Shame Piñata

S2E7 A Brunch to Acknowledge Heartbreak

Ch-ch-ch-changes! In part-two we step off the beaten path and into the unknown. Maybe by choice, maybe not. Either way, we have all we need to reinvent ourselves. We just need to get creative.   Music by Terry Hughes   Links: My Self Marriage Story   The Queer Spirit Podcast S4E7 - Ritual, Ceremony & Rites of Passage   Rate This Podcast   Full Transcript   Picture this. It's May, the very end of the year at a busy middle school. Everyone is ready for summer but the 8th graders are acting especially weird. They're getting in trouble for silly reasons and sometimes acting completely out of character. I've learned over time that 8th graders can act a little strange in that last month because they’re preparing for a huge change. They have no idea what life will look like next year, which of their friends will still be in their lives or what academic, social and even emotional challenges high school will bring. They’re at that place, in the words of Shel Silverstein, where the sidewalk ends.    Life gives us moments like these again and again, chances to step off the beaten path and into the unknown. What does it take to make that leap? How can we make it easier? What are some little things we can do to support ourselves and the ones we love through the process of reinventing ourselves?   This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.   This is part 2 of a 3-part series we’re calling, “Do You Need a Ceremony”. In part 1 we focused on honoring important personal moments, the kind there are no party decorations for - and really, the kind we might not even think about honoring. Moments that run the gamut from a huge loss like losing a beloved pet, to joyful moments like paying off our student loans. The idea is that if it’s an important moment to us, it’s important to celebrate it or mark it in some way. Today we’re going to talk about how ritual can help us reinvent ourselves.    Sometimes it can feel like it’s time for a change. And sometimes we grow without even realizing it. And other times we don’t even know we need to change until we get out of our routine and when we return to it, we realize it doesn’t fit us anymore. Has that happened to you? These are the kinds of changes we’ll be talking about today as well as the many intuitive ways we already demarcate change and growth in our lives.    So first, how do we know when we’re going through a change? Of course, sometimes it’s quite obvious. Like when everything is going great and suddenly it all falls apart. Big changes can happen like that, suddenly, and with little warning. These can be super unsettling, disorienting, and upsetting. When a change happens - especially if it’s a big change that takes our focus, it can be easy to lose touch with the things that ground us and keep us calm.    Sometimes we might not notice that things are ticking along and we’re silently coming to a moment of meaningful change as a person. It might feel like we don’t easily fit into a role we’ve always held or like no understands what’s really going for us. We might notice new feelings like feeling frustrated or annoyed or even more tired than usual. We might notice we’re feeling kind of trapped or unappreciated.    The reality that we’re constantly growing and changing goes somewhat against the way we typically think and plan. For example, we live our lives as if we’re all set and nothing will really change from this point forward. We anticipate life stages and probably expect that we are likely to move though them just like our parents did, but in the day to day, things can feel pretty stable. So the fact that we’re always growing and changing kind of works against the comfort of the known, the stability of the familiar. We’re probably eventually going to get tired of this exact job or the unique culture of this company. We may decide to change our major at a very inconvenient time. Maybe by the time we’ve saved enough to buy our dream home, we’ve met someone who wants to travel the world instead of settle down.    We change.    One night years ago, I cooked a wonderful fish dinner and after cleaning up, I stepped outside to take out the trash. Upon returning to the apartment I was surprised to realize the entire place smelled like fish. I hadn’t noticed it during the time I was cooking and eating but after being in the the fresh air for a few minutes it was obvious to me. This became a metaphor in my life for the value of taking a break from my regular routine in order to make sure it was still working well.    When changes happen that I don’t want, two of the most helpful practices I’ve learned to do are to be in flow and to say thank you. There’s something about trusting the flow and showing that trust by saying the words "thank you" that transforms my experience. This brings to mind one of my favorite quotes by Meister Eckhart. “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”   Another way to approach change is through the meme, “When something changes in your life, just yell ‘plot twist!’ and keep going”. I try to remember that one too because… I’m really not in control. As much as I want to be, as much as I feel like I need to be, and as much as I OK I want to be. I’m not - and that’s hard.   We'll be right back.   Thanks so much for joining us today! Just a heads up that if you're in a life transition right now and would like some support, you can work with me to have a custom ceremony built just for you. Go to shamepinata.com to learn more.   Changes can actually be helpful in that they invite us to reinvent ourselves. For example, we might change our diet if we are diagnosed with an illness. That’s just a small example.    Here’s a list of times when I might choose to re-invent myself: - after a loss - when my life is changing in a way I can't control - when I see a change coming - when an old chapter is closing or a new chapter is starting - when I just feel like I’m becoming a new person - when I want to get unstuck - when I really want to change an old habit or mindset - when I notice that hard feelings are getting in my way - or when I feel inspired to become a better or a different person   There are ways that we intuitively reinvent ourselves in life by using intentional actions. For example, cutting our hair, changing up our personal style, moving to a new place, reaching out to new people, trying something new, even walking a different way to work, anything to honor the way we're changing.   In addition to these intuitive methods for changing it up, we can go a little deeper if we want. Here are a few examples:   If I see a change coming, I can use ritual to ground on a daily basis - ground into the things that give me strength and help me be me in the flow and be able to say thank you so that I am able to navigate the change with as much resilience (and grace if I can muster it) as possible. Perhaps lighting a candle each morning. Taking 10 minutes of the day to do a breathing practice. Dancing to one song everyday and full-out expressing myself as much as I can for those 5 minutes.    When I’m starting a new chapter in life, I can weave the sacred into that experience in several practical ways, from creating a personalized playlist of songs to cheer myself on and hold the hard feelings, to bringing my friends and loved ones around to circle up with me and vision what my life could be like.    When it’s time to get unstuck, ceremony might help me to simulate the stuckness. Maybe a friend can hold my arm another friend can hold my foot and act as stand-ins for the things that are holding me in place. I might dialogue with them and talk about the limitations I feel and find in my body to be ready to make the change and break out of their grasp. Or perhaps it's a different direction. Perhaps my body might indicate a need to surrender to these forces until an a-ha moment arises and I see things in a different way. This kind of thing can also work when a bunch of bad feelings are in my way.    You’re seeing a pattern here right? Rituals are physical acts that we do that have a greater significance than just the act itself and they are effective because they tap into our subconscious mind. Sometimes physical actions can just be straightforward physical actions like drinking a cup of coffee. We want coffee. We drink coffee. End of story. But we might also take a sip of our Grandmother’s favorite coffee on Samhain to honor our continuing connection to her through the veil, remembering what it felt like to sit in her kitchen as a child smelling the coffee brewing. The cool thing is that anything we do in life we can do with intention. In ritual space, simple acts can be profound.    Let's move on to a real life example of using ritual to reinvent oneself. I will actually give you two. These are ceremonies I've spoken of before, so I will add links in the show notes so you can hear the full story on each one.    The first one is from the time when I was preparing to get married. I knew, in that way we can know ourselves so well, that despite my best efforts, I was going to have a tendency to hold the wedding in a lopsided way. I was going to want the fairy tale as the main event, not the commitment and the day to day struggle, the active noun of love. (Mr. Rogers says love is an active noun, like struggle). I was going to focus on the dress and the fairy tale and ever after... you know, the things girls get socialized into wanting. Now, I've been a feminist for many years and I know that the archetype of the bride was going to run deep and would pull out all the little girl stuff in me. So I decided to consciously counterbalance that pull by committing to myself first.    I designed a self-commitment, or self-marriage, ceremony which I held about three months before the wedding. As I said, there's a much longer story here and you can hear it on the episode called "My Self-Marriage Story". But I will tell you here that the ceremony was a profound moment of reinventing myself as I was about to get swooped up into a bunch of old stuff I didn't believe anymore. It allowed me to reinvent myself so that I was in a calm, grounded place, resourced within myself before I made that commitment with another person. And the vows I made to myself in that ceremony are still relevant to me every day.    The second example is from another moment in time when I felt called to reinvent myself. I had been at a job for too long and the day finally came for me to leave. The trouble was that it was difficult to see where I was headed next because I had so many backlogged hard feelings from my time of stuckness. You can hear all about how I dislodged and released the old stuff in an interview I did on The Queer Spirit podcast. It's the last question host Nick Venegoni asked of me on the show and it's linked in the show notes.   I invite you to think and feel through all of these examples and ideas and match them up against any places in your heart in you that might be ready for a re-boot. You are an amazing, glowing, changing being. Celebrate it!    Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite player to make sure you're notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2E6 Do You Need Ceremony (Pt 2)

Bonus - Ritual, Initiation and Change (The Queer Spirit Podcast)

When Reverend Tristy Taylor and her husband decided to stop trying to have a baby, she honored that loss with a special ceremony. During her time sitting shiva, "grief first" was her mantra. Then a dream inspired her to create a celebration of her decision to not become a mother.   Links: Tristy's Blog Post on The UnBaby Shower Video Tour of Grief Ritual Art Journal Tristy Taylor  The UnBaby Shower (KPFA International Women's Day Edit) Rate This Podcast Music by Terry Hughes   Full Transcript   Taylor: Yeah, it's a major life transition for women that's not acknowledged, you know, or talked about really.   Thomas: It's just like a failing, or a loss, or a...   Taylor: A giving up.   Thomas: Yeah, exactly.   On our journey through life, we will come upon moments that invite us to reinvent ourselves. Big changes can do this like moving away from home, getting married, starting a family or choosing not to start a family. How can we slow down in these moments and really honor what’s changing, really honor how we’re changing?   This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we’re going to go deep. Are you ready? We’re going to dive into one of those moments that’s really a rite of passage, an initiation, a change. One of those moments that ceremony is perfect for because it invites us to use all of our creativity and all of our heart. And what’s more, it invites us to use ceremony for what ceremony does best, to create the container to hold the strong emotions that come up with big changes.    Tristy Taylor joins us today to share the story of her unbaby shower, a three-part ceremony she designed when she and her husband decided to stop trying to conceive. She took her time. She followed the threads of what was changing in her and she ended up creating a beautiful ceremony that both honored her grief and was also a celebration.    Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I think... It does start with the journey my husband and I were on to make a baby together. And after trying the usual routes and discovering that nothing was happening, we entered the world of fertility treatments, medical intervention and started down that road, which included some pretty powerful hormone therapy that was... quite a journey to be on that. Basically, all my emotions were at 11 all the time. [LAUGHS] So like, you know, small inconveniences became like fiery, mountainous, rage-fueled tirades. [LAUGHS] And eventually did end up having a pregnancy, but then that pregnancy was... the pregnancy ended up being ectopic. So the fertilized egg and embedded in my fallopian tube. And, you know, we didn't know that and I ended up going to the emergency room one night with just intensive abdominal pain and they took one look at me and said, "You're bleeding internally, and we need to open you up immediately." And then that's when they discovered that... that my tube had ruptured... my fallopian tube had ruptured. And after that experience, we kept trying but it started to... all signs started to point to this was gonna be painful and challenging and not really get us where we wanted to be. And my husband and I talked for a long time about what that choice meant to be child-free. And he kind of took it in stride and sort of said, "Well,I'm gonna use that energy to do other things." And he, like started his own business and, you know, spent a lot of time away from me and away from home kind of diving into almost a little bit avoidant perhaps of his own feelings. But building this business that he'd always wanted to create and felt free to create now that we weren't trying to create a family and all the sort of pressures that might have come with being a parent. It kind of freed him up. And kind of the opposite happened to me where I just felt like my life had been pressed pause... like the pause button had been pressed on my life and I didn't know what happened next. And being someone who really tries to show up to what's happening in my life, regardless whether or not I understand it, I realized that I needed to honor this loss. So... and to really allow some space and time to feel the grief of the loss of being a mother and and even this particular pregnancy loss with the ectopic pregnancy. And being an interfaith minister, I read a lot about all sorts of rituals and I had recently read a really beautiful piece about the modern day of sitting shiva for someone who had passed away from the Jewish tradition. And, knowing that shiva means seven, seven days and I really like felt the like ritual power behind that. I mean, it's a ritual... but that seven days like I really felt how... to devote seven straight days to my grief where grief came first and nothing else had precedence over my sitting inside of my grief... My whole body just resonated with that. I just was like, Yes, that's what we're gonna do! And that's what I did. And I didn't, really... Other than my husband, I didn't talk to anybody. I ended up doing a lot of crafting, which felt really good. I ended up making these kind of heartfelt... heart-shaped sachets with like lavender and different herbs in them... calm... these sort of calming craft/sewing kind of stuff that would that was very focused, but I was also kind of putting my grief into these pieces that I was making. And yeah, it was... it was very powerful time and spent a lot of time in nature and just cried a lot. And didn't think about the future or what my life would look like, I just really tried to focus on the moment, which is challenging, you know. Our Western culture really pushes us to get over our grief as soon as possible and not to dwell and like... all of that stuff... When really, I think the more we can show up for our grief, the more can beautifully move through us. And we can truly let it go. We have to feel it first.    During the time of sitting shiva with her grief, Tristy had a dream. In the dream, she was out in the snow looking into a kind of hut, a hut that felt very ancient. Inside the hut women dressed in animal skins were gathered around a very, very pregnant woman, putting oils on her and celebrating her. There was a fire in the hut but Tristy was outside in the cold and she knew through the knowledge that comes in dreams that she was not allowed into the ritual because she was not fertile and she would be bad energy for the pregnant space.    Taylor: And I woke up crying, and hurt very hurt by the dream. And I also know from doing dream work all my life that no dream ever comes to hurt us and be like, "Look at you, you know, you're stuck, Haha!" You know... Our dreams always come for health and wholeness. And so I really sat with the dream. I drew pictures from the dream... I felt into it. And and the gift that came out of the dream, cause I do think all nightmares have a gift. The gift that came out of the dream was this idea for an unbaby shower. Because it didn't feel fair to me that I should be left out in the cold. And this transition that I was making is just as valuable as the transition of becoming a mother, the transition to not be a mother. And so I connected with two very good friends who are great ritual-makers and we started to piece together this whole ceremonial ritual around having this unbaby shower. And it started with the grief. It started with doing a grief ritual with these two women and really having their support and being in nature together, and making food together. And then that transitioned into this more celebratory shower-space where about 18 women came to my house and painted my body with body paints and gave me blessings. And it was so interesting because it was raining at the beginning of the shower ("the shower"). So we all had to like jam into my little, you know, 700 square-foot house. And then by the afternoon the sun had come up and then I was all like covered in body paint and we just went outside and we're just running around and it was so joyful. There was so much joy. And the way I kind of completed the ritual was making this dedication to being a creator, being a spiritual guide, being... offering my gifts to the world. If I wasn't going to be mothering a new life, then I would be holding this spiritual, creative space for others. And it always makes me think of that Dolly Parton quote, because she also couldn't have children. She tried and she couldn't have them and she just said, "Well, God just decided that I'm gonna be mom to everybody kids." You know, like, I just love that. And I love being, you know, an auntie to my friends', kids. And that feels really like a powerful and important role as as my auntie's were to me as a kid. So that's how that all came about.   Thomas: I love... I love that. I love... I love the way that you love ritual, and you lean into it and into your dreams. And I love your stories, because I love to hear you listening. The layers at which you listen inspire me. And remind me what you discovered about your grandmother and your great grandmother.   Taylor: Yeah. So my... my ruptured tubal pregnancy where I had to have emergency surgery was on March 3. And my... my mother told me that her mother, my grandmother, was born on March 3. And I remembered that her mother, my great-grandmother, died giving birth to her. So my great grandmother died on March 3 giving birth. And I had this emergency surgery that saved my life and I would have died through trying to become a mother. So there was this fascinating karmic Ancestral wound being healed, I believe. I didn't die, I survived. And I really do... from the ancestral work that I've done in my life, I've had visceral experiences. Because time is not linear in that world, like time is a spiral. It's past. It's present. It's future all at once. And so the healing that I did on that day and continue to do ripples back to my Ancestors. You know, and that's my female line. It's my mother's mother's mother, you know, that... all of that is relevant to my experience, you know. And of course, none of that was planned, it's just how it unfolded. It's one of those kind of magic, unexplainable moments, you know, where we've kind of put the pieces together afterwards. And it's like, oh, that seems significant! [LAUGHS]   Thomas: I've always loved the physiological connection that we have to our grandmothers, because... I always have trouble saying it... I... the egg that became me in my mother's ovary... that...   Taylor: ...was in your grandmother.   Thomas: ...was in my grandmother's body - yes!   Taylor: Isn't that amazing?   Thomas: It's so crazy!   Taylor: Yeah. Incredible. And the work they've done about how, like, the stress and trauma of our grandmothers are in those eggs within eggs, like we're literally physically inheriting that trauma. You know, which is, you know, powerful healing work that we all can do as women.   Thomas: Mm hmm. Absolutely.    Tristy's story inspired me so deeply because of the depth of her commitment to the process. Letting the grief ritual come to her, sitting shiva for the 7 days, then creating the unbaby shower to return to her society as a woman who will not be having children. Listening to her story reminded me of my own journey on the road to motherhood and my ultimate decision not to go there.    Thomas: I so appreciate hearing the story of the baby shower because I went through my own process of figuring out... of having a moment in time in my life when I needed to decide which way am I going to go - towards somebody who might want to have a baby or stay with somebody I really like a lot who's very clear they don't want a baby. And I was at the age where I had to pick. And it was a little hard, you know, because I had... You know, I felt like I was losing a lot. But then when I sat with it, and sort of took apart all the pieces of being a mom, I realized that I only wanted certain pieces that were definitely not... didn't equate with having a child or trying to have a child... it just was like, not my thing, even though I felt so much pressure to be a woman in that way. And a lot of, like, legitimate grief and loss when I when I walked away from it, which isn't something I ever thought I would feel but it was there. It was like, wow, okay, to go through these feelings. And my partner was, really, really there for me. And I sought out community, I put an ad on Craigslist for women who had chosen not to have a child who wanted to chat with me about it and I had like four or five women have conversations with me.    Taylor: Oh, I love that!   Thomas: You know, there's nowhere to go to find those women. So I found a few and that really helped me feel like okay, I'm not alone. And then I asked my mom, you know, what do you think? And she said, "You never wanted kids, even when you were a little." And I was like, "Oh, okay, that helps. Thanks." [LAUGHS] Because you know, figure there was some wisdom there that she might be able to give me, plus she never pressured me to have kids, which was immensely helpful on the journey to decide, you know, what was right for me. So I... I know a little bit about I didn't go through the journey of trying, but I went through the journey of deciding, you know, deciding to walk away. Actually, I just had a flash... My parents loved antiques and they had this antique cradle. And my mom lived in Italy before I was born and she kept beer in it and she said the Italian neighbor would always come in and... I guess he'd bring her beer... I don't know... he would come in the house and he would say, "Where is the baby?" And she'd be like, "It's the beer goes in the cradle." Because at that point in her life, she didn't think she was going have a baby because they had tried and tried and tried and tried and given up and then they had beer in the cradle.   Taylor: And then you're all, "Surprise!" [LAUGHS]   Thomas: TYeah. Hi. Move the beer, there's a baby now.    Taylor: That's amazing!   Thomas: Oh, thank you so much for sharing this story with me and with us. And I look forward to sharing out your blog posts with which has the some of the images from your journal and you have the video walkthrough of your journal that you kept during that time.    Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad to share it with you and anyone who resonates or is inspired to create their own ritual. And, you know, I mentioned the blog post, that part of it was inspired by a woman who had a ritual around starting menopause and what that meant to her so I really, I really love to encourage others to think about those major life transitions, like even like leaving a job and starting a new one or moving to another state, which I'm about to do, like, I've been thinking about, like, "Oh, I'm gonna be letting go of California, you know, and what does that mean, to me is born in San Francisco, and, you know, born and raised here. So I think there's lots of space for ritual in our lives if we make it. Yeah. If we have that conversation, we listen and respond.   Tristy Taylor is an Interfaith Minister and Ritualist, providing support and companionship to those that live on the fringes beyond traditional religion. She firmly believes that ALL people deserve to have rituals and ceremonies that honor life’s transitions, regardless of their spiritual beliefs. She has had major personal life experiences around grief and death and is comfortable supporting others during these very human experiences. You can find out more about her work at www.createwithspirit.com.   You can hear a longer version of this same interview where Tristy shares more about what her time sitting shiva looked like on the KPFA Women's Magazine Archives.  Look for the link in the show notes. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2E5 The UnBaby Shower

As we go through life, we inevitably come upon moments that are difficult. Some might be incredibly personal ones that it feels like few other people could understand. We have some options in those moments. We can ask for help, of course. And we might also create a ritual that is uniquely perfect to address our own needs. Please Review Us on Podchaser! Music by Terry Hughes   Full Transcript You know that feeling when an inconvenient emotion is gnawing at you, bothering you, and you just really wish it would go away? It might feel like no one would understand what you're going through anyway, so why even try to explain it? Maybe, just maybe, that thing is you trying to get your attention with an important message.    As we go through life, we inevitably come upon moments that are difficult. Some might be incredibly personal ones that it feels like few other people could understand. We have some options in those moments. We can ask for help, of course. And we might also create a ritual that is uniquely perfect to address our own needs.    This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.    A lot of our interviews are with people who have created ceremonies to honor life transitions that are socially acknowledged. The birth of a baby, a wedding, and death are known as the "big three" by celebrants, but there are plenty of other transitions we celebrate publicly, including getting a new job, graduating from school or finishing a training program, moving into a new home, a relationship anniversary, a friend anniversary, getting a promotion at work, committing to a partnership in community. Most of us have  experienced ceremonies like these, as well as the wide variety of what constitutes "ceremony" for these events, which could range from receiving a card from a friend, to flying to Hawaii for a wedding. The function of these moments is usually to recognize publicly that this person is now different. Their label has changed, one of the many badges they wear in the world has been swapped out or added to. They're a mother now, they're a manager now, they live in the city now, or the country now, "I now pronounce you” The list goes on.    These ceremonies alert the community to their new status and also invite the person to step more deeply into the new role, knowing that on some level, other people care about this change in their life and will hold them accountable to the expectations that come with it. Some couples even ask everyone present at their wedding to help them honor their wedding vows as they move forward in life as a couple, and ask that they speak up if they see the couple failing in that regard.    In addition to helping us honor our changing selves publicly, ritual is also a wonderful way to walk ourselves through personal transitions, the kind that we might not feel comfortable sharing with the world, the kind of personal milestones that society wouldn’t see or wouldn't recognize.    Today we're kicking off a small mini series called, "Do You Need a Ceremony?" in which we'll focus on a variety of life experiences where ceremony might be helpful and see if it's something we might like to explore. In part 1, we'll touch on the important personal moments we might see coming as well as those that might surprise us.   So what are some personal transitions we might see headed our way? Here are some random examples. We might be anticipating our last child leaving the house, the anniversary of a traumatic event might be on the horizon, or the passing of a parent from whom we've been estranged. These are each somewhat nuanced and potentially complicated moments, which we might or might not feel called to work with. But if we do feel called to support ourselves through them in some way, we can turn our mind and heart toward how that could best happen.    While the socially-recognized moments often have a framework we can build a ceremony on, the personal ones may not. So here we are invited to dig deep into what is changing for us. We might begin by asking ourselves some questions like: What is shifting? What needs to be marked? How does this change make me a slightly different person? What do I want to have witnessed in this transition? How might community be part of a ceremony?    Someone once asked me if I do a ritual every month to honor a significant personal moment. My answer was no, I don't do ritual for moments of personal growth unless I'm having a moment of personal growth! My point is, you will know when you need a ritual. To help you identify those moments and consider what you might do with them, here's a simple ritual sketch.   The first thing is to begin to cultivate an even deeper self-awareness than I might already have so that it's easy to identify anything that's trying get my attention. Is anything gnawing at me? Or scaring me? Or worrying me? Is something coming up that I don't feel super comfortable with? Does my heart need some extra care around a loss? Is there something I'm really hoping someone else will do for me? What do I need?   So let's say I create this kind of open dialog with myself over time and one day I realize there's something there. There's something that is asking for my attention. I might spend some time kind of getting to know it. What does it feel like to be in touch with this need, this thing? If I journal about it, or let my mind float to it while I'm taking a walk, what do I learn? Do I have any judgments about it? "Oh, that shouldn't matter," or "I'm being selfish," or my personal favorite, "I should be over that by now." The judgments are important, so I want to hear them out. I know they come from a good place, a part of me that's trying to avoid conflict. So I hear them out and then thank them and set them aside.    Bringing a curiosity to the process will help the need or desire to show me what's happening with it. If it's a fear, it might feel tight and want comfort. If it's anger or longing, it might already be moving and just need some channeling. I might sense into where it wants to go and imagine the most supportive setting possible. Does it want to hide under a pile of blankets? Does it want to storm and rage and break things? Does it just want to say how it's feeling about a hard situation? I'll spend some time feeling into it.    As I do this, I might begin to imagine what actions would meet its needs and what it might be like to be witnessed doing those actions in a supportive way? If it's a fear that wants to hide, what would it be like to invite a friend to hide under a blanket with me and tell them about this terrifying thing? If it's rage, what's the safest way I could break a bunch of stuff and maybe even yell and scream about what I'm mad at? You see where I'm going here... the ritual creates the container and the action helps the emotion move. And the witness... the witness is magic. There's something about being seen in our deepest moments that transforms us beyond what we can do alone. I really can’t explain it.    Once I have a sense of what would feel really good, really supportive to this part, it's time start bringing everything together by deciding/intuiting the details of who, what, when, where and how. I'll remind myself to be bold and brave, really go for it and ask for what I want. I'll be getting vulnerable so it's super important to remember to take care of myself in terms of who I invite and how I share anything about the event.    Mostly, I'll do everything in my creative power to honor this thing, feeling, need, and take it seriously. I know that I'm actually doing healing beyond my own when I honor an important moment for myself.    [MUSIC]   It's so great to have you with us today! If you value what you hear on the show, you can become part of the Shame Piñata community by helping us build our Podchaser page. Podchaser is donating 25 cents to Meals on Wheels for every review in April. Find the link in the show notes & don't forget to subscribe to the show in your favorite pod player if you haven't already.   Let's go through this with a concrete example. Turning 35 was a significant moment for me, because it meant outliving two strong women I admired and wanted to be like. Both my great-grandmother and a close friend of the family who helped raise me never reached that age. Each of them died at 34 and a half in very heartbreaking ways. At some point, probably between turning 34 and turning 34 1/2, I realized it was coming, the moment of having a birthday they never had.   That feeling. I don't even know what it was. Some combination of dread, loss, heartbreak and just plain fear. That was what I was working with. It was real and it was in my face and it was alerting me that I had some work to do, and that I had some feelings to process. So that was step 1, finding "the thing", the "pain point" as the saying goes in business. The thing that is coming up to be addressed.    The next step was to sense into how those feelings wanted to move and design a ceremony to facilitate that. It took me some time to build that ceremony, as simple as it ended up being. It was really kind of a long, slow process of sitting with the feelings as they came up, journaling, talking with friends, doing some small rituals, visioning and healing. I focused on coming to terms ever so slightly more with what happened to each of them. And I spent time reminding myself that I was actually a different person than them and it was okay for me to have my own story. I imagined what it might be like to chart my own course beyond their example.    Ultimately, I decided to have a large gathering of friends come over on my birthday and to simply tell them the whole story, let them witness everything. When the day came, we all jammed into my little yellow cottage for a big celebration and we really enjoyed being together. Eventually everyone settled down for me to tell the story. It was heartbreaking to go into it and it felt kind of awful to share such grief with my friends. But they stayed, and they listened, and they honored how much these women meant to me, and how scary it was for me to go on on my own. And then, quite spontaneously, they gifted me with an angel tunnel, which was formed diagonally in the little cottage and through which I walked with closed eyes between two lines of friends who whispered to me how much they loved me as I passed, the things they admired about me, and the ways I had touched their lives. The angel tunnel wasn't part of the plan for the event, it evolved on its own and it was the perfect conclusion to the ceremony because it was a birthing, a bridge into the next part of my life, the part where I would begin to map my own way forward. And it also bridged me quite lovingly into being 35, and set me on that path knowing that a whole bunch of people who loved me had my back as I moved tenderly forward.    The steps again are to identify the "pain point", sense into what it needs, and design the ceremony to support that. I invite you to give it a try the next time something is gnawing at you.    You are invited to join us for parts two and three in this short series called "Do You Need a Ceremony?" They'll be headed your way later this spring and early summer. Our music is by Terry Hughes. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2E4 Do You Need Ceremony? (Pt 1)

S2E3 A Queer Pagan Handfasting

Time is a spiral - right now and always. And COVID time is a ride all its own. Whatever your experience of time has been in the past year, join us for a look at what time gives us and the benefits of letting go. We'll also explore our own personal connection to space and time so we're not so thrown by the world around us. Links: - What Happens When We Lose Our Social Rituals? - The Liminal Space – Embracing the Mystery and Power of Transition from What Has Been to What Will Be - KPFA's 2021 International Women's Day Programming Music by Terry Hughes Full Transcript Torres: First, I have to say, like, I don't... I know you were putting like the toilet paper tubes in a little area in the bathroom but I wasn't sure why and now you have them out on the table and I'm noticing they have like a... it's like a journal... it's really cool. This is my husband Rodrigo sitting with me and 47 empty toilet paper rolls. Torres: ...look, I have a collection of paper rolls with stuff written on them and I'm like... I used them as a way to mark our progression through the pandemic. Thomas: Here's the very first one. Torres: Oh, wow. Yeah, and we're, we're about there. It's almost a year now. Thomas: Yeah. It was March 18 I think when we went on lockdown. Torres: Wow. Thomas: So this is March 30 '20. And then there's a March from '21 there at that end. Torres: 3/2/21. That was two days ago. Thomas: So I dated them and I have them arranged them arranged by month so we can see how many we used each month. Torres: Ok. After a while of just dating them, I started also writing little journal entries on them. Thomas: What do you got there? Torres: Ah, let's see... let me grab one of these. 8/1/20: My podcast is... Thomas: Now Torres: Now available on Alexa. And it's written around the tube so it's like, you have to turn the tube around to read it. Thomas: Right. It's an interactive journal experience. Torres: Yes. It's a spiral with time. Time is a spiral - right now and always. And COVID time is a ride all its own. Whatever your experience of time has been in the past year, join me for a look at what time gives us and the benefits of letting go. We'll also explore our own personal connection to space and time so we're not so thrown by the world around us. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. So how are you doing with time right now? Do you have enough of it? Too much of it? Do you feel lost or are you right on track? Do you know what day of the week it is? How sure are you about that? I've been having a hard time telling which way is up for about a year now, and it's disconcerting and I know I'm not the only one. I've heard several people say in the past year that it's difficult to focus, it's difficult to keep track of what month it is, difficult to gauge the passage of time during the day. Was that 15 minutes? Was that only two weeks ago? COVID has really been messing with our ability to keep track of time, mostly because it's a completely liminal space that's asked us to give up the framework we've used our whole lives. I found an article on liminality recently from Alan Seale, the Founder & Director of the Center for Transformational Presence. The piece was written in 2016. Seale, who could probably never have imagined how impactful his article would be in the early 2020's tells us that, "The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin root, limen, which means 'threshold.' The liminal space is the 'crossing over' space – a space where you have left something behind, yet you are not yet fully in something else. It's a transition space." Time is a super interesting thing. We feel secure when we build routines and expectations based on its constant presence. We mark time with concepts like generations, lifetimes, stages of life, annual patterns, weekly schedules, daily routines. Let's take a moment to consider what COVID has done with these concepts. It's become difficult to connect across generations which has kind of separated us from that intergenerational space that's so rich an important. The National Academy of Sciences recently published a study showing that life expectancy in the US went down in 2020 due to the pandemic, so there's a hit to our concept of what constitutes a lifetime. Along with that, the life expectancy reduction for the Black and Latino communities is 3 to 4 times that for the white community. That very statistic threatens to erase any gains we've made in equity on its own. Stages of life and the ways we mark them have also been affected. Graduations, weddings and other gatherings designed to mark the stages of life largely abandoned for almost a year. We're missing those rituals, really missing them. And lastly, as you know, our annual, weekly and daily patterns have completely changed. This is no small thing. I know you know this, and I just really want to say that whatever you're feeling right now, and whatever happened the last time you maybe suddenly just lost it over something small, you're not imagining things. This is weird. We didn't build our lives to make sense of this. An extended period of liminality with no warning and no psychological preparation is pretty brutal. COVID time to me feels like living inside a jar of sand and water that's being constantly shaken. Kinda like a snow globe, but without the pretty winter scene creating a calming sense of place. What does time do for us? Or to be clear, what does an organized sense of time do for us? I think it gives us stability and maybe even sanity. At the very least, it provides a lay of the land, a framework, something to base our expectations on. But maybe we need to even be more fine-tuned in discussing this. It's not that time isn't flowing normally right now, right? Two weeks is still two weeks during COVID, but the thing that's weird is it doesn't feel like two weeks. I thought that I would get used to the flow of time in COVID and eventually it wouldn't be so disorienting, but that actually hasn't happened. I think that's because we're still in the liminal, threshold space, and the big question "When will this be over?" still can't be answered. So there has to be some benefit from this weird time we're in, some way we can grow from it. We'll be right back. [MUSIC] Thank you for spending a few minutes of your day with us! If you enjoy listening to Shame Piñata, you can support the show by sharing with a friend or co-worker. We're into our 2nd season now (yay!) so all of our first season episodes are available on your favorite player and there might be one there that would really call to someone you know. And thanks! One thing we can definitely do is practice disconnecting from our attachments and embracing the feel of flow. We might realize we're already doing this multiple times a day once we start paying attention. We can also use this time to reframe our view of the world and how we show up in it. We can fight for making a better world, a more equitable world. I have a quote on my desk that I look at every morning from writer Roxane Gay, something she said a year ago when the pandemic started, "The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For Black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free." And this is a chance for all of us to change the way we live, who we connect with, what kind of media we consume, and whose words we surround ourselves with. We are being offered the chance to see things from a different angle. And as Alan Seale says, "Herein lies the power and the gift of the liminal space. The liminal space shakes us out of our habitual lives. It draws us out of what we have known, yet does not allow us to know what is coming next, or when. It’s the chrysalis stage for the caterpillar." So how do we keep track of time within liminality? Here are a few ideas. First, routine events can help: A daily walk, a weekly lunch, a monthly treat. These are things our subconscious mind can begin to rely on for comfort and stability. And they can even weave in some connection if we want that. There's number two, regular social connections. I've been lucky enough to be part of a family that's held weekly Zoom calls for almost a year now. Before COVID, visits were few and far between, but we just celebrated our 50th call last week. (I know because my uncle keeps track and he held up a big 5-0 sign as we began the call). If you don't have regular social connections in your life right now, consider looking online at the activities and groups you find interesting. So many things have moved online right now. It's possible to attend workshops and ceremonies on the other side of the world. And if you can't handle any more screen time, consider events that might allow you to call in rather than connect online and maybe take a walk while you listen. Third, nature is still happening! The Earth still turns every 24 hours, bringing the steady rhythm of sunrises and sunsets which can be very potent times to observe the majesty of life on our planet. And the moon still pulls on the waters in our bodies just as much as she pulls on the waters of the Earth. You can mark the month by her changing light and if you choose to honor the new moon or the full moon, know that there is a very rich history in that tradition. And of course there are the many sabbats around the wheel of the year as celebrated by the earth-based religions throughout time. Here in the northern hemisphere we're coming up to Spring Equinox later this month which will of course be the Autumnal Equinox in the southern hemisphere. And that brings us to the mid point between emptiness and fullness, a moment of balance. And balance brings us to ritual. [MUSIC] We can create rituals to mark the significant moment in our lives. As social psychologist Shira Gabriel says, "Rituals mark the passage of time as sacred." We can also use ceremony to center ourselves when things are topsy-turvy. Here's a simple ritual sketch we might use to find ourselves even within the flow of COVID time. So first we might create an intentional space by finding a still corner of the house or maybe taking a walk to find a quiet space in nature. Then we might take a few deep breaths and really feel into the body. What does it feel like to be sitting on this thing? What is the feeling of the air on my skin? How many sounds can I hear? Next we might get in touch with any spiritual guides, Goddesses, Gods or entities we work with or connect to the numinous however we experience it with gratitude and humility. Connected to this greater force, we might notice that our breathing has softened a bit and that we feel just a little bit calmer. We might then bring our focus to the wide field of time, seeing ourselves in the very center of it, complete and whole, grounded and calm. Noticing how it moves in spirals, how it dances around us and holds great complexity. And yet at the center of it, we are focused and deeply connected with our own self, our own presence. Sound healer Aleya Dao talks about the golden river of light that flows at our core. We might connect to that pure essence of self as we watch time go by like a movie. We might begin to sense the many ways that our core essence transcends time, transcends the grids our mind creates to make sense of it. We might come up on a younger version of ourselves and feel moved to share something we've learned with them. We might seek out an older version of ourselves and ask for some wisdom to make this COVID time easier. Mostly, we can rest in the deep knowing that all time is now and all space is here. This ceremonial experience of time transcends the limits we've known before, and allows us to heal in new ways. When we're ready, we can return to the space we're in, take a few deep breaths and maybe move our body around a little to come back to waking consciousness. And we might want to write down a thing or two of what we experienced in the open field of time. So how are you keeping track of time right now? What's working for you? Drop us a note on the shamepinata.com website and we will share your tips in an upcoming show. Catch a special edition of Shame Piñata this Sunday March 7 on KPFA's International Women's Day Programming. Interfaith Minister Tristy Taylor will speak on the importance of ceremony in women's lives and The UnBaby Shower she designed when she and her husband stopped trying to have children. That's at 1:30pm Pacific this Sunday, March 7 on KPFA.org. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2E2 Making Sense of COVID Time

Being a woman in this world brings challenges. Susan wanted to prepare her daughter Nikole for those challenges in the best way possible. So she invited several of her closest friends to a non-religious ceremony and asked them to present Nikole with some of the things that had supported them in their own lives. Notes: Susan Burgess-Lent Susan's Book: Trouble Ahead: Dangerous Missions with Desperate People Join the Shame Piñata Mailing List Love Shame Piñata? Subscribe on iTunes Follow on Spotify Follow on Podchaser Follow on Instagram Connect on Facebook Join us for a Ceremony Full Transcript Burgess-Lent: I think that's the key is you have to decide, "Okay, this is a milestone." And we can do it fast and furiously. We can plan it out. But either way, the marking of the experience is what counts and the community that forms around that discovery, that realization, is really valuable, especially for women. In her book "Circle of Stones", author Judith Duerk asks, "How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you to go to be with your mother, with your sisters and aunts, with your grandmothers, and the great- and great-great-grandmothers, a place of women to go, to be, to return to, as a woman. How might your life have been different?" This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome, welcome to the second season of Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. I am so glad you've come back to join us for season 2, and if you're new to the show, welcome! I'm especially happy to have you here today because this season we will begin to branch out and talk about rites of passage people have created for events beyond weddings. Weddings are amazing, don't get me wrong, but there are many more life transitions that we can honor with ceremony. We're going to start off today with the life transition that probably comes most readily to mind when I say the words rites of passage. Today we will meet Susan Burgess-Lent and her daughter Nikole Lent. Susan and NiKole will tell us about their welcome to womanhood ceremony, the one that Susan created when Nikole turned 16. The setting for the ceremony was their home to which Susan invited her closest women friends to bring a symbolic gift to honor her daughter. The ceremony was 17 years ago, but you can hear how it is still an important part of their lives today. Thomas: Susan, I wanted to start with you and ask you what inspired you to create the Welcome to Womanhood ceremony for Nikole. Burgess-Lent: It was a process. I think I was discovering what it meant to be a woman more profoundly at the time than I had before. And when we had Nikole, I decided that my purpose was to raise a competent and compassionate human being. And I realized that at the same time, she'd also be kind of a captive of her gender. There were bad things that would happen because that's what happens to women. And much to my grief, I couldn't prevent them. And so, you know, this was an initiation into another level of the sisterhood. You know, my generation dealt with a lot more... we were more thoroughly indoctrinated into deference. I didn't want that passed on to my daughter. So, you know, and I think also her struggle during her early teen years exhausted both of us. And I wanted to celebrate the end of that, as well as this new phase that she'd come into that seemed somehow more grounded. Thomas: Wow. And what background did you have with ritual at that time, Susan? Burgess-Lent: Not a lot beyond, you know, the usual holiday things and birthday celebrations that... the normal ones that we have. But I also felt that some kind of maybe subconscious need to translate the more religiously oriented rituals that I had grown up with into something that was secular and to the point of providing Nikole with some real tools. Thomas: And can you put into words the kind of tools you wanted to provide her with? Burgess-Lent: I think that it was that first of all, that there were a whole lot of women out there who come before her, who knew the path had suffered many of them, some of the things that would happen to her and got through it and figured out what to do next. Plus their gifts were... were sort of iconic, you know things to carry, things to wear, things to listen to, that had provided some support for them in their lives. And I I feel like the ceremony had as much impact on them, as it might have had on Nikole. I asked Susan and Nikole to take a step back for a moment and describe what happened in the ceremony. Burgess-Lent: Nikole, do you want to do that, or should I? Lent: You can go ahead. Burgess-Lent: Well, okay. I had invited my women friends. I had a circle of about 10 women or so. And I told them that I wanted them to share with Nikole, the wisdom that they had acquired over the years being a woman. And that if they wanted to bring some gift, it would be in the form of something that was symbolic. And they could read a poem, or they could play some music, or they could dance or they could have an object, it didn't matter. I left it up to them. Thomas: And what were some of the gifts that showed up? Lent: I can speak to that, because I still have many of them. [LAUGHS] One was this gorgeous woven, very intricately woven, basket that our friend had made by hand. And I've used it for so many things over the years and it's held strong for... yeah, pretty much like 15-17 years at this at this point. Susan: Yeah. Lent: And it's like a... it's just a gorgeous bag that I've used for produce when I'm at the farmers market and carrying important... I've like kept precious items in it. And it was... it's just sturdy and very... Like it... it looks like she had spent hours on it. But I think she was, you know, adept in these weaving skills. So maybe it was... it was very thoughtful. And another friend gave me Joni Mitchell's album "Blue" which I love and I've listened to like in times of heartbreak and in times of you know, just the... she's... She wrote a card that said something like, "These songs are tattoos on my soul and have been with me for like, you know, profound moments in my life. And I hope that they can be there for you the way that they worked for me." And I listened... that album was like... it was like a friend to lean on. And then another friend made this beautiful... she's a mosaic tile and glass artist and she made this... a mirror that was like specifically crafted and tailored towards like a young, kind of like angsty teenager artsy vibe. [LAUGHS]. But that I loved and that I had in my room. And I forget which... Another friend had made... she did a painting of like, it was an image of a woman that was kind of in transition that I had in my room for a long time. And there was also the crown... I wore a crown, like, it was like kind of a bramble and with flowers, you know, while I was in the middle of this ceremony, and that... It just felt like an honor to be celebrated and cherished, and that was a symbol of that. Those are some of the gifts that I can think of there... I am sure there's more but, you know, it's been some time. But a lot of good stuff. A lot of precious, thoughtful, deliberate offerings. Thomas: Wow, that sounds amazing. It sounds like the people who showed up really had prepared and were really fully present with you. Lent: Yeah, everyone seemed to take it very seriously. And it... you know, it was light and we had we had... we enjoyed ourselves and we had, you know, some... a nice breakfast and... But yeah, everyone... like it was like the experience of transition into womanhood was something that everyone present took very seriously. Thomas: Was it something that you talked with your friends about afterward? Lent: I did. And I was the only person that I knew that had had something like that aside from, you know, friends that had ceremonies related to religion or cultural background, be it a bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, quinceañera or things of that nature. But as far as like a non-religious based rite of passage ceremony, I was the only person that I knew that had experienced such a thing. So my friends are really curious and excited and intrigued by that. We'll be right back. If you value what you hear on the show, you can become part of the Shame Piñata community by getting on the mailing list for all the upcoming events and news and don't forget to subscribe to the show in your favorite pod player if you haven't already. [Music] Thomas: We spoke a little bit about this before, but I'm curious if you can say more about how... well the broad question is how did the ritual change you, but specifically, I'm curious how, how it changed your relationship with ritual, if at all? Lent: I think just the importance and significance of getting women friends together for me personally is really profound. And at one point, I was in a fashion collective and we... One day, I was just like, you know, "It'd be really... I'd love to just go somewhere where I could scream and not be heard. That would be nice. Do you guys want to go to the top of a mountain and just scream if you need to and..." We had other like sage burnings and four directions... just release ceremonies or spreading ashes of friends that had passed. These things became a regular activity in my life. And I think that... having... ritual being a thing that was important to me in my teenage years, like, carried on into my adult years and still is important to me. Thomas: Same question to you, Susan. How did your relationship with ritual change, if at all, after the ceremony? Burgess-Lent: Well, I took it very seriously that this sort of thing ought to be incorporated in many more ways in our lives. I spent a lot of time in Africa and I know that the sense about rituals of all kinds was a really important part of lives. And it was both a pause and a reset that said, okay, we have something to celebrate, to grieve, to whatever it was... There was a whole way of doing it that honored the community, not just women but men and women together. And I felt that rituals that women can have in particular around major events. Certainly a birth... welcoming... you know, the transition to womanhood, motherhood, menopause, all of those things. We have some ceremonies, and I'm not sure that I qualify a baby shower as a ceremony, but it sort of is. And these are major points of change in a woman's life and gathering more women together just makes it better. Thomas: [LAUGHS] Yeah. I'm curious, Susan, from your perspective, did the ceremony 17 years ago changed Nikole in any way? Burgess-Lent: Oh, I'm sure it had an impact. I think the thing that I noticed right away is that she seemed to begin to take herself more seriously as a woman. And I felt that, you know, she's become, partly because of the support around the issue of being a good human being, she's become a really extraordinary individual who is in intelligent, beautiful and fierce - in particular about what she thinks is fair and right. And all those things are honored when you say, "these are the values that matter in the world... in our world, in our women's lives." And taking yourself seriously on that is real big deal. Thomas: Is that something you were aware of, Nikole? Lent: I think it, it felt nice to be taken seriously, at that ritual. Like it felt like I was being taken seriously so it seems natural that I would shift into feeling in my power, having women acknowledge what a powerful, you know, moment of transition, this is for you... You don't get that... I wasn't getting that in school. [LAUGHS] I was getting a very different way, which is not always welcome. Having that acknowledged by, you know, elder women who I respected along with... accompanied by wisdom that was helpful... definitely was encouraging to step into my power, I would say. Thomas: That's wonderful. And that's a such an intense time, such a potent time to be given... shown that mirror and welcome to stepping into our own power. So what advice would you both have for somebody who is considering maybe doing this for their child, a coming of age sort of ceremony? Burgess-Lent: Well, I would say that you have to start wherever it is you are. You know, you... you don't have to be elaborate. You just have to be honest and creative. Do what works for you. And really, there's wonderful research all over the place about, you know, customs for women. Some of them aren't so good but the ones that are have, you know, objects and scents and foods, and you can integrate a whole lot of things in this. I think we did have cake, [LAUGHS] and some others. But I can't recall now. It's all it's a total sensory, if you want it to be. Thomas: How about you, Nikole, any thoughts on advice for someone considering creating one? Lent: Yeah, I would say, I was thinking along the same lines of just making sure you meet your child where they're at. Like, you know, tailoring it specifically to who they are like it... you have to get to know get to know what your, what your child is into, and what things might appeal to them and, and that will kind of guide you in how to arrange something like this so that it's not, like a scary, terrifying... it's an inviting thing to be a part of. Like, I was I felt comfortable and like it was like something to look forward to and something I was excited to participate in. And I think it was important, like, you know, we talked about maybe, wouldn't it be nice if we had some of my friends my age there. But I think for me, the powerful element in it was that I was being welcomed to womanhood by elders. And that was a unique experience for me that stands out is just having women that have lived it that can share about it and and have fun with it. Like it should be a fun thing. [LAUGHS] Burgess-Lent: Yeah, most of all should be fun. Yeah, I do remember that little crown it was it was grapevines intertwined with flowers, as I recall, and you looked so cute in it. Lent: But on a final note... that it's... I just want to emphasize how important I feel that rituals and ceremonies marking rites of passage are in this day and age. I feel like it's becoming even more important with just like how time moves more quickly and rapidly with technology especially having just those moments where you celebrate and honor like, wow, this is a major pivotal life thing. And it's gonna go by really quick. And let's take a moment to just honor this together. I think that's really important. Thomas: I do too. I think you said it very well. Thank you for saying that. [LAUGHS] Lent: Yeah. Burgess-Lent: Thanks for inviting us to re... re visit the time and the thoughts that went with it. If there is a young person in your life who is approaching a coming of age milestone, there are so many resources that can support you in creating a religious or non-religious ceremony to mark that transition. I hope that Susan and Nikole's story has widened your ideas about what that could look like. And if listening to this story brought up any sadness about missing an opportunity to celebrate coming of age for yourself or someone else, know that ritual transcends space and time and it's 100% possible to create retroactive rituals. We'll talk more about those this season too. Susan Burgess-Lent is a veteran international aid worker, warrior for women’s rights, author, mentor, and public speaker. She is Founder and Executive Director of Women’s Center’s International, an Oakland-based non-profit that creates safe resource centers for women affected by conflict and poverty. Nikole Lent is studying to become a trauma-informed substance abuse counselor. Pre-pandemic, Nikole worked as a Chef for musicians and events. Nikole is passionate about dance, comedy and performance art. Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to make sure you're notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2E1 Welcome to Womanhood

On Season 2 of Shame Piñata, we'll dive into what it looks like to create rituals for the important moments in our lives. Music by Terry Hughes   Love Shame Piñata? Subscribe on iTunes Follow on Spotify Follow on Podchaser Follow on Instagram Connect on Facebook Join us for a Ceremony   Transcript I’m Colleen Thomas. I help people make sense of life through ceremony. On Season 2 of Shame Piñata, we'll dive into what it looks like to create rituals for the important moments in our lives. Lent: The experience of transition into womanhood was something that everyone present took very seriously. Thom: But there was so much variety and people were totally involved. So you weren't just watching. It was like, you were in it. Find us on favorite player or go to shamepiñata.com to learn more.

S2 Mini Trailer

On the second season of Shame Piñata, we explore rites of passage for real-life transitions such as reaching a certain age, facing a significant loss, receiving a diagnosis, or choosing to reveal our true selves to the people we love. Music by Terry Hughes. Links: Be sure to catch up on Season 1 as well! Love Shame Piñata? Subscribe on iTunes Follow on Spotify Follow on Podchaser Follow on Instagram Connect on Facebook Join us for a Ceremony Full Transcript Four of my closest friends watched from their computer screens as I put on a small pile of t-shirts, each one on top of the other. Before putting on each shirt, I read aloud the words I had painstakingly written on the fabric with a ballpoint pen. Words of grief. Words of loss. Words of shame. [MUSIC] The thing about shame is that it thrives on secrecy. So I'd created this ceremony to share it in a safe space, to expose the shame and take some of its power away. Putting all those t-shirts on felt awful. But it was an important beginning of the ceremony that ultimately freed me. I’m Colleen Thomas. I'm a ritual artist and I help people make sense of life through ceremony. This is Shame Piñata. It can be difficult to keep going through the hard times, but the good news is that as human beings, we are so amazingly creative. We can reframe major life changes as initiations and we can do it on our own terms. Lent: The experience of transition into womanhood was something that everyone present took very seriously. It just felt, like, an honor to be celebrated and cherished. Venegoni: A ritual passage ceremony I wish I could have had would be something along the lines of a coming out ceremony. You know, I think that for so many queer people that not only is it not honored, but it's something to be ashamed of or to hide. Taylor: I didn't die. I survived. And I really do... from the ancestral work that I've done in my life... time is not linear in that world. Like, time is a spiral. It's past. It's present. It's future all at once. And so the healing that I did on that day and continue to do ripples back to my Ancestors. On Season 2 of Shame Piñata, join me to explore how to honor each change as a new beginning. Episode 1 launches on February 5. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public or go to shamepiñata.com to learn more.

S2 Trailer New Beginnings

What if I told you that it's possible to find grace and flow in the middle of chaos? What if I said you could learn how to dance in liminal space and be a rock star, a liminal kind of rockstar. It's all about releasing expectation and connecting to the things that matter the most. Music by Terry Hughes Links: S1E9 COVID-19 A Ritual for Flow Upside Down & Inside Out OK Go - Upside Down & Inside Out BTS - How We Did It Full Transcript We're nearing the end of the year. It's been 9-12 months in the COVID space, depending on what part of the world you're in. And we're not done. What if I told you that it's possible to find grace and flow in the middle of chaos? What if I said you could learn how to dance in liminal space and be a rock star, a liminal kind of rockstar. It's all about releasing expectation and connecting to the things that matter the most. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. I've been thinking a lot lately about peace and grace and COVID sanity. I was struck by something I heard from recently from Dietician and Chef Alicia Connor. She said, "Let go of the past. Accept the now. Hang tight." There's so much wisdom in that. Because we can't go back. Even though we might be wishing with every fiber of our being for restrictions to be lifted and life to go back to normal, really, there's no going back. We've come so far in this weird COVID journey that we know things will never be the same. They'll just be new and different at best. Today we're going to break down Alicia's statement and spend some time reflecting on each part of it. We'll look at what letting go can mean, both in terms of COVID and in terms of regular life. We'll explore the now, with all of its discomfort and liminality. And we'll talk about what hanging tight in the strangeness of that now can be like, and how we can find our balance there. As we move toward the end of the calendar year and those of us in the northern hemisphere deepen into the winter season, the stage is set to support us in a natural process of letting go. Winter is a wonderful teacher for rest and hibernation, releasing what's ready to fall away with the leaves and rest beneath the snow. At the same time the winter holidays focus us on light, life and connection, the earth grows quiet. If we create some time to sit in the quiet, maybe even in the darkness which begins so early now, and notice what's ready to be released, we may find old things, old beliefs, old hurts, hard feelings that are still hanging around from old relationships, bits and bobs we haven't forgiven others for (or forgiven ourselves for). And we might even find some deeper things like old blankets of shame we've walked around in for years, or things we've carried that maybe aren’t even ours. Letting go can mean many things. Letting go can mean honoring ourselves for holding these things, honoring the people at the other end of cords, grudges or miscommunications. Letting go can mean laying some things down, letting them drop into the earth. Releasing attachments. It can also mean releasing expectations. Expectations for a return to normalcy, expectations for simple answers to the complexity of our world today. It can mean allowing the mandala of this moment to exist, all things existing at the same time in the same place. Happy things, joyful things, sad things, heart-wrenching things... all woven together as part of the whole. Letting go is important for our mental health, our nervous systems, and our basic ability to cope with change. Releasing any rigidity in our body, our mind, and our heart can help us soften and flow with what actually is. But as we've been exploring this season on Shame Piñata, being in the now is not always comfortable or fun or even doable. We may find, when we try to quiet our mind or body that we're quickly distracted by thoughts or sensations. Similar distractions may pop up when we learn of some new scary fact or hear a hard story. Our nervous systems protect us. It strives to keep us in balance and to block out overwhelm, at least mine does. Sometimes if something is just too much, or there's been too much intensity for too long, I kind of leave the room. My eyes glaze over. The person I'm with knows I'm not really listening anymore. I'm just beyond my tolerance level at that moment. This is normal. Especially now. I'd love it if we could give ourselves permission, and give others around us permission, to stop for a moment when we pop a nervous system fuse and take a break. Maybe take a breath. Because resistance to overwhelm is actually a healthy and sane response to a crazy situation. The thing about the now is that it's sort of timeless, right? It's "this now moment", which makes it both a single moment and all time and space at once. How do we make sense of a long string of "this now moments"? We can get kind of lost. It all can become sort of gelatinous. Most of us are used to a schedule or a rhythm of events.... this could be daily... this could be annual. We're used to making sense of things through life rhythms. Summer travel plans, weekly health routines, a daily schedule of meeting or other events. Liminality itself can be kind of brutal. Marking time, floating... it's almost like we're treading water while we hang out waiting to see how things will land. I was thinking about navigating liminality and an image popped in my head from a music video by the band OKGO. Stick with me here because I know this is a bit of a jump. If you haven't seen the OKGO video for Upside Down & Inside Out, you need to. Not only because it will help illustrate my point, but also because it's an amazing video. It's the only music video I've ever seen that was filmed in zero gravity, excepting of course Commander Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity on the International Space Station. When I think of liminality, I see the OKGO band members swimming around the inside of a plane as it flies in parabolas in the skies over Moscow. The video was filmed on a jet plane that was flying up and down in great sweeps called parabolas. Each parabola gave the band 27 seconds of weightlessness to perform a piece of their zero g choreography. They filmed the video in one take as the plane completed 8 parabolas, pausing in place in between weightless peaks and then cutting out the paused sections. The video was directed by lead singer Damian Kulash and his sister Trish Sie. In one of the many behind the scenes videos, the two spoke about the process the band went through in learning to move around in a zero gravity environment. Damian said, "Most people's response to weightlessness is just to start swimming," to which Trish added, "It takes some time to train your body not to flail around. Kicking and paddling when you're in the air is not the same as kicking and paddling in water. You just look panicked." And there are many frames of the band members kicking and flailing around, looking pretty uncomfortable in their first test flights. But by the time they filmed the video, they had found their way around and learned how to glide here or push off that thing to head over there. They were doing complex choreography in periods which bridged the divide from double gravity into weightlessness. They moved almost as efficiently as the aerial dancers they brought in as flight attendants. I share this image with you to illustrate that it takes some time to find our grace and flow in liminality. We're not born to it. We're used the reliable gravity of our everyday lives. When that basic force is gone, we can feel lost within the task of simply moving from point A to point B. But once we get it, we can do it. We can even find grace in liminality. And as song says, "Gravity's just a habit that you're pretty sure you can't break." So here we are hanging tight. In this moment. And now in this moment. How can we support ourselves in keeping on going as the moments go by? Here's a simple ritual sketch you might try out and adapt in any way that support your current situation. So first we might take a deep breath and sit with the concept of centering. What does centering feel like today? What is center? Where is center? And then we might ground down into the earth and allow our bodies to land and quiet a bit. As we sit in the stillness, we can begin to notice any energetic cords we are connected to, cords that others may have placed on us, cords we may have put out into the world to keep track of things or to keep our balance. Things we love. Things we fear. Things we're attached to. We can notice those and let them dissolve, connecting instead to ourselves and to the earth, growing a bit heavier as we connect again down. Amongst the cords we may find expectations or attachments to outcomes. Rigid expectations we might have for ourselves or for others. Rigidity. Need. Attachment. We can play with releasing those, just play, and see what it feels like to be floating safely in the now. Then we might call to mind a place where we feel safe and good. Maybe a place we've been, or a place we've seen pictures of. A place where there are no worries. A place where we can vision and dream for a bit. And in this place we can ask ourselves, "What's important? What do I know in my core? What's one thing that really matters to me?" and see what comes. And as images arise, we can quietly let them wash over us. Things we love. Things that matter. Things that define us because of our unwavering connection to them. Timeless things. True things. Core things. And we can welcome these things into our consciousness and thank them for being part of our life and our heart. And then we might make sure we're still connected to the good earth, take a few deep breaths, and return to the room where we can do some journaling about how to create more connection to those things on a daily basis. How to let them become our anchors during this floaty, liminal time while we're still paddling around in zero gravity. We can't go back. And there's no forward to go to yet. So for now, we wait. And we float, and we Zoom, and we knit or bake, and wash our hands, and wear masks and make thoughtful choices. There's kind of really just the now. There is simultaneously no return to what was, to the life we had before COVID, and no next life yet. Let go of the past. Accept the now. Hang tight. Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to make sure you're notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1E17 Dancing in Liminality

S1E16 Inviting Grief to the Wedding

What does your body need in order to rest fully? What does your heart need to soften a bit? What would it feel like to rest - not with one ear out for the next crisis - but actually fully rest? Basic Steps of a Ritual for Deep Rest 1. Set aside concerns 2. Nest building 3. Set an intention 4. Invite guides/guardians/Ancestors 5. Rest in the space 6. Listen in the space 7. Return slowly 8. Have some water Music by Terry Hughes Links: Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest Black Power Naps ----------- Full Transcript My coworker described how she spent some of her time this past summer. She said she just needed to be on the beach staring at the water. So she did that, while her kids built sand castles and looked for shells. She sat there for several days, just slowing down and doing nothing. Listening to her words, I realized I'd done my summer break completely wrong! Life is super dynamic right now. There's never a dull moment from the election on the horizon to health issues, natural disasters and a huge leap forward in social justice. How can we be our best? How can we show up as fully as possible? Maybe resting is part of the picture. Not resting with one ear out for the next crisis, but just fully resting. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we're going to talk about resting deeply. Like, actually letting go for a whole series of minutes. Putting the world on pause. Putting the phone on do not disturb. Noticing any aversions we might have to letting go and actually doing it. We'll talk about why rest matters, why we avoid it sometimes, and create ways to find out what is truly restful to us. If resting isn't a challenge for you but you know someone who's chronically on edge, please share this episode with them. So, what is the point of rest? I often find myself wondering that when I'm feeling short on time, or in crisis mode. Sleeping and even eating can seem like an awful waste of time. Why can't I just get on with it? Rest actually has several functions. It allows our body to do some basic healing without the added strain of pushing forward. It helps to create a little more space in our heads. It gives us some breathing room. And, it also allows us to process our experiences. Years ago I was checking out a graduate program in spirituality. During my first visit to campus, I asked several of the students what they wished they had known before they started. They all said hands down they wished they'd taken their time with the program, to have had more time to absorb everything on both an intellectual and a personal level. That was a huge insight for me and it turns out that they were right. That program offered some deep lessons that it would have been a shame to rush through and lose the chance to fully absorb. This wisdom on integration aligns with what I learned from my favorite yoga teacher about savasana, or corpse pose, which is often done at the very end of yoga class. He said that savasana is actually half of the yoga practice, because it allows our body to integrate the work we've just done. So without those 10 minutes of lying still on our backs on the floor, significant benefits of the class would have been lost. If resting is so great, why is it difficult sometimes? I invite you to pause for a moment and look around the space you are in. Check out the colors and shapes. Notice a few sounds. Notice your breath. Notice any tension in your body. And I invite you to take a breath that's a bit of a deeper breath than usual or maybe experiment with any wiggles or any small movements that your body might like to make in this moment, in “this now moment” (as the saying goes). Throughout this pandemic, I'm learning that “this now moment” can be a pretty uncomfortable place. The liminality, the uncertainty, the watching, the waiting... all bring challenges I've never had to deal with before. And they can be very unsettling and uncomfortable. And I think that's why rest has eluded me. Because resting is an in-the-moment thing. Deep rest, where I'm not trying to figure things out, or creating small problems as a distraction from the bigger ones, or distracting myself with excessive work or eating or television. But actually resting in “this now moment”. Alongside thinking about rest I’ve also been thinking about how to unpack my white privilege. I decided to learn about how rest is different for different people. I know that white people can have expectations of safety and comfort that are not shared by black indigenous and people of color. I found a great article by Janine Francois who researches race, racism and cultural heritage. In her 2019 piece called "Reparations for Black People Should Include Rest", she writes the following. "Time, as we know it, is a colonial invention and forms the backbone of American society, making the racial distribution of time inherent to white privilege. As whiteness dictates freedom, education, pleasure, and social mobility, have you ever wondered why so many of those considered to be our “greatest” artists or philosophers are white men? Who among us has the access to time to make “masterpieces” or to “think,” without dealing with the impacts of oppression? Racism robs us of our time to be creative, to dream or simply be." Janine goes on to share an elaborate description of her experience of the Black Power Naps exhibit at the Matadero Madrid Contemporary Art Center in Spain. Black Power Naps, created by Navild Acosta & Fannie Sosa, is a sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power. I encourage you to learn more at https://blackpowernaps.black/ When I think about what kind of rest I need right now, I notice that I need different rest than normal, deeper rest than normal. With so much going on that's so heavy and important, I need extra time to process right now. I need a serious savasana. I need time to, as I call it, stare at the walls. That time needs to be very slow. So I made a list of thing that are slow and nurturing to me, things like reading, bird watching, cloudspotting. Being at the beach, being in water. Wordless time. Time in silence. Time surrounded by the music I love. At my graduate school, there was a room called The Cave. It was an interior room with no windows, and it was kept very dark. It had an altar with a few candles burning all the time and some beautiful Tibetan wall hangings. When it wasn't being used for drumming circles or meditation classes, it was available to just go sit in. I loved walking into it in the middle of the day, feeling the quiet pressing in on me. Getting lost in the dark. Sometimes I could hear a bit of conversation at the front desk, because there was a vent in the wall right there, but usually it was quiet. The Cave was the heart of the campus, because we all knew how important that deep, quiet, personal resting place was. That place where we might better hear the wisdom inside of us, that place where we could process the experiences of the day. If the first step is making a list of the things that are deeply restful, the second is to schedule time for them. I've been playing with this for a month or so and am finding it to be a rich source of self-support. So I encourage you to consider calendaring some deep rest. Maybe a half hour a day of deep rest? Another way to drop into deep rest is to use ceremony as a container. Here is a simple ritual sketch to do just that. A first step might be to make a quick list of everything we don't want to forget, everything that we need to hold onto. Make a list, honor the things we wrote down as very important and worthy of our energy, and make a conscious decision to set them aside for a while. Let them go, let them be held by something or someone. We could set the list in a box where we know it won't get blown away or lost, or even give it to a friend to hold (in real life or in our imagination). Then, when we’re ready, we might do some nesting. Gather everything that we will help our body relax completely. Pillows, blankets, cover the windows, put on some relaxing music, maybe a bath would be nice. Maybe if we have a stuffed animal, that might even be nice to hold. What feels deeply nurturing? What helps us feel safe? Then we might create sacred space or create the container in whatever way feels right to us - calling the circle, casting the circle, saying a prayer, lighting a candle - creating the container. I think with deep rest it can sometimes be helpful to have some company. We might call in a beloved Ancestor or Spirit Guide or a deity we work with. Call them in, invoke them, welcome them to the circle. And then we can rest, relax the body, do some deep breathing to balance out the hard edges, follow the flow of any emotions that arise, let ourselves drift, dream, imagine, journey. Rest in the space. Listen in the space. Allow some of that deep healing to filter up through us in the space. There is no one way to do it. There's no right way to do it. Our intuition will lead the way, allowing our breathing and our body to follow. When the music ends or we feel complete, we want to come back very gently. If we're lying on our back, we might roll to one side and lie there for a bit. Then sit up slowly and have some water and maybe journal. Just as we took time to create the space as we went in, it's really important to come out slowly. And it's also nice to thank and release anyone we called in, and then open the container. The very last thing we might do is to really honor and appreciate ourselves for having taken the time to do some deep resting. I encourage you to think about what would be most nurturing and restful to you this week. It might be nature, some kind of making or crafting, dance, movement, meditation, taking a nap in sacred space, taking a nap in regular space, anything that helps you slow down and be in the moment - your moment that you create as your "this now moment". Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. That’s one of the best ways we can help other people find the show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1E15 Deep Rest

A discussion with Betty Ray on the three phases of a rite of passage & the tools they offer us for composting our grief. Music by Terry Hughes Links: Betty Ray Betty’s talk: We Must Initiate the Young People Arnold Van Gennep Lisa Miller of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute Menarche ritual Full transcript: Ray: And then there’s the whole midlife crisis and a porche and a girlfriend and whatever and all that, but we don’t really talk about what’s going on psychologically or spiritually. The transitions in our lives can bring up difficult feelings. It’s easy to see the lay of the land when we’re walking a straight path, but when the sidewalk ends, all kinds of confusion can come up. We may lose track of where we’re going and even start to question our values. How can ceremony help us through the transformations in our lives? Join me for a conversation with Betty Ray. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we’re going to slow it down and really look at rites of passage. Where did that term come from? What’s the anatomy of a rite of passage? And what can these ceremonies be used for? Our returning guest Betty Ray helps parents design customized ceremonies to help their youth go through a coming of age process, something that is deeply needed in American culture today. But she understands that all big transitions are worthy of the same process, whether it’s coming of age, approaching midlife, or even experiencing a significant loss. Betty and I had a conversation recently about using the rites of passage structure to design a healing ceremony. This could be any kind of healing ceremony, but I asked her how the rites of passage structure could be useful to design a ceremony for someone who had lost a child. Ray: I think the language rites of passage to me is more structural because rites of passage articulates a structure. There’s a three-part structure to rites of passage which is immutable and across all these different cultures. And that is really a benefit because that gives us a way in which we can design meaningful personalized rites of passage or healing rituals or however you want to describe it, there’s lots of ways. But I think the language around rites of passage for me has been to articulate this tripartate model which is so powerful. The first one, the first phase of totes of passage is called separation and this is from the work up in Arnold van Gennep and this was from 1909. So this guy a long time ago studied all these different cultures and found across cultures and across time and space that people were using the same three phases. And in fact, Joseph Campbell was really inspired by Van Gennep’s work and used his rites of passage work for the hero’s journey work which is amazing. Like I didn’t know that. Did you know that? My God, I was so excited about that, I was like “Oh, you’re kidding me!” That's so brilliant because it makes sense that rites of passage would make a good story. So the three steps are separation, where the initiate leaves the comforts of home. And whether that’s a young person going off to figure out who they are and discover their identity or a middle-age person who has to leave the sort of the structure that their life has become. So then the second phase is called liminality or I’ve also heard it referred to as metamorphosis and that’s the phase where once they’ve left there kind of betwixt and between as Victor Turner said. It’s this time when you don’t know what’s going to happen to you and that’s when this beautiful phase of ego death comes in. You don’t know. You die. Who you are, who you were, is no longer who you are or who you want to be. And then there’s design elements I can make liminality more or less... that’s a design challenge for those of us who want to do these. And then the reincorporation phase where the young person for the young middle/elder whoever comes back to wherever they were, to the original, you know, container and then takes what they’ve learned and bring it back to... so that they may be in their community once again. So there’s kind of a, you go off into the netherland, you go off to the wyrd world, the forest, you know, in our mythologies... all kinds of heroes journeys there. Yeah, so those three phases I feel like are really valuable as design elements. So that’s why I was talking about that. And we can talk about how to put this into someone who’s lost a child. How do we manage that, those feelings and the grief and the identity and all of the elements, the psychological elements, that go into holding that and how does one release that and reinvent themselves to be able to move forward and to not just be completely paralyzed by that loss? I think what I love about rites of passage, however you talk about them, is that they do offer tools for composting our grief, or our fear, or whatever - getting it out and turning it into something else. The transformative nature is really powerful. Thomas: What's the benefit in designing our own ceremonies? Ray: I think that our 21st century culture has become so individualized that certain kinds of rites of passage, the generic thing, just don't resonate. And so the benefit of a personalized sort of self designed DIY rite of passage or ceremony, transition ceremony, is that it can be something that is deeply meaningful to you. And I don't think these work if they're not deeply meaningful to you. So I would argue that there is no reason to do this if it isn't personalized. It's really important that it be meaningful, and that it come from a place that has such heart and meaning that it can that it does the sort of psychological lifting. When it is individualized, it's a creative process. It's really fun. It's really fun to think about what is the thing that nurtures me. It's really fun to think about what is the thing that I'm trying to heal. It's not fun - that's not fun. But it's healing. It's healthy to look at what is the thing that I want to let go of and how do I design something so that I can take back my power over this thing that has really hurt me or has humiliated me or that I want to leave behind. And that can be anything from a relationship to a mindset. You know? It's a lot different than talking about in therapy and I love therapy, I go to therapy. It's valuable. But again, getting into this psychic space of ego death, right? You’re kind of more open and vulnerable and you kind of like you, you're working with the programming language of the soul. And it's a lot deeper than just the cognitive stuff. We don't... cognitive is important. But this when you're working at the soul level, it's more potent. I love that way of describing it: that what we’re doing in ritual is working with the programming language of the soul. Does that make sense? We’re getting into an area where words don’t work, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to use words to describe it, but think of the rituals you’ve participated in in your life and remember what they felt like in your body. There’s a reason we do devotional ritualized practices in religious settings. Taking the bread, stepping into the Mikvah, casting a circle with the athame. These are physical things we do to connect, ritualistic soul-level actions we take. They are separate from our thoughts. When we hear the phrase “rites of passage” we may think of life stages such as coming of age, getting married, or having children. But life transitions are not always predictable or planned. A sudden illness or loss can knock us off our game and create a need to withdraw and heal. That’s where rites of passage or ritual can become invaluable. Ritual can provide a space of deep healing where our pain can be witnessed and honored. Ray: When I was about 25, I was involved in a bike accident. And I was not wearing a helmet and I was unconscious for a day or two. And I woke up in the hospital and I was all like, double vision, concussion - a real mess. And I got out of the hospital and I was like in bed, you know, I couldn't work, I was out. And I was just really just discombobulated. And I had this major double vision, and I was so like, I couldn't even, you know, literally couldn't see straight. And my mom called me, you know, and she said, "I would like to offer you a rite of passage at my house." And I was like, I don't know what that is but it has to be better than this wherever I am right now, this sucks. And I'm in bed and I would love to... sure whatever that is, do it up! And so she said, "Okay, I want you to invite somewhere between 6 and 10 women that are older that you look up to and that your respect," and I was like okay. And so I know she knows some cool people and I know a few cool people and I put together this list and they all came to her house at the winter solstice. And one of her friends had made me a paper machine a mask to wear for the ceremony. And it was like this beautiful thing that had a butterfly at the mouth and like flower up at the head and like these beautiful beads... and it was really... it was like, okay, so I put that on, we came to her house and there was a fire in the fireplace and all these women were sitting in a circle and I wore the mask. And they proceeded to each tell me a story, or read a poem, or kind of reflect me, or reflect the world so that I could kind of titrate it and understand it, some things about the world things that were, you know, through poetry and beautiful writings and pieces of art. And I just sat there and just absorbed this giant mirror of all these older women that were so wise and so loving and so interested in helping me heal. And I could just feel that energy and I'm wearing this mask. And then at the end of it, I had to, I had to write, based on everything I had heard, I had to write a series of commitments to myself, and like things I wanted to keep, things I wanted to nurture, things I wanted to deepen and explore. And then I had to write a series of things that I was ready to release. And she had a fire in the fireplace and at the time, I took the things I wanted to release and I put them in the fire. And we said a prayer. And then it was over and it was probably about 20 minutes. It was a short thing, maybe more - I don't remember maybe it must have been more - but anyway, it was really powerful to me. It was a really, to have all these older women hold me in that way taught me the power... and to and to experience the intentionality of that moment, the gravitas, the beauty, you know, she... the home was beautiful, it smelled nice, it was people you know, it was just a sensory experience of being in this kind of like other world. And the kind of the grace that I felt afterwards was just like, wow, I knew this was powerful! And I was really interested in doing more of it. I was in my mid 20s. And I remember kind of putting it out there and sort of doing a little bit of research after it was over, like kind of getting out of my depression hole and going down to the bookstore and researching a little bit. And I got this clear picture that this is too woo woo for the world. I can't do this now. It's not ready. It's too weird. And so I took a hard turn and I went into writing about popular culture, and, you know, teaching myself technology and HTML and like, I kind of went there. But it always stuck with me, it was always part of my soul. You know, it was like I was awakened. Wow, that's a cool thing! You can do this stuff and it really helps your soul! It helps you get out of, you know, self pity and suicidal ideation and you know, kind of loneliness and all this crap that I... and my physical thing didn't change. I still have the crazy double vision. But I was just, it was something that changed in my being. So, you know, but over the years, I sort of dabbled in it, you know, I kind of come back to it and I found it on the dance floor. And I really found like, dancing really helped me with the soul work and, you know, I would take an astrology thing here and they're like, kind of like closet woo woo, you know. And then I found this program at, you know, at Columbia, right, like, fancy-pants ivy league school has this weird little thing called the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. And it's actually not woo woo. It's a bunch of researchers who have found evidence for the benefits of spiritual exploration and spiritual experience. And I was like, okay, it's coming out. Now it's time. You're going in! So I took that program, I quit my job and I am now working on the rites of passage stuff. Lisa Miller, the woman who founded the SMBI, the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, has done all kinds of really interesting research on the power of intergenerational spirituality. So she's she says that when a young person has a container, a community, you know, who are holding them in a place where they can explore "lowercase s" spiritual practices they're so much healthier, they have a much, much higher rate of... a much lower rate of depression, anxiety, self harm suicide, and it's like 60-ish percent; it's ridiculously powerful. Yeah, yeah, it's a big deal and it's sort of free. So it's kind of, you know, it's not like you have to like build a new school or have a mountain that you know... going off to the mountaintop or anything, you can just change your practices. So it's important for families and communities to know about that. One of my favorite things about ritual is that it can transcend space and time. What I mean by that is if there is something that happened in our past - maybe a hard time we went through all alone or a significant personal accomplishment that got overlooked by our friends and family - we can actually do ceremony for it now and bring some healing to both the past and present versions of ourselves. That may sound strange if you are new to the concept of ceremony. But if you do this work regularly, you know what I’m talking about. My first experience with this was when I read a book called “Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation” by Dena Taylor. It inspired me to create the menarche ceremony that I never had. Because ritual transcends space and time, it didn’t matter that the ceremony took place 15 years after my first period. My inner 12-year-old was fully present and felt fully welcomed into womanhood that day. I asked Betty to reflect on her past and think of any transition she wished she had had a rite of passage for. In answering my question, she spoke about a very personal subject. She spoke about healing from an abortion. I’m pausing to give you a heads up now in case this subject is close to home for you or in case you are listening with children. Thomas: Are there any experiences in your past that you wish you could have had it rite of passage for? Ray: There are several. I had an abortion and that was the biggest source of shame ever. And I had no way of... I mean, I had… it was very difficult to like make peace with that or understand, you know... nobody talked about it. So, having some sort of a, you know, there's an Amanda Palmer song about an abortion… it’s a ceremony and it's beautiful and I sobbed the first time I heard it. I think having that would have been a good idea. It would have been a way to heal that in a way that was good for me. Although what I did do is I ended up moving out to California from Minnesota to honor that. It was like, I'm not ready to be a mom here. I'm gonna to go do whatever it takes for me to know that I can be a parent. And that means going out to California and sort of following an instinct that there's work out there for me that will not only be meaningful and enrich me but it will help others. Like I wanted to be able to have to have an authentic sense of myself in the world and I just had no way of doing that where I was. So coming out here was sort of that for me, but it wasn't the same and it was certainly not witnessed. No one knew about it. You know, that was my own sort of thing. Yeah. Thomas: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I've heard that in the blood mysteries for women, that that's one of the blood mysteris, you know, that that's got that same depth as, or is considered in some circles by some healers to be, in the same depth of you know, menarche, menstruation, menopause, birth, and abortion, miscarriage even, you know, just that it's that it's that really deep, really, really deep place. Ray: It is. Thomas: Yeah. Ray: Well, yeah very confrontative because it forces you to look at your life in a way of like you're at this giant fork, right? And like, what are the resources over here? What is my capacity? What does that what does that life look like? And what is the life look like on the other direction? And they’re… you can't go through it unchanged because it causes such reflection and it causes such anguish and it's so... it's very complicated. So it definitely, you know, I think it just transforms you and so for me moving out here was like, “Thank you, Little Spirit.” You know, it was all in the attempt to, well, to be able to welcome that little spirit back someday. And I don't know that I did. I don't know if my daughter is the same little spirit, but certainly there is a little spirit now too. Thomas: Wow, thank you. I’m so very grateful to Betty for giving us the low down on the anatomy of a rite of passage and for sharing with us so vulnerably. I encourage you to think back and notice if there’s anything in your past it might have been helpful to have a rite of passage for. It’s not too late! Together with a close group of friends and family, people who can take your healing seriously and honor your story, you can go back and have the transition witnessed. Betty Ray is a speaker, author, and consultant who uses design thinking to co-create meaningful rites of passage to help her clients navigate transitions. Learn more about her work at bettyray.net. If you’re a parent or work with youth, be sure to catch her talk “We Must Initiate the Young People” on YouTube. Check our show notes for links to that plus more information about Arnold Van Gennep and also Lisa Miller of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1E14 The Programming Language of the Soul

Even if it's not our natural disaster, even if no one we know has COVID, all of the chaos of this moment is affecting us. It's affecting our body. What can we do to begin to work with these strong feelings, these strong events, fears, moments, dynamics? How can we let our body help us find a way through? Links: When Loss Hurts: 6 Physical Effects of Grief When Grief Gets Physical Between the World and Me Full Transcript The unique challenges of this time are affecting us at a survival level. They may be bringing up feelings we've never felt before. It can help to realize that some of their potency comes from the fact that they are landing on a very foundational piece of who we are and what it means to be alive. Even if it's not our natural disaster, even if no one we know has COVID, all of the chaos of this moment is affecting us. It's affecting our body. What can we do to begin to work with these strong feelings, these strong events, fears, moment, dynamics? How can we let our body help us find a way through? This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. With the uptick in natural disasters lately, I realized that this might be a good time to talk about how very fragile being in body can be. And how important and how amazing. You might be one of those people who never thinks much about your body, maybe you live in your head a lot, or you're young and carefree, or you just don't think about it. And you might have a body that's talks to you loudly and in no uncertain terms with, a body with which you've had to develop a relationship. Either way, your body is affected by your thoughts, your stress levels, your hormones, and also what's going on around you. The 1st chakra is where body meets spirit. I often find that when things are happening, the more serious things, the more base-level survival type things, we can get triggered at the 1st chakra level. The 1st chakra, at the base of our spine, is all about being in a body. It's about food, shelter and clothing. It's about safe passage and basic survival. It's one of the first chakras to awaken when we're born. It's all about being alive. Some of us are lucky enough to live in a world where we don't need to worry about basic survival needs on a day to day basis. Instead, our energies are free to move on into creative expression and philosophy and critical analysis. But when those moments of basic needs arise, they are the sole focus. How am I going to pay the rent? Where will I source food I can eat? I have to find a safe place to sleep. These are all basic needs. So in these moments when basic needs are going on for us or even just around us, we can get tripped up and kinda stuck at that first chakra level. Things like COVID, which brings not only fear of illness, but also fears of losing our loved ones. And for some of us, that trips up other base level need considerations because losing a loved one could mean losing our home if we can't afford the rent or mortgage on our own. We've also seen massive job losses with COVID, which can directly affect where we can afford to live and what kind of foods we can purchase. Body. These considerations are all about being in a body, a body that needs food and shelter, a body that can get sick. A body that can die. Stress and pressure from the ongoing isolation and vigilance and social distancing can have physical manifestations. I know for me and many of the people in my life, stress is starting to take a physical toll. Flare ups of long term conditions, new aches & pains, a changing relationship with food, insomnia. We can't get a massage, the gym is closed, we are having to learn and sometimes create new ways of caring for our bodies. And, the big one, physical touch is now dangerous. How crazy is that? Body. These considerations are all about being in a body, a body that needs deep breathing and calm, a body that needs touch. At the same time we are in a moment of profound change where black bodies and white bodies are becoming more visible. Protestors of all races are putting their bodies directly in the path of police brutality, some for the first time. And the words of Ta Nihisi Coats are still echoing from his 2015 book "Beyond the World and Me", a letter to his son. '"But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience... You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body." Body. These considerations are all about being in a body, a body that can be subject to cruelty and fear, a body that has the right to exist free from violence and threats of violence. And then also, the natural disasters going on this month have brought their own 1st chakra challenges and wake up calls. Hurricane Laura hit the southern states as one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the US. A fire in a chemical plant after the storm spread toxic smoke throughout the area. 1.5 million people were told to evacuate, during a pandemic. And in the west the wildfires sent even more people away from the shelter of home, some unable to return. And thick smoke turned skies gray and the sun red for weeks. Again, body. These considerations are all about being in a body, a body that lives on a planet going through great distress during climate change, a body that needs safety from the natural elements. And lastly, grief. I don't know about you, but I'm not always present to the grief in the world because it can be a little overwhelming. There's the personal grief of losing a friend, the communal grief of losing a community held together by a business that closed, the collective grief of watching so many people die from COVID, and the global grief of watching our planet in so much pain. Grief shows up in the body. Grief is not just about crying, anger and depression, grief can bring a host of physical reactions. It was a huge relief to me to learn after my dad died that physical reactions were a big part of grief. I'll include some links in the show notes about this if you'd like to learn more, but suffice to say grief can cause inflammation, increased blood pressure, chest pain, nausea, confusion, headaches and muscle weakness. Body. These considerations are all about being in a body, a body that is connected to the whole, a body whose heart aches when it sees grief and loss. So what we do with this information, this rather sobering list of all of the ways our bodies are being triggered right now? Probably one of the best things we can do is stay connected to our bodies, by bringing a gentle awareness as we live our lives. Directing a bit of our attention and compassion to our body, just like we would to a friend who was hanging out with us. Just a soft presence, a sense of, "Hey. How you doing? I'm here." And it can also be helpful to notice our dialog with our body. What kind of words are we saying in our head about or to our body? Do our words come from a place of lack or judgement? And if so, what might it be like to give our body the benefit of the doubt, to treat our body like a friend? I know that pain, weakness, and illness can sometimes feel like our body is betraying us. Like, "I want to do that thing but I can't 'cause of my friggin' body!" and that's a real thing. It's frustrating. Believe me, I know. And maybe our body isn't trying to hurt us or limit us. Maybe there's some kind of wisdom in there that we can benefit from if we can listen to it. There are ways we can create sacred space and ritual around honoring our body too. If we want, we can grab a journal and take it to a quiet place where we can be alone for a while. Maybe do some deep breathing or light a candle to create an intentional space. It might be interesting to write out a list of any items that are affecting us at that 1st chakra level. Then we can feel into each of them and see what we can discover. Maybe some of the fear isn't ours. Maybe we're holding old, Ancestral energies around some of the challenges. We can choose an item to put on our altar for each concern, or perhaps pick a tarot card to gain deeper insight into it. We can journal about them and ask ourselves, what do I need for each one? Love, movement, tears, support? Something practical? Something energetic? What am I learning about each one? The idea would be to really honor each concern, each deep life event and let the energy around it move. Then we could rest, reflect, journal and open the space. So I encourage you to spend some quality time with your body. Almost like going on a date. Do something you body wants to do. Or don't do something your body doesn't want to do. Take a long walk in the evening when it's cool. Get takeout from your favorite restaurant. Skip the alcohol your brain is saying will make you feel better. Stretch more. Breathe way more. Take that online improv class you're scared of. Put on your favorite music and dance. Your body knows how to process the extra energy at the 1st chakra. In fact, nothing can process it better than your body. Just listen and learn. Before we go, we're taking a survey of our listeners, and we'd love for you to participate. It will help us learn more about you - no matter how long you've been a listener or how frequently you listen to the show. So please take a few minutes and visit our website at shamepinata.com. You'll find the listener survey link right on that page. To offer our thanks to you for taking the time to share your reflections on the show, we'll send you a 5-minute centering meditation. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Your review will help more people find the show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1E13 Being in a Body

A show about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions

hubhopper

Shame Piñata

hubhopper