. They… you know, they have a miscarriage or they find out they're pregnant, or they, you know, they want to honor, you know, the end of their breastfeeding journey. There's something that happened in that kind of beginning of life stage or the end of life. You know, they lost a parent, or a death anniversary’s coming up, or they have been hanging on to these ashes from a cremation and they don't know what to do with them. So we really started to populate the app with these ceremonies that you could create for yourself around birth and death. And we are now in the midst of bridging out the life cycle. So, I am a Life Cycle Celebrant. I work with people on ceremonies around mastectomies and hysterectomies. Ceremonies around moving into a new home or leaving a childhood home. I've worked with people who have been fired and lost a job and they wanted to create a ceremony to kind of honor what that job brought them and also kind of burn in the fire the things that they wanted to never do again. There are so many points along the lifecycle, both visible and invisible, that deserve to be ritualized. They deserve to have that kind of ceremonial intention built into it. So that's, that's the pillar one that's like one side of the app experience is to be able to create your ceremonies and some people might come in and know exactly what they want and they just want to create a ceremony around a death anniversary, and they can just, you know, pay per use so it's a single-time purchase that they want.
And then other people are really seeking something more. They're really wanting to understand their own relationship with ritual and ceremony. Or they’re a care provider. We've got a lot of death doulas and birth doulas and hospice volunteers, midwives, naturopath counselors using our app and they create ceremonies for their clients and their patients. So they're using this as a tool that they can kind of bring to the people that they work with. I've also got a lot of celebrants using this, so there's a wedding ceremony in there and if you are, celebrate, and you've got a new client, and you want to kind of give them some ideas as to what's possible in terms of ritual, you can create a wedding ceremony that you then send to them and they can pick and choose rituals they like. You can then add new ones, you can create your own, you can draw… You know, it's the biggest thing to remind yourself there is that it's you know, you don't need to follow this word for word. It's just a guide to inspire you. I think of it like a blueprint.
The other side… the other pillar of the app which we're really starting to build out this year is the learning environment. So I've hosted tons of online workshops and courses I ran last year, had about 120 students come through a six week training that we offered around end-of-life rituals. And I want to take all of those little mini workshops and build them into the app environment. So for the people that are the members, the subscribers (you can have a monthly or yearly subscription), I want there to be a place where they can go and think, “Oh, gosh, if a client just reached out, reached out or a friend reached out, and you know, they have a child who died.” And they really want to acknowledge the you know, the grief that the family and the friends might be holding. And I want to be able to create a ceremony workshop that explores kids’ relationship with grief, and how to explore that.” You know, on the other side of it, maybe there's something around, you know, I've hosted a lot of divorce ceremonies, which has been really interesting for people. And everybody's always like, “Oh, I want to know more, I want to know what what else I can learn about this and how else this can be done and where the, you know, what other cultures are doing” So being able to look at the… the learning environment as a place to have that, that ability to go deeper if and when you choose. I think is really exciting for me, and for a lot of the people that have reached out because I think that there's, you know, the people that come in, and they just want something quick and they want something now and they know, you know, they don't need a whole lot of hand holding. And then there's the people that really want to build a community here and they want to share back their story after they created a ceremony so that it might inspire someone else. And that's my big hope with where Be Ceremonial can grow is that it will become, you know, “This is us. This is our invitation. We've been a catalyst, we've created this framework. Now let's let the community populate it. Let's let people step up and make this their own space. Let's allow this to be a place that connects us and inspires us when we hear stories from people around the world and how they took the same five rituals that I took and yet their ceremony turned out so differently. That's so interesting. I want to hear about that…” And that’s the storyteller in me is just wanting to create a space where those stories can be celebrated and witnessed.
Thomas: That's wonderful. Well, I feel like what you've created with this, the two of you, it's just such a gift. So on behalf of, I don’t know, everybody everywhere, I just want to thank you so much.
And I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to join me in this exploration of Megan and Johan’s work at Be Ceremonial. I hope that a piece of Megan’s story, either a moment of creating ritual to honor a life transition or her overall entrepreneurial spirit has inspired you as it has inspired me. Megan will be back soon to speak more about slow technology and how she is using ritual to transition from pandemic to endemic.
Megan Sheldon is a Cultural Mythologist, End of Life Storyteller, and a Celebrant. She is also the co-founder of Be Ceremonial, the world's first ceremony creation platform, giving you the ritual tools you need to create your own ceremony. You can sign up for a free account at Be Ceremonial dot com or download the App in the App Store.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata, reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. Also be sure to check out our second show, Daily Magic for Peace, supporting you as you support Ukraine. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.