Cere­monies of Release

To every­thing, there is a season… And at a certain point we must release people and parts of our lives that have been at the center of our lives forever. Good ritual can help you find comfort and closure as well as offering you new ways to remember the parts of that shared life that worked and release the ways it didn’t. Come, let us cele­brate together.

• Death:
  Saying Goodbye to a Beloved is not easy. It is worse if we’re not ready or we still had unfin­ished busi­ness with this loved one. Good ritual can help us accept the awful reality, grieve well, and find ways to honor that person and our memo­ries going forward. Whether you wish to have a funeral, memo­rial or grave­side service, whether your beloved is to be cremated or buried, I can help you create the ritual you need to honor your beloved.

• Divorce:
  If more people would create a ritual around their divorces, this devas­tating loss might be easier for everyone to bear. When you have chosen a life partner and that trust is broken, when a family will be torn apart by the new reality, when you have to work out finances, custody and living situ­a­tions, there is so much room for bitter­ness and broken­ness to over­whelm a broken heart. It is good to let go and make peace in some way with this no-​​longer central rela­tion­ship. Ritual can help you formalize your regrets and move forward with strength.

• Regrets:
  There are things we don’t do in our lives that we may have wished to. But we cannot allow ourselves to be held hostage to the “if onlies” of life. Ritual can help us say “I would have liked to do that” and examine the wonderful things you have done instead. If you struggle with a glass half-​​full syndrome, good ritual can help you past this.

• Guilt:
  There’s no one alive who hasn’t done some­thing he or she regrets deeply. We’ve wounded people, we’ve made choices that were not in our own or a loved one’s best inter­ests. Unless we can say clearly what we’ve done and ask forgive­ness — at least of ourselves — we cannot move on. A ritual is a wonderful way to take respon­si­bility, perhaps make amends and move forward into a life that acknowl­edges our painful humanity.