On the need of rituals and ceremonies 1

On Sunday I was listening to a lecture by a Dance/Movement Therapist and she said, speaking from an anthropological perspective that we as society in the West suffer from "ritual deprivation". I am not comfortable these days with assisting to a particular church (while I love to enter temples of any tradition and pray, Catholic, Buddhist...), but I long for ritual and ceremony. Here the next two postings are dedicated to ritual:

"The need for ritual is a basic human instinct, as real, as urgent and as raw as our need for food, shelter and love. And it is every bit as crucial to our survival. A compelling urge to merge with the infinite, ritual reminds us of a larger, archetypal reality and invokes in us a visceral understanding of such universal paradigms as unity, continuity, connectivity, reverence and awe. Like sex, ceremony -- solitary or shared -- offers us a way to relate intimately with the primordial universal force and allows us to embrace that sacred power that informs and fuels all existence. Ritual is our lifeline to the divine.

The absence of significant ceremony in our lives has left us feeling disconnected, confused, alone and bereft. Insulated and isolated in extremely intense times, we dangle, stranded in an enormously complex universe without a spiritual safety net to save us."

Donna Henes 
www.huffingtonpost.com/
Image by Mariko Evan from Bohemian Eye