On Tuesday evening, Viktor and Nynke attended the Happy Startup Soul Cafe to join a gathering around the topic of ritual.
Soul cafe is an online space where Happy Startup community members come together to engage in dialogue around the more personal, spiritual questions that they carry. Deep conversations marvellously facilitated by David Papa. This time on rituals, next time on death.
We enjoyed the open, warm, vulnerable space that was created and we had a beautiful conversation about rituals in our own lives, what they can bring and how to work with ritual without people 'feeling woowoo’
Here are some things that emerged:
Rituals are strongly connected to our internal landscapes. Through symbolism and engagement in ritual, we create a form of literacy for what is happening inside us.
Sometimes we have agency and freedom in this inner landscape and ritual helps us to live with clarity and integrity. Other times, unwanted rituals in our environments manage to get through very strongly to this inner world and we experience powerful manipulation.
There are different kinds of rituals; daily practises, life events and circumstances where we might spontaneously act in a ritualised way.
Our need to make sense of our lives and our need for rituals has grown this year.
We seem to remember ritualised moments more strongly than other memories.
We ended with a round of our own answers to this beautiful question: