Hello my friends!
I'm thrilled to be bringing you this episode of The Becoming Podcast with my lovely friend Megan Sheldon. Megan and I have been connected for years through our mutual love of ritual and honouring the threshold moments of our lives. She's been a previous guest on this podcast, I've been a guest on her podcast, and we've collaborated many times. This time, I'm so excited to be sharing this conversation as Megan prepares to launch her book into the world. I was honoured to be an early reader of this book, and Megan even invited me to write the foreword! I can't wait until you can read it, too!
First, let me tell you a bit more about Megan:
Megan Sheldon is a humanist celebrant, end-of-life doula, ritual designer, and founder of Be Ceremonial. For over a decade she has guided individuals, families, and communities through the moments that matter most, from births and weddings to grief, loss, and the invisible thresholds in between.
Her book Ritual Without Religion: A Humanist Guide to Creating Secular Ceremonies offers a path back to one of the most ancient of human practices for anyone who has felt the ceremony-shaped hole. She lives and works on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples in North Vancouver, BC.
Here's some of what Megan and I talk about in our conversation:
✔️ The backstory of Megan's book, Ritual Without Religion, and how for so long she felt she couldn't access the ritual and ceremony that she longed for because she wasn't raised with a religious background.
✔️ How important it is bring ritual and ceremony into our lives in the small moments, not just the big ones.
✔️ An overview of Ritual Without Religion, including its' sections on the nature of ritual, the science of ritual, the art of ritual and the practice of ritual. Megan covers topics like the effect of ritual on our bodies, how to hold space for ritual, rituals that "colour outside the lines," as well as tangible tools to help readers bring more ritual and ceremony into their lives.
✔️ The fact that our culture seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift whereby more and more people are craving, talking about and engaging in ritual.
✔️ The idea of ceremony-as-survival – that doing ritual isn't just a "nice thing to do," but that it was actually central to our ancestors' survival, and core to our modern wellbeing as well.
✔️ How ritual is a muscle that we need to learn to flex before we really need it in a moment of crisis or desperation.
✔️ How we can do ceremony with people who aren't super into it, becoming more confident ritual and ceremony leaders and facilitators.
Show Notes
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