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.

1. Identify an event in your life that felt significant but perhaps was not adequately recognised as such or was given unhelpful meaning at the time. Or you could identify a current process in your life or something in the near future. Write down the "story" of what happened at that time (if the purpose relates to a past event) or the "story" of your thoughts and feelings about a present/future event. (p. 70-72)
2. Based on that exploration, work out what you want a ritual to do for you. State the purpose of your ritual. Begin with "The purpose of my ritual is...." or "I want to (celebrate / honour / heal / release) ....". Write it down. You can come back to it as many times as you need to and refine it. (Chapter 3)
3. As a separate exercise, find some time to use all your sense to create the stimulus of your ideal/imaginary ritual space. Don't worry about whether any of it is realistic or feasible and don't feel you'll have to use it all later. Just give yourself freedom to explore. Go methodically through what you see in your ritual space, what you hear, what you touch/taste/smell. Make notes as you go. (pp. 88-90)
4. Look at your written purpose, story and ritual space. Pick out metaphors that could be used to inspire enactments. (p. 76 & 94-102) E.g. if you want to "let go" of certain feelings or ideas you could literally drop items that represent those things into water or into a fire or into the earth (but see p. 97-98 for potential energetic aftereffects of burying/discarding into earth)
5. Plan how your ritual will go. The enactments and structure can be very personal to you. Just take care if you are doing a healing/releasing/banishing ritual, that you do the healing/releasing/banishing FIRST and within the same ritual you fill the void thus created with some sort of intention. Be as specific as possible but if that's difficult you can just "state positively that you open yourself to life-affirming opportunities for growth" (p. 96)
6. Make a "shopping list" of props (candles, oils, paper, water, salt, herbs, crystals, symbolic objects & representations, safe space for burning), gather them and set a date for your ritual.
7. Perform your ritual!
8. Assess how it went

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.

Previous discussions:
Introduction & Chapter 1: The Power of Women's Ritual
Chapter 2: Rituals in the Belly of the Beast
Chapter 3: Developing The Purpose
Chapter 4: Developing The Theme

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