I woke up a few mornings ago thinking about ritual and ceremony – and with a pull to write to you about these things. I hope that you may find something of use in my thoughts and reflections.

In my experience, when ritual is ‘done’ to us it can be awkward and disenfranchising and alienating (I had a Catholic upbringing that included plenty of rituals that fell into these categories for me). But when we are empowered to create personal rituals for ourselves and each other – rituals that feel truly authentic and mark a passage from one place to another – it can be the most wonderfully potent vehicle for expression, healing, celebration and intention.

Some of us may think of the concept of rituals as being a bit too ‘out there’ and woo-woo. Or maybe we associate them with religion or paganism. The word itself may conjure up images of crystals and incense and church – or of dressing up in strange costumes.

But perhaps ritual can be as relatable and personalised as we need it to be. Maybe it can be a resource in our tool box – to be taken out and used whenever we feel that it might help us to mark, or shift, or express something that can’t easily be reached through our usual day-to-day activities. Personal rituals can give us the opportunity to recognise and articulate that some events or feelings or transitions deserve to be elevated through ceremony. Perhaps they can provide a framework, a container within which we can touch on and express things that might otherwise feel too scary, or big or un-boundaried to deal with.

Two things happened in recent days which have resulted in this missive bubbling up to the surface. The first was a video shared by someone I follow on Instagram in which she spoke so beautifully about the way she and her family had chosen to prepare for, and then mark, her daughter’s menarche. I won’t say too much more about this here because I’m going to invite her to tell you about it in her own words in a future newsletter. I know that many of you reading this will be mums to daughters or grandmothers to granddaughters who have yet to reach this milestone – and I think you’ll enjoy hearing this mother talk you through the tender and loving way she and her family celebrated this passage.

The second event was a scene in the exquisite BBC TV series Giri/Haji that I binge-watched recently. I don’t want to ruin anything for you in case you decide to watch this (do!). But this scene revolved around an improvised ceremony to mark the death of one of the characters – and it reminded me that we do not need formality and special buildings for these things.

Two of the many themes that are expressed in the messages I receive in my inbox from middle years women are 1) experiences of loneliness and fears that it’s too late to meet a soulmate; and 2) encountering loss and grief with increasing regularity. I'd like to share with you two examples where rituals in my life have served me - and which speak to these themes.

Soulmate Pebbles

Over 12 years ago now, at the age of 36, I was in the midst of the third internet dating period I’d embarked on. I’d dabbled in my late twenties and again in my early thirties. I’d had A. Lot. Of. surreal lunches with pilots and creatives and medics. I often went to the same country pub for these dates and it tickled me to appear so regularly at the same table with a different bloke :)

But this time felt different. I could no longer kid myself that this was just a bit of fun - because I had become really invested in the outcome. To all intents and purposes I ‘did’ being single pretty well. I had bought and was living in a teensy two-up, two-down that really felt like home; I intentionally lived alone rather than sharing with a lodger; I regularly had friends over; I wasn’t afraid of holidaying or dining alone. But the truth was that I really REALLY wanted to be part of a unit, a team – I wanted a family of my own. And this desire infused all the dates I went on. I imbued each of them with deep importance. So, as you can imagine, it had started to feel much more weighty than it did fun.

At some point during this time I happened across a piece of research which stated that the chances of meeting your soulmate on an internet date are 1 in 100. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought, 'in that case I’d better get a shift on!' Once I got over my panic at the prospect of enduring dozens more encounters with strangers before I met the one that my soul recognised, I had a flash of inspiration. I decided that I needed to create some kind of ritual that would enable me to feel a little more empowered and would help me to fully acknowledge and embrace my intention, at the same time as becoming a little less attached to the outcome of each individual date. Something that would help me to engage with the idea that this process was a journey, with each date being a stop en-route to the destination. If nothing else, it was a way of bringing some lightness and agency to things.

So, on a fresh, blue-skied, wintry afternoon I drove myself to what was then my beloved local beach (Lepe in Hampshire). And I spent a couple of delightful hours there selecting 100 smooth round pebbles which I took home with me. I washed them in my kitchen sink and whilst they were drying I placed a pair of kilner jars onto my bedroom windowsill. I placed the 100 pebbles into the lefthand jar. And in the coming weeks, each and every time I went on a date, I moved a pebble from the lefthand jar to the righthand one. Each date became simply a passage rather than something that pressed down on me and held the key to my entire future. I grew to look forward to the quiet and peaceful ritual of returning home after another meal with a stranger, opening up my jars and gently moving a pebble from one to the other. Of embracing the sense that every time I did this I was one pebble closer.

And I’m not quite sure what I think about ‘cosmic ordering’ or its various manifestations but it turned out that once I had this ritual in place I didn’t need to go on many more dates after all. Because the man my soul recognised as being my mate* was pebble number seven!

David and I knew what we were to each other after less than a handful of dates, three months after we met he asked me to marry him – and 12 years later I’m sitting here in our home writing you this missive.

We closed the pebble circle together by taking 99 pebbles back to Lepe (of course we kept 'David's'!), thanking them for the part they had played in our story – and lovingly placing them back on the beach.

Rituals for Loss

(trigger warning: miscarriage)

The years I spent working as a secular Funeral Celebrant truly cemented my belief in the power of ritual. During that time, through the privilege of leading over 300 funerals and memorial ceremonies, I learned that a bespoke ceremony which feels totally in keeping with the person who has died bears almost no resemblance to a generic cut-and-paste funeral. Rather than something to be endured it can be a profoundly beautiful, transpersonal experience. If you’re curious about this past life of mine my old (very dated!) website is still online here.

In terms of my own experience of loss, one of the elements of it that some of you will already know about is that a decade ago David and I had IVF which resulted in pregnancy – and later, in a surgical miscarriage. The truth is that perhaps we didn't deal with our loss in the best way in that we didn't do any memorialising or ritualising at all. And it didn't occur to us to take time off work together to grieve and process what had happened. Given the chance to do things differently I think I would have put together some kind of memory box incorporating our scans and baby books and photographs taken during our pregnancy. I perhaps would have found a way to create a permanent symbol of our lost baby. And I would have had some kind of ceremony to acknowledge our loss, perhaps with just a handful of family or close friends, or even just the two of us. And I would have taken time out to allow myself the opportunity to be fully present with the shock and the grief.

But it wasn't until around 18 months after our loss that we did something which would have been really helpful to do at an earlier stage - we attended a memorial service for Babies and Children at Mortlake Crematorium in Kew (close to where we lived at the time). It's an annual, secular ceremony which takes place around Xmas time. I actually led it myself 6 months after we miscarried (which with hindsight wasn't wise). It's a ceremony for people who have suffered any type of baby or child-related loss – no matter whether recent or decades ago. I can still remember my sense of gratitude for having that container within which it felt safe to allow the depth of my grief to flow through me. For that grief to be articulated, named and acknowledged – and for us to have opportunity of writing on a star about our baby and hanging it on the Xmas tree in the crematorium chapel. David and I both cried our way through the whole ceremony and left the crematorium that day feeling that something cleansing had washed through us, leaving us lighter.

Recently I’ve had the entirely unexpected experience of being knocked off my feet for a few days with further grief about our childlessness and the miscarriage we experienced some ten years ago – and this has caused me to reflect on what I can do to help myself. When I shared this experience on my Instagram Stories I spoke of how I felt that the emotions I was experiencing hadn’t only just now been created – but that rather they had been sitting deep within my body, buried underneath all the other the stuff of life. And that I felt a kind of gratitude that they had found their way to the surface – so that I can honour them and lessen their weight. An Instagram friend sent me a sweet and perfect message in which she said: “It’s good that this was a moment when the grief could come through and you could meet it.” Her words got me thinking about what the things are that we can each do to make it easier for our grief to ‘come through’ so that we are better able to meet it.

The truth is that the loss of our baby (although our IVF pregnancy didn’t quite make it to 12 weeks, to us it was very much a baby that we lost) was the first in a string of losses and traumas that stacked up on top of each other in quick succession – leaving little time and space to deal with each of them, before the next came thundering along. It wasn’t until earlier this month, a decade after the event, that there was a convergence of the grief coming through with the time and space to fully surrender to it. The day I spent in bed recently; the tears I shed with David that day and over the following days; and the opening up to a recently-made friend about the full circumstances surrounding that loss and the others that followed it has been so cathartic. But I am still feeling a need for something more – for some additional outlet and expression of the mark that the brief existence and loss of a third member of our little family has left on me.

You won’t be surprised to know that I suspect this need has been heightened by the impact of this life stage – in terms of both the hormonal storm that I often find myself living within and the symbolic nature of the impending cessation of my monthly cycle.

And the truth is that initially I felt ashamed of the magnitude of this recent wave of grief. As if I should surely be over it by now. It felt like a dirty secret – which is why I decided to bring it out of the shadows and into my Instagram Stories. Because there is no rule book or external arbitor of what is an acceptable shelf life for our grief – or what we are allowed to feel deep grief about.

Grief isn’t something that has to be defeated and overcome and finished. It doesn’t mean that we are weak or indulgent – ongoing expressions of it don’t indicate an absence of joy and gratitude in our lives. In my experience it is perfectly possible to live with joy and gratitude and grief. We don’t owe it to anyone to package things up neatly with a ribbon.

Just as we don’t expect to achieve completeness or transcendence or peace through just one meditation session, I’ve come to see that we don’t have to limit ourselves to just one farewell ceremony or ritual when it comes to dealing with loss. If living with grief is an ongoing exercise then perhaps repeatedly creating ceremonies and rituals to help us continue acknowledging and processing this loss is something that can be of help to us. We don’t have to try and squeeze all of our emotions and healing into one event, we can create opportunities for further rituals that we repeat as often as needed.

In the last 5-10 years I’ve come to see how – for me at least – the impact of suppressing and embodying grief (or other difficult emotions) can be enormously debilitating, both physically and mentally. So I am especially keen to give myself plenty of opportunities to allow unexpressed and embodied grief to move through me and be metabolised, rather than getting stuck.

In this instance, I’m giving some thought as to what ritual I could create with my husband in order to honour this latest wave of loss I feel whilst also, I hope, helping to disperse and lighten it. I have a feeling that the beach and the sea might be involved. And I’m also exploring the possibility of commissioning Jo Sweeting to make one of her beautiful carved pebbles for us so that we have a tangible object in our home that would, in Jo’s words, “anchor and honour your experience of loss and memory”. It would seem that pebbles are destined to have an ongoing role in mine and David’s lives.

Rituals & You

How might you harness the power of ritual in your life?

You may be feeling the loss of the end of a long friendship; a change in your relationship with your children; the complicated grief around the death of a parent who perhaps never quite met your needs – or who did; the end of your marriage.

Or it could be that you are ready to open up your heart again to the possibility of romantic love. Or want to celebrate a joyful rite of passage.

I hope that these reflections might give you the permission you need to treat yourself with kindness, and to elevate some experiences in your life into something beyond the ordinary everyday – and perhaps to find or create your own personal rituals to help you through.

And something I’m excited about exploring is the place that ritual might have for us in marking the doorway through which we step during these middle years. Watch this space!

Middle Years Monday Illuminations

For this edition of Middle Years Monday Illuminations I've found some riches that speak to the middle years experience, together with some wonderful accounts of menopause rituals.

I hope you enjoy them - and, of course, if you spot anything that you think might be perfect for future instalments of Middle Years Monday Illuminations please do drop me an email with a link (thanks so much to those of you who have already started doing this).

This piece from Psychology Today - asks (and answers) "Is menopause just a bunch of intolerable symptoms? Or is it truly a passage? And if menopause is a passage, what is it a passage to? Is there a ritual to mark such passage?"
This beautiful piece - has me yearning to take part in a "seder of womanhood". I'm sharing the opening passage in the hope that it might entice you to read it! "As the moon hovered on the edge of Chanukah, thirty six —a magical number— of my women friends assembled to celebrate not only the Festival of Light, not only my fiftieth birthday, but also my menopause. Thirty-six joined together to end an age-old silence. We had gathered not only to speak about menopause but also to celebrate it. Just as my journey beyond menstruation would be unknown to me, so this ceremony was a journey unknown to them."
This piece about the impact of our middle years hormones on our relationships - don't be put off by the alarmist title. If you've been wondering what the hell has happened to result in you relating so differently to your partner not only will this article reassure you that you're not crazy - it also offers some sage advice. (Many thanks to Linda for sending me the link to this.)
If you are happy to embrace expletives and close-to-the-bone humour then this 5 minute video Last F**kable Day will please you (from Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and Julia Dreyfus)!

And finally, I recently invited you via Instagram to share with me what the word ‘ritual’ means to you. This is my favourite of your answers (thank you Nancy):

“It feels to me like something done purposefully, with conscious thought that lifts the spirit out of the mundane. It could be stopping in a busy moment and sitting down for a cup of tea or lighting a candle when I prepare dinner or picking flowers for the table or just making the table look lovely. A simple reminder that our soul needs peace and beauty. A moment for the soul to catch up with the body.”

I do hope that this letter has been a welcome companion - and until next time I send you my warmest wishes,

Pip x

P.S. *BTW I don’t believe in the concept of ‘the one’ because I don’t buy into the idea of Life being so cruel as to hang our chance of romantic happiness on the odds of us meeting the one other human being supposedly destined for us. Rather than there being just one ‘one’ for each of us, I believe that during the course of our lives we will encounter a number of people with whom we could build a loving lifelong relationship with. And that it’s up to us to have the wisdom and insight to recognise and select them!

Disclaimer:
Everything here is shared in good faith with an intention to support and inspire. However, neither Pip nor Middle Years Monday claim to understand your personal circumstances, we are not dispensing medical advice and you should not take anything here as a replacement for advice from a qualified health practitioner.

Is there a place for ritual in our middle years?

Soulmate Pebbles

Rituals for Loss

Rituals & You

Middle Years Monday Illuminations