Ceremony is Somatic
What do I mean by ceremony? Exploring the Core Principles of The Coracle
What do I mean by Ceremony?
The Coracle: They Journey of Safety and Belonging begins in one week! If you’re curious, reach out by replying to this email or book a free discovery call on my website.
On Sunday, May 18th, just before 9AM HST,
I’ll be in the Zoom waiting room getting ready to welcome voyagers on the first online odyssey of The Coracle, a mentorship I’ve developed over the past couple of years carried on myth, folk tales, and Mū magic.
Will you be waiting in that room? I hope so! Read on to learn more about the core principles of this journey into finding your own mythic ground.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been sharing a series of essays on the core principles of The Coracle, which if you haven’t read them are:
The indigenous wisdom of fairy tales and myths. (Mostly from the Indo-European tradition.)
Mū Hawaiian magic
Ceremony
In the last two essays I shared how I discovered that fairy tales are a spiritual technology that corresponds to ancient codes of magic preserved to this day by the Mū Hawaiians. Today I want to share a little about what I mean by ceremony.
I didn’t grow up with ceremony. The closest I came to it were the Sunday morning church services I attended with my family growing up in Connecticut. We were Congregationalists, a Puritan sect originally known as Anapabtists, who left Europe because they were being persecuted. In search of religious freedom, my church ancestors became colonizers.
Congregationalists, and the other Puritan sects like Calvinism, believed that individuals did not need a priest to have a relationship with God. No intermediary was necessary, and they abolished the hierarchy of the Catholic Church with its Pope, cardinals, and priests. Gone was the sacrament of Confession, the Hail Marys and rosary, the incense and icons. In the Puritan churches there were no distractions from one’s direct communion with God. We still had Communion, but we put the bread in our mouths ourselves instead of lining up for the priest to drop a wafer in our open mouths.
A lone minister stood up before the congregation each week and preached a sermon from the pulpit on the scriptures each Sunday, but he didn’t have a closer relationship with God than anyone in the pews.
In my church when I was a kid, that preacher was the Reverend Wilson Busick, who was as fine an orator as they come. Maybe for the grownups it was different, but as a kid, it really didn’t matter to me what Reverend Busick said. He was from the South. He knew how to draw the words out long so you really heard them, how to make them musical. He knew when to pause to greatest effect, and how to gesture to get his message across. He lifted up his arms. He was theatrical.
I may not remember anything about his sermons. But I remember him.
Seen from another lens, you could say Reverend Busick was somatic. He was in his body.
Those gestures, the inflections in his voice—entered my body because they came from his. I didn’t feel the body of Christ, or anything actually, in the sacrament of Communion. I thought the bread was dry and grape juice not sweet enough, but I felt Reverend Busick. His cadences and rhythms were more powerful than anything he said.
When I was 24, I moved to Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, and began to unschool myself, reconnecting with nature and the non-human residents of Earth. I learned about the Manisses, the indigenous people of the island whose culture had been eradicated by the white settlers who claimed the island in 1661. I learned the island had once been covered by forests that came right down to the beaches. Those forests were gone now, and as far as I know, there was only one woman of Manissean descent still living on the island. Most of the Manisses had been outright killed, died from plagues, or been enslaved.
I was haunted by those lost people. I heard the ghosts of the trees chopped down by the white settlers for ships’ masts and firewood.
As I began to hear what had been lost, I realized how much I was missing.
And I realized what I wanted—a direct connection to the divine.
And so I summoned the spirit of what I’d been taught in the Congregational church and began to create my own ceremonies.
I walked. I collected stones and made altars and circles. I sang to the water.
I felt ridiculous sometimes, but I kept going. A lot of the times it just happened without thinking. I’d be drawn to a spring and find my hands receiving the water. My fingers would shuffle through beach pebbles for yellow, red, black, green, and white stones, and assemble little medicine wheels.
Eventually, everything around me began to speak back.
“What do you think a ceremony is for? “a friend asked me a couple of years ago.
“A ceremony is to open up a portal to communicate with the unseen,” I found myself saying.
I would refine that now, and say a ceremony is a way to communicate with the holy in nature, to honor and praise all the glory around us.
I don’t feel the loss of not being raised without ceremony any more.
I do recognize that so much has been lost over centuries of colonization, but I am not lost. I am here, and my body knows how to praise. Ceremony is somatic. Our bodies know how to praise, and if given the chance, will communicate with the holy in the particular way only they can. Our bodies are nature.
In this, the Puritans were right. We don’t need an intermediary to communicate with God.
However, in their attempt to reform Christianity, I feel they went too far. The wisdom of the body was stripped away. The sensual delight of incense and red satin, rose windows, and icons to worship, fed the senses and kept worshippers connected to the body in a way that Protestantism doesn’t.
I want to create ceremonies that honor the body. I want to inhale nectar and taste ambrosia. I want to anoint and be anointed.
The Coracle is not a call to return to our pagan roots. It’s not a creative re-enactment.
This is a call to be here, in the now, to create our own ceremonies inspired by how our bodies are moved by the elements that touch us—the wind in our hair, the blast from the air conditioner; the rocky beach and the city pavement; the crackling fire and the belching furnace; the babbling brook and water streaming out of a tap that smells like chlorine.
We are modern humans. We can’t go back. It’s time to let go of missing what we’ve lost. We need to grieve and complete, and create our own ways to connect with the divine again, in ways that are sincere, and have integrity because they are based on impulses from our own bodies. Anything else is going to perpetuate the cycle of ripping off the people who still have a connection to their ancestral ceremonies. The people our ancestors colonized. Let’s do our best to stop that cycle. Let’s decolonize our mind and bodies by listening to what they have to say to us directly.
This will require letting go of the way we think it should happen. We’ll need to be both humble, and regain enough self-esteem to know we know what to do.
If we can do this, stay both humble, and realize we are worthy and we belong because we are here, we’ll be able to learn again from nature.
These are the ceremonies I’m here for.
Will you join me? Will you listen to what lives inside your body and follow the instructions you receive?
This takes practice, which is where ritual comes in, the repetition that tells the spirit world, and our bodies themselves, that we really mean what we’re thinking or saying.
I can say, from long experience, that a group really helps with accountability in keeping it going, and in magnetizing our efforts.
If you feel the call, we’d love to have you in The Coracle.
Doors will be open a few more days, until Thursday, May 16th. You’ll find a registration link here, along with detailed information about this journey. If you still have questions, please reach out by replying to this email or book a discovery call through my website.
This is an opportunity for you to plant your feet on your own mythic ground, to establish an unshakeable core of safety that your ancestors, held within the matrix of the Great Mother, experienced from birth to death. This is an opportunity to know, on the deepest level, you belong.
It’s time to bring what our distant ancestors knew into this world, into this time, in whatever place you inhabit. It’s time for you to let go and be held again by the Great Mother, who speaks in poetry and symbols, in whirlpools, birdsong, and storms.
And here’s to Reverend Busick, and those magical figures from our childhood that imprinted us with wonder, even if we didn’t understand, at the time, what they were saying.
Aloha mā
The Coracle, Part One: The Journey of Safety and Belonging beings Sunday May 18th.
Five live Zoom sessions guided by five folk tales, on Sundays, 9-11AM HST.
Ongoing private email and ceremonial support, and a Substack chat to interact with your fellow voyagers.
Please share this email with any friends you think would benefit from this journey!
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light