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- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred
When it’s time to reclaim all of who you are…
When it’s time to honor, reflect, and celebrate…
When it’s time to grieve or grow… it’s time for Ceremony.
Through ceremony work, we'll explore and develop...
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Honoring and celebrating transitions
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Receiving the gift of change
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Trust in the seasonal cycle of growth
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Reclaiming your deep inner wisdom
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Deep, connected relationships
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Greater ease navigating challenges and unknowns
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Clarity on your path forward
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Joy and playfulness
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Comforting relationship with grief
Ceremonies with me are...
grounded
encouraging
loving
peace-giving
collaborative
unique to you
Reclaiming Ceremony
We were born for, and from, Ceremony.
The dominant Western culture is primarily influenced by the descendants of colonizers who purposefully and systematically erased indigenous culture and the rites of village life. We are living in the wake of this historic loss, and the dominant culture has robbed humanity of our natural relationship with ceremony, ritual, and rites of passage.
Because of this, many of us are culturally orphaned, and we feel this lack every day.
Without regular ceremony, we don’t have as much confidence in the cycles of life. Without regular ceremony, we feel isolated and unsure during challenging transitions. Without regular ceremony, we overload the few ceremonies we do observe in our culture with unacknowledged grief.
Weddings exhibit this cultural gap clearly. What’s meant to be a celebratory occasion often feels fractious and overshadowed by family dynamics that aren’t essentially relevant.
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This work is about reclaiming our relationship to our own deep inner knowing and connection to our essential nature.
Thresholds that deserve to be honored with community support, reverence, intention, and self-determination but rarely are:
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Claiming Your Name
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Moving from Childhood to Adolescence
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Choosing a Vocation
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Moving from Adolescence to Adulthood
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Leaving Home
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Changing Jobs
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Ending a Relationship or Friendship
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Relationship Repair and Forgiveness
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Engagement
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Marriage
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All Losses - Deaths, Divorce, Change
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Accidents, Injuries, and Surgeries
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Moving
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Pregnancy and Birth
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Changing of the Seasons, New Year's
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Healing
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Aging, Birthdays
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Children Leaving Home
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Any Experience that Shifts Identity
Ceremony Design
Ceremony Design can include any or all of the following elements:
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Video calls connecting to the heart of what needs to be honored, invited, and processed
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A fully designed ceremony (collaborative or made for you) that includes traditional and unique-to-you elements to support you in honoring, releasing, and claiming who you’ve been and who you’re becoming
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Clear step-by-step documents for you and your celebrants to follow
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In-person facilitation of the ceremony
My Ceremony Design Approach
My work is based on the conviction that you were born a complete, perfect, innocent, and incredibly resourceful human being (and still are all of those things). You were born of the wisdom, abundance, and inherent belonging of nature, and carry that wisdom, abundance, and inherent belonging within you.
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Ceremony is a way for us to re-inhabit our birthright of belonging. ​​
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It is a way of slowing time and reflecting on who we've been and who we're choosing to become.
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When we slow down and pay attention to the ways we're changing and being changed by life, we are able to deeply trust our ability to navigate the unknown with clarity, courage, and peace. ​
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In working with you to craft a meaningful ceremony, I'll support you first to envision how you want to feel during and after your ceremony. Led by your vision, I'll bring a wealth of knowledge about elements of ceremony to support you in creating an experience for you and your celebrants that is reflective of your values, meaningful, and transformative.
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A note on respectful Ceremony Design: Due to the dominant culture's estrangement from ancient knowledge, we sometimes end up (intentionally or unintentionally) reaching to other cultures and appropriating their wisdom traditions to try and fill the gaps left by the history of colonization that has so deeply wounded the planet and all her inhabitants. This is often well-intentioned but nonetheless harmful. In reclaiming our relationship with ceremony, it’s important to draw first and foremost from wisdom traditions that are connected to our own ancestry. If and when we do take inspiration from other cultures, we will do so mindfully and humbly, respecting the sacred boundaries of rituals that are not part of our inheritance and do not belong to us.
Dream Work
Ceremony is inextricably tied to dream work. In dreams, our subconscious reveals the unacknowledged parts of us that are longing to be known and invited back into the flow of life. In Ceremony, we consciously invite those parts back into the flow of life, answering the call from our dreams.
By interacting intentionally with the information given to us in our dreams, we can shape our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the future that feel fulfilling, safe, and joyful.
Ceremony Design and Dream Work can be done concurrently or separately. Dream Work aligns and overlaps beautifully with Somatic Coaching, and can include any or all of the following elements:
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Dream Journal support
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Dream imagery exploration work (informed by Jungian dream analysis)
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Somatic Coaching to explore and integrate emotions that surface in the dreams or while processing them