The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

Dedication

To my father, who taught me

when to follow the rules,

and my mother, who taught me

how to change them.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface by Dacher Keltner

Introduction: The Paradigm Shift

1. Connecting with Self

2. Connecting with Others

3. Connecting with Nature

4. Connecting with Transcendence

5. Already Connected

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

WE LIVE IN AN ERA of fragmentation. Scholars have studied how our communities—families, churches, neighborhoods, work teams, and bowling leagues—are transforming. Once stable and enduring, now, as a result of economic and social forces, they are filled with people who have a more transient commitment to their jobs, locales, friendships, and marriages.

For deep and historical reasons, our sense of identity is now more fragmented, for better and worse. We have more complex and richer spiritual identities than in the past, more complex and richer gender identities, and more complex and richer ethnic identities. We are living in a globalized world.

There is much to praise in this era of fragmentation: the rise of rights and freedoms, the growing number of women in power, the democratization of art forms and information, and the glacial but accelerating move away from the homophobia, sexism, and racism that defined our recent history of colonial conquest.

But there is much to be concerned about, as well. People feel the absence of community. Studies find that the average citizen of the US, and likely the world, is lonelier than ever before. People have fewer friends. They spend inordinate amounts of time commuting in the car or scrolling through online feeds. People feel less trust toward their fellow citizens and work harder than before. The technologies many of us greeted with such enthusiasm a decade ago are now proving not to be the utopian, digital new world of connecting and sharing but a different kind of new world defined by anxiety, loneliness, endlessly comparing oneself to others, and perhaps surveillance. Our era of fragmentation has paved the way for an era of anxiety.

And this fragmentation has pronounced costs for the mind and body. As a professor of psychology, I teach the science of happiness at University of California, Berkeley, and beyond to hundreds of thousands of people in online courses, digital content, and my podcast, The Science of Happiness. Over the twenty years of this engagement, I have been asked one key question: How might I find deeper happiness?

The science points to an answer in the abstract: Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organize your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy, science suggests. Deep connections and the sense of community reduce levels of stress-related cortisol; they activate reward and safety circuits in the brain; they activate a region of the nervous system called the vagus nerve, which slows down our cardiovascular system and opens us up to others; and they lead to the release of oxytocin, a neurochemical that promotes cooperation, trust, and generosity. But I have been hard-pressed to point to deep, practical, principled ways to build connection, community, and a sense of ritual.

Now I can. In Casper ter Kuile’s illuminating book The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices, we find a road map to greater meaning in life through community. A first step is through the creation of everyday secular rituals. Rituals, in my view, are patterned, repeated ways in which we enact the moral emotions—of compassion, gratitude, awe, bliss, empathy, ecstasy—that have been shaped by our hominid evolution and built up into the fabric of our culture through cultural evolution. I learned this from Casper during the summer of 2018. He invited me into a ritualized experience of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, my favorite cathedral in Paris. Before entering the illuminated space inside, we circled around the building, clockwise, taking in the stream of sounds and images that meditative walking brings about. We then offered alms to a man begging at the entrance feeling the deep sympathies of charity. Before sitting in a pew, we genuflected and made a request and offered a quiet reflective thought—prayer—for someone we care for. We took in the stained-glass windows and their patterns and colors, so reflective of the patterns and beauty of nature—veins in leaves, colors of trees, reflections on lakes. Our attention moved up to the apse of the cathedral as though looking up to the clouds in the sky. We crossed ourselves in an act of quiet touch. Although I am not religious, these simple acts of ritual—like those that run through this book—brought me a feeling of calm, reverence, and even grace.

Rituals create patterns of the greatest capacities that I believe were given to us in the process of evolution and elaborated upon in our cultural evolution: our capacity to share, to sing, to chant, to revere, to find beauty, to dance, to imagine, to quietly reflect, and to sense something beyond what we see. Casper’s book points to higher-order principles through which you can create more ritual in your fragmented life. Read sacred texts (this past June I reread Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, a sacred text in my family, and was moved again). Create sabbaths in your life, from work, technology, social life, and our frenetic, often overscheduled hours of the day. Find opportunities for what one might call prayer—mindful quiet forms of reflecting on love, gratitude, and contrition. Eat with others. Seek out nature, that universal source of transcending the self, that so often repairs, as Emerson observed, life’s calamities. In the spirit of our fragmented lives, Casper encourages us, through his broad, synthetic view of spiritual life, to weave together a fabric of rituals to bring meaning and community to our lives.

Casper offers perhaps a more challenging prospect, too: to awaken to the ritual and community that you are already instinctively creating in your social life. We have a biological need to belong, scientists have shown; without community, as in solitary confinement, we lose our minds. We seek out and create rituals with alacrity and force. For twenty years, I played pickup basketball until I depleted the cartilage in my knees. I played in nearly every city I visited, from Santa Monica, California, to Brockton, Massachusetts, to cities in France. I played with anyone. I was not even that skilled a player. And when I had to hang up my high-tops, what I missed most was not points scored or victories eked out, but the rituals that hold people together in pickup basketball: fist bumps, forms of protest and contrition, celebration and dance, ritualized patterns of five people moving together on a basketball court. It is sublime.

Casper’s brilliant book challenges us to see and feel the rituals that are already part of our lives, to switch our minds to a community mind-set. It is likely happening in your spin class, on climbing trips, at musical concerts, when you shop for food, as you dine with your family, in the patterns of play, conversation, and celebrating and consoling on children’s soccer fields—and even in how you might use your smartphone, in its better moments, to share photos, recipes, quotes, jokes, GIFs, memes, and news. After reading The Power of Ritual, I came to see how much ritual already ran through my daily life. And I felt lifted up.

Social, economic, and architectural forces, such as the rise of single-family housing, have made this an era of fragmentation. There is much to decry about that, and we feel it in the pains of isolation and loneliness. But there is much freedom and promise in this fragmentation, to create community and ritual in a richer and more complex fashion, one that honors and celebrates the diversity that is our species. The Power of Ritual points us toward this promise.

Dacher Keltner

Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley

Faculty Director, Greater Good Science Center

Introduction

The Paradigm Shift

AS A TEENAGER, I was convinced: You’ve Got Mail was the greatest movie of all time.

Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox, played by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, meet online in the early days of AOL chat rooms. (We’re in 1998 here—think Monica’s The Boy Is Mine and Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.) All they know about each other is that they love books and they love New York City—nothing else. Not even one another’s real name. And through the back-and-forth emails that they send each other, they fall in love. They’re honest with each other about their secret fears and hopes and pain. They share everything that they don’t tell even their partners. This is the best of online anonymity—feeling intimately connected and totally safe at the same time.

And connected and safe were two things I didn’t feel at all.

I was a gay kid living in an English boarding school with fifty testosterone-fueled teenage boys. I stuck out like a sore thumb. A look around my bedroom, shared with three others, revealed all you needed to know. As you walked in there were posters of half-naked supermodels and racing cars to the right, pictures of the band Slipknot in their horror masks to the left, and then in my corner, a complete collection of Agatha Christie books and glitter gel pens.

Needless to say, I wasn’t the first boy chosen for the rugby team. Or the soccer team. Or anything, really. (I did join an aerobics class, breaking boundaries for all future queer kids in the school, I hope, but that’s another story.)

I felt lonely all the time. I would go on walks and pretend I was a hairdresser asking myself out loud about any vacations I was going on. I tried to ingratiate myself with the older boys by making them toasted Nutella sandwiches like a baboon trying to demonstrate submission on the savanna—please don’t hurt me, I will bring you food!

So, you can imagine why a movie about love and connection and joy meant so much to me. And it’s important to say that (spoiler ahead) the two characters in You’ve Got Mail don’t actually meet until the final—my least favorite—scene. The movie is about the promise of love and connection, more than the actual experience of it. I longed for that kind of connection. And a tiny part of me trusted the universe enough to know that perhaps, one day, ideally in glamorous Manhattan, I might find my own version of a literary multimillionaire who had a dog called Brinkley.

I’ve re-watched You’ve Got Mail many, many times. But it represents so much more to me than just a movie now, because I’ve made it more meaningful. I have very specific rituals for when and how to watch (always alone, always with a tub of Pralines and Cream Häagen-Dazs ice cream). It’s not an Oh, what shall we watch? kind of movie; it’s an I’m feeling lost and alone, and I need everything I’ve got to bring me out of this slump kind of movie. Certain lines are inscribed on my heart, like mantras. Characters are totems of how I want to be—or not be—in the world. While for most people it’s just another rom-com, for me, You’ve Got Mail is sacred.

That’s what this book is all about—taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating—by thinking of them as spiritual practices. After more than half a decade of research and thousands of conversations with people around the country, I am convinced that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works. That the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive. And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the center of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred. Paradigm shifts like this happen for two reasons. First, because there is new evidence that refutes previously held assumptions—think of how Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology and the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example. Second, because older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking. And that’s what is happening today. In this time of rapid religious and relational change, a new landscape of meaning-making and community is emerging—and the traditional structures of spirituality are struggling to keep up with what our lives look like.

I’ve written this book to help you recognize the practices of connection that you already have: the habits and traditions already in your bones that can deepen your experience of meaning, reflection, sanctuary, and joy—perhaps at a yoga class, or by reading your favorite books, looking at the setting sun, making art, or lighting candles. It might be through lifting weights, hiking nature trails, meditating, or dancing and singing with others. Whatever it is, we’ll start there by affirming those things as worthy of our attention, and we’ll notice how they make up a broader cultural shift in how we build connection to what matters most.

Religious traditions that were supposed to serve us have often failed. Worse, many have actively excluded us. So we need to find a new way forward. Drawing on the best of what has come before, we can find ourselves in the emerging story of what it means to live deeply connected. Even without espousing specific religious beliefs, the practices that we’ll explore in this book, whether daily rituals or annual traditions, can collectively form our contemporary spiritual life. These gifts and their wisdom have been passed on through generations. Now it’s our turn to interpret them. Here and now. You and me.

I’m so glad we’re in this together.

CROSSFIT IS MY CHURCH

I have spent the last seven years exploring the idea that just because people are leaving church doesn’t mean that they’re less spiritual. As a ministry innovation fellow at Harvard Divinity School, I’ve studied the changing landscape of American religion with my colleague Angie Thurston. We published How We Gather,* a paper documenting how people are building communities of meaning in secular spaces, in essence performing the functions historically handled by traditional religious institutions. That paper has been praised by bishops and the former CEO of Twitter alike, as we’ve had the joy of mapping and connecting with America’s most innovative community leaders and meaning-makers.

Through hundreds of interviews and site visits and lots of reading, Angie and I kept track of secular communities that seemed to be doing religious things. Wherever we went and whoever we spoke to, it became our habit to ask, So where do you go to find community?

Time and again, the answers surprised us. November Project. Groupmuse. Cosecha. Tough Mudder. Camp Grounded. But the one that really threw me was CrossFit.

People didn’t just talk about it as their community. CrossFit is my church became the refrain. When we interviewed then Harvard Business School student Ali Huberlie, she said, My CrossFit box [gym] is everything to me. I’ve met my boyfriend and some of my very best friends through CrossFit. . . . When [we] started apartment hunting this spring, we immediately zeroed in on the neighborhood closest to our [CrossFit] box—even though it would increase our commute to work. We did this because we couldn’t bear to leave our community. At our box, we have babies and little kids crawling around everywhere, and it has been an amazing experience to watch those little ones grow up.

CrossFit is family, laughter, love, and community. I can’t imagine my life without the people I’ve met through it. At Ali’s gym, or box as it’s called in the CrossFit world, people gather on Friday night for drinks as well as five or six times a week to work out together. Across town at another affiliate box, there’s an expecting mothers’ group, and the box hosts a talent night where members try out stand-up comedy or play the cello for the first time in twenty years.

Cofounder Greg Glassman never set out to build a community, but he’s embraced the role of quasi-spiritual leader with open arms. In an interview with us at Harvard Divinity School,