Hello Goddesses,
Some of us are feeling a bit overwhelmed or need time to catch up so I thought this week rather than pressing on with Chapter 5 we would have a checkpoint post to take stock and share our progress with creating a personal ritual.
As some of you know (because I keep dropping it into conversation LOL) I recently took the Personal Ritual Creation course with Ruth herself. I strongly recommend it, it was amazing (just visit Guardians of the Grove website). It's very personalised and really wonderful. Anyway, one of the big things I took away from the 4-week course was that you don't have to know it all to create a ritual. You don't have to read the book to the end, you don't have to do all the things the book suggests. For example, it's nice to have an altar as part of your ritual but if you're not familiar with altar use it's not essential. Your first ritual really can be as simple as a statement of purpose, the development of the purpose's theme, the identification of appropriate enactments, planning and then doing. Of course the more knowledge you acquire and the more time and effort you put into exploring and developing your ritual before you actual do it, the more powerful it will be, but most of us here are new to this and it's fine to practice and start at beginner level. Remember the book is aimed at experienced ritualists as well as newcomers.
The second important thing I took from the course is you have to do it in order to experience it. There is no substitute for the transformative power of performing and experiencing ritual. It is visceral. This is a practical as much as an intellectual exercise and we all learn best by doing.
Therefore even if you haven't read up to Chapter 4, it doesn't have to hold you back from experiencing an intuitive personal ritual. So I invite you to go as far as you like through the following process and if you wish, share with us in the comments. Or just use this week to catch up on your reading and journaling/writing. Please feel completely free to share as much or as little of your general thoughts about as much or as little of the book so far (Chapters 1-4), or to ask any questions.
If you are newly joining us, please let me know if you'd like to be added to the "tag list". Similarly if you'd like to be removed from the "tag list" please just let me know.
Special thanks to @CompassionateGoddess for recommending this book and having the idea of a book club in the first place.
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