Latest / This Jungian Life Podcast / Ritual: Finding the Center in a Turning World

Transcript

Ritual: Finding the Center in a Turning World · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The core idea is that ritual works. It's one of
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: the few things that we know connects us, especially in
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: times of change. When someone comes into the group, like
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: a baby or a wedding, when someone leaves the group,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: like a coming of age or a death, when someone
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: moves or gets sick, like the group, uses a ritual
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: to reconstitute itself. And this has happened for 300,000 years.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: You're talking about human universals. And yet in this century,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: we've abandoned them by almost any metric. And yet in
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: many ways, there are all of these new astonishing range
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: of new ways of gathering that are popping up around
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: the world that seems to be a recovery, maybe even
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a renaissance of new rituals that fill gaps that we
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: didn't have.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life, conversations with Jungian analysts on
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: the unseen forces shaping our lives and what it means
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: to be truly human in today's complex world. I'm Lisa Marciano,
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Well, we're so excited today to welcome to the podcast
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: author Bruce Feiler. He is the author of seven New
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: York Times bestsellers, including Life is in the Transitions, The
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Secrets of Happy Families, and The Council of Dads. His
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: three TED Talks have been viewed more than 5 million times,
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: and he teaches the Webby Award-winning TED course, How to
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Master Life Transitions. His latest book, A Time to Gather,
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Us was just published in May. And Deb and I
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: got wind of it and thought it was a really
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: great topic. I don't think we've ever covered ritual before.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: And Bruce, as I was just saying, I love what
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: you've done with this topic and how you've applied it
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: to the difficulties that we're facing at this particular cultural moment.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: And I can't wait to learn from you and hear
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: your wisdom.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me and
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: for that kind introduction. And I have to say, I've
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: also really been looking forward to this conversation because sort
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: of the Jungian ideas of kind of universal truths and
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: tropes and ideas and themes and rituals kind of has
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: run through my work now for almost a decade that
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: I've been collecting and analyzing life stories. And I'm delighted
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: to be here. And to be honest, kind of can't
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: wait to see where it goes.
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: Okay, we're going to see where these two streams meet.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Would you maybe just start off by telling us how
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: you came to write this book?
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: So I think that, you know, there's a few things
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: to say about that. There's kind of an immediate story.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And the immediate story, today is my 23rd wedding anniversary.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: My wife, Linda, and I went from empty nest to
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: full nest in 32 minutes, 21 years ago. when we
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: became the parents of identical twin daughters. And to skip
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: over a lot of history, 18 years later, we went
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: from full nest to empty nest in 32 minutes when
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: we dropped our daughters off at opposite ends of the
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: same college campus. And when we drove back home and
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: I walked through the front door of our home in Brooklyn,
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: where I'm talking to you from today, I had this
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: very precise feeling, which is that I felt homesick in
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: my own home. And I thought, you can't use this word.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: You know, that's what kindergartners feel when they, you know,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: when they separate from their children, or that's what adolescents
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: feel on their first night of sleepaway camp. But it
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: is what I felt. And it wasn't just my children.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Like my dad had just died. My mom was aging.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: My marriage, which in many ways had been built around
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: those children, now needs to be redefined. And so many
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: relationships in my life need to be remade. And I
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: think I had the feeling that the more I kind
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: of sat with it that almost everyone I know has
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: in some ways that we are suffering from, I don't know,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: this sense that we have abdicated our relationships for our
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: smartphones really kind of in one way. Like we all
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: know that we carry the enemy around in our pockets
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: and we all know whether it's loneliness or isolation or
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: polarization or division or here comes AI or whatever, through
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: whatever lens you want to talk about it, we all
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: know that we have this craving to connect. And I
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: basically wanted to reconnect and I went looking for answers.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: And that's when I stumbled into this story that I
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: think of now as like the most interesting story I've
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: encountered in four decades of writing professionally. And, you know,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: we can get into it, but just to sort of
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: at its highest level, the core idea is that ritual works.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: It's one of the few things that we know connects
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: us especially in times of change, right? This is what
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: you guys do every day. But when someone comes into
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: the group, like a baby or a wedding, when someone
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: leaves the group, like a coming of age or a death,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: when someone moves or gets sick, like the group uses
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: a ritual to reconstitute itself. And this has happened for 300,000 years.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: You're talking about human universals. Like this is before we
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: were anatomically human. And yet in this century, we've abandoned them,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: you know, by almost any metric, birth rituals, coming of
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: age rituals, only half of us are married, only a
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: third of us are buried anymore. So we are in
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: kind of what I think of as a celebration recession.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: And yet, in many ways, there are all of these
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: new astonishing range of new ways of gathering that are
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: popping up around the world that seems to be a recovery,
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: maybe even a renaissance of new rituals that fill gaps
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: that we didn't have. And this, the way my mind works,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: is this is a story. The old rules don't apply.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: The new rules haven't been written. Let me go on.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: So I went on a journey, attending and joining in
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: rituals in 16 countries on six continents, and I've written
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: both what I think of as kind of as an
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: adventure story for those of us who like these things,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: but also a quest to try to identify, again, a
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: universal theme, very Jungian at its core. Like, is there
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: a blueprint of togetherness that we can reconnect with at
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: this moment that we all need to reconnect with those
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: around us?
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: If you can't get enough of Jung, we have some
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: other offerings for you.
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: Well, we don't.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: But the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts does. So first
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: of all, there's our seminar, which is offered eight weekends
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: a year here in Philadelphia. It's all in person this year.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: So if you're local to the area or you're willing
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: to travel, there are a few spots left. All sessions
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: are taught by certified Jungian analysts. I will be teaching
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: there this year. a lot of other great people in
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: the lineup. You can look at the syllabus if you want.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: You can go online to cgyungphiladelphia.org and check it out
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: and take a look at the syllabus for the upcoming year.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: And there's also information there on how you can apply
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: to be part of the seminar.
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: So it's a small group. It's very, very rich.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: Deb and I were both in it for a million
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: years and still very close to our hearts today. There's
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: also another Paja offering for clinicians. It's the Advanced Clinical
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Practice Program. It's limited to eight people.
• 7:35
  Speaker 4: It's all online. It meets once a month. And in
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: the fall, it's going to be taught by our colleague,
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: John White.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: And in the spring, I'll be teaching about working with
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: dreams in clinical practice. So if you're a licensed clinician
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: and you just want to brush up your young life,
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: check out our advanced clinical practice program. You can also
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: find more information about that at cgyoungphiladelphia.org. You know, it's
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: one of the things that I love about your book
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: is that it is kind of practical and it's also hopeful.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: It's like there are all these things happening that you outlined,
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: but here's something we can do.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: I don't like the posture in the whatever, 15 books
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: that I've read. I don't like wagging my finger and
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: telling people what to do. And so I like giving,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: showing people, first of all, in this case, to a
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: certain extent, I'm saying that we should do this, but
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the first thing I'm saying is that we are already
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: doing this.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: That we are already, and if you look, the new
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: rituals that are popping up anywhere, first of all, they
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: are much broader in some ways than the traditional kind of,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: path of, there are four big life rituals that, you know,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: this predates Jung, but from Van Gennep when he comes
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: up with Rites of Passage in 1909, right? It's the
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: big four, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. We now
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: have them for gender reveals and NICU graduations and end-of-life
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: doulas and end of Job doulas, pet funerals are a
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: $ 3 billion business, okay? We've got, you know, daddy-daughter dances
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: and mom proms and cancerversaries and soberversaries. And I think
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: that what's going on, and this is, you know, kind
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: of when you asked me why I got involved in this,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: because the last 10 years, what I've been doing in
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: my life is thinking about how we navigate life transitions, right?
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: I have now collected and analyzed 500 stories of Americans,
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: all ages, all walks of life, all backgrounds. This is now,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: in effect, the third book I've written about this. The
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: first is Life is in the Transitions, then The Search
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: About Work. And what I have found at its core
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: is that the idea of a predictable linear life, which
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: is what those of us who are 40 plus grew
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: up with, that's been replaced by the recognition that we
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: live nonlinear lives with many more ups and downs and
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: twists and turns. We spend, by my data, half of
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: our adult lives in transitions. And so I thought I
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: was ready for this. I give a TED Talk on this.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: I teach a TED course on how to navigate. I
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: thought I was ready. But the reason this hit me
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: so hard is that I was focused, maybe what a
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: lot of your clients, when they come in and the
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: clients of those listen to us, I'm in an individual transition, right?
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: I've lost my job. I've lost my legs. I've lost
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: a loved one, right? I've, natural disaster, a pandemic, a downsizing,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: these things that affect us individually. And at its core,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: what A Time to Gather is about is collective transitions, right?
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Not the life quakes, as I call them, but in effect,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: the group quakes, when the communities that we're a part
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: of feel destabilized, what do we do then? And as
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: kind of lacking as the research is on navigating life transitions,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: it's even more lacking when it comes to how do
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: groups reconstitute themselves when the group itself is going through change.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: You know, to give people a feeling for a new
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: type of ritual that has only existed briefly, and one
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: of the stories you lead with You know where I'm going.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: Would you please tell about the Honor Walk? After reading it,
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: I could not tell it, even if I wanted to,
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: because it's so touching. And that's what rituals do. They
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: touch us.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate that question. And I've heard this story now,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: and I've been telling it for years. I also can't
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: choke up. It's an incredible story. It's about a woman
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: who grows up. in a tiny town in Ohio, okay,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: in a family devoted to community service. The father is
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: the mayor and the fire chief. The mother teaches Presbyterian
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Sunday school. She grows up, becomes a nurse, gets married,
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: moves away, comes back on Super Bowl weekend, and her
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: little sister, she's a twin, and her little sister says
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: she's going to get engaged next week, like it's a
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: joyful moment in the family. The sister gets in a
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: car to drive to work the next morning. It has snowed,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: skids on the ice, wraps her car around a tree.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: So the family, you know, jumps into action. They get
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: her to the hospital. She takes the two necessary brain
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: tests overnight. And at 6 a.m., a doctor they had
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: never seen comes in and says to the family, she's
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: an organ donor. We're basically taking her away. And Missy,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: the woman I'm talking to, was like, I was devastated.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: And I said, I don't want any family to experience
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the kind of pain and sort of, I don't know,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: inconsideration that I felt. She quits her job, comes back,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: goes to work in the donor support world, and finds
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: incredible tension, invisible to most of us, among the groups.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: That's the families, that's the donor support groups, and the
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: medical professionals. They're all kind of, to a certain extent,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: rivals here. And one day she turns on the television
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: and she sees one of those funerals that we've all
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: seen for a police officer, in her case, also firefighters, right?
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: These big visual spectacles designed to honor and pay tribute.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: That's what I needed, she says. And she spends years
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: trying to figure out, because what you need, we're going to,
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: we'll talk about this, you know, as we go on,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: like what are the elements you need in a ritual?
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: But the first is you need some sense of sacred space. Okay.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: But you got someone leaving the ICU and going to
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: the OR where the organs are harvested. How are you
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: going to create sacred space in a chaotic hospital setting
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: where people are trying to save lives of people? And
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: now you have someone here who's already, you know, legally dead.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: And so what she does is she creates an honor walk.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: They put the body on a gurney, puts a cell
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: phone by the ear. The first song she picks, the
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: family picks Annie's song. First concert I ever went to
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: was John Denver. Like, this is like my age talking here.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: They push the body into the hallway. The entire hospital
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: staff has stopped what they're doing in their dark blue scrubs,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: holding flameless candles to pay tribute to the deceased. Not
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: what they're taking. but to honor what he's giving. And
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: they stop five feet from the operating doors, the swinging doors,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: say goodbye. She makes a rule, Missy, and the rule
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: is no pictures. She makes an exception for the first woman.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: The next morning, Missy's holidays phone blows up. How do
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: I do an honor walk? How do I solve this?
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: She's like, how does anybody know? The woman posts the
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: picture on Facebook. Facebook, it gets 2 million likes. There
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: are now 50 donor support groups around the world. They
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: all do Honor Walks, dozens around the world. ER, people
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: might have seen one recently on The Pit. They've gotten
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: a quarter of a billion views on YouTube. And what
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: this is, and I think that, first of all, it's
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: an amazing story, which is why I started my book
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: with it.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: But it's an invisible pain.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: First of all, it's relatively new. We haven't done these
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: organ transplants even for a full century at this point.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: But it's an invisible pain that you can mark with
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: being around people. And the idea of getting people in
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: a hospital who are saving other people's lives to stop
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: to honor someone whose life is over is an expression of,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: you know, I always say the three most powerful words
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: in the English language are, you're not alone. And this
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: is a way of saying to this family, you're not alone.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: And we can just see it's a Hall of Fame
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: modern ritual.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like that idea of it making visible pain
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: that is invisible. And you're reminding me of someone I
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: worked with decades ago who had lost a pregnancy, kind
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: of late term, you know, terrible thing that had happened.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: And then she got pregnant again and she was seeing
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: me and she was incredibly anxious. She was having a
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: lot of symptoms. And when I talked to her about it,
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: what I realized is that the pain of the first
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: loss was invisible, just like you're saying.
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: I said, well, who knew?
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: Who knew about this baby? I mean, this baby had
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: a name. This baby had clothes that had been bought
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: and hardly anyone knew. And so we together came up
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: actually with a ritual. I suggested it and she came
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: up with it. She decided that at the baby shower
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: for the current pregnancy, she was going to have a
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: bit of a memorial service for that previous baby.
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: And you know what? Those symptoms of intense anxiety resolved.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: We have, I mean, you guys are professionals, right? We
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: have 500 academic studies that show it synchronizes our brain waves, right?
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: You know, it aligns our breathing. It calms us in
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: times of stress and change. It makes our families, our neighborhoods,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: our communities, our offices, our teams closer. Because what we're,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: you know, as I don't have to tell you, we
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: know that life is a story that you tell yourself, right?
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: That that story that goes on in our heads is
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: not just part of us, it is us in a
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: fundamental way, right? And this is sort of the big
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: idea in Life is in the Transitions of how, by
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: listening to stories, what patterns can I identify? And narrative
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: psychology as an academic field is now, right, more than
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: a generation old. What we are talking about here is
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: embodied storytelling and stories that are co-created, stories that are
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: collectively told, not by an individual in your own head,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: but by the group. And that we know when you
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: co-create stories, Like if we were siblings and we went
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: off and the three of us are siblings, I have
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: an older sibling and a younger son. So the three
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: of us are siblings and we go off and spend
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: a day at a museum or a beach and we
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: come back and we tell that story. We know that
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: we would start interrupting each other. No, Deb, you forgot that.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: And then Lisa, no, Bruce, like you're over-exaggerating what you did.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Like that is co-creation. That is shared storytelling. And what
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: a ritual is in its own way is embodied storytelling.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: where we're not doing it just in words, we're doing
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: it in deeds. And so that's kind of my first
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: reaction to this. My second reaction is to highlight the
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: invisibility of the pain of a lost child or a
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: lost pregnancy, okay? Deb, you asked me like what was,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: you know, a favorite story. We just discussed Honor Walks.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: There are two that I think of. One is my
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: wife's favorite story and her favorite chapter, In a Time
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: to Gather is, maybe I shouldn't say this, it's my anniversary,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: but it's the Taylor Swift divorce party about this woman
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: who grows up on Long Island. Both grandparents, sets of
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: grandparents were divorced. I'm not going to get divorced, she says.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: We can imagine what happened. They're universals. She grows up,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: she gets married, has two kids. She gets divorced. Her
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: husband takes half the belongings. She gives away the other half.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: She walks home and she says, I don't have sheets
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: to sleep on or towels to dry with. Like, I
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: need the support of my friends. So she creates the
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: world's first divorce registry where people can sign up to
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: give her things not for the wedding, but for this
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: new time of need that would have been shameful before.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: She gets half the market of divorced people. It's fascinating
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: to look at the numbers. But then she says, I
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: need to know more. So she writes a blog post
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: called the Taylor Swift Divorce Party. I'm talking shake it
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: off cupcakes and, you know, we are never, ever getting
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: back together napkins. And it goes viral because she says,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: I can be sad that my marriage is over, but
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: not want to be separated from my friends, not feel
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: ashamed and not feel that my life is over. And
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: I want a ritual. So that's one end. Again, a
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: new ritual that organized religion, and I'm someone who wrote
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: five books about the Bible, ever did. But to me,
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: my favorite chapter is very late in the book and
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: it's called the Garden of Lost Children. And it's exactly
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: what you talked about, Lisa, which is that organized religion, none,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: almost anywhere, ever, had rituals to honor miscarriage, stillbirth. Like,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: it's unbelievable. Maimonides, the great Jewish thinker, if you die
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: before 31 days, it's as if you never lived and
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: we're not going to have a funeral. The Catholic Church,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: if you die before being baptized, you can't be buried
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: in a Catholic cemetery, okay? And you can't get to heaven.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: So in Ireland, they had these things called chilinis, which
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: are these public burial spots. And these dads would take
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: these stillborn children and take them to the edge of town,
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: the entire town would follow. And they would often bury
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: them under abandoned churches so that water coming from the
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: roof would surreptitiously baptize the children in what are called
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: eavesdrop funerals. This is one of the reasons that we
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: have the phrase eavesdrop, okay? An astonishing thing. And it
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: wasn't until a grandmother who was one of the first
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: women doctors in this country, but also a Buddhist priest,
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: living in Zen centers in California and later the Northwest,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: brought a ceremony from Japan from the post-war to honor
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: lost children that has now swept this country. And it
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: is a powerful reminder that many of these were invisible.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: Many of them involve women and many of them involve
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: things that organized religion, and I'm speaking here often as
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: a defender of organized religion, chose to ignore. And now
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: that women have more influence, the internet shows us what
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: things are doing elsewhere. It creates the problem in a
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: lot of ways, but it also can solve the problems.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: We now have this grassroots movement of people saying, as
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: a millennial designer said to me, after planning a mastectomy
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: ceremony for a friend, a mastectomy ritual, My generation, we
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: want the rituals when we want them and we don't
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: need our parents or our preacher's approval to do them.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: We're just going to do them ourselves. It's unbelievable and
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: it's incredibly inspiring.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: You've touched on one of the key elements for ritual,
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: you know, which is that it's embodied. And the second
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: one is life events that are so painful, but not
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: formally recognized. And I'm thinking there have to be witnesses.
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: You know, and when we're talking to people about dreams,
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: we often, you know, we can do a dream incubation
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: and create your own little ritual to please ask for
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: a dream. But these things like the honor walk and
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: a divorce registry and so on, there are others mirroring, sharing,
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: you know, Those three important words, you are not alone.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: So let me say a couple of things. That's a
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: beautiful thought and takes us in, I think, an important direction.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: So let's just start with a basic definition. Here's how
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I define ritual. Having spent all this time attending them
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: and joining them and now creating them, as people ask me,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: a ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: feel at home. Okay, so let's break that down. It's
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: an act, it's a doing, right? This is not a talking,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: this is a doing, okay? It is embodied, right, Deb,
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: to echo what you just said. It's shared, it's gonna
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: connect us, okay? I'm not saying that, you know, the
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Dalai Lama says, you know, I don't like teaching Westerners
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: how to meditate because they're gonna meditate for a higher
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: test score, right? Or for a raise, like where really
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: it's supposed to help heal the world. So I'm not
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: saying that you can't have a ritual where you're gonna
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: sit in the morning with your cup of tea, but
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: if it's really, if it's designed for yourself, that's one thing.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: There's something about a ritual at its core that is
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: a shared experience. But it is unnecessary, and this is
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: a shocking word in this conversation, but I think one
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: worth pausing on. You don't need to get down on
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: one knee to get engaged. You don't need to wear
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: black to mourn. You don't need to circle the bride
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: seven times to get married. But these are unnecessities that
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: become necessities because we infuse them with collective meaning. OK,
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: and it's that sense of meaning making. And the final
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: thing is, you know, echoes back to the homesickness, which
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: I once was ashamed of, but which I now think
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: is maybe the real issue that we have in the
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: world today, which is that we all feel homesick in
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: some way, a kind of existential homesickness. That's the feeling
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: of being. And this is, you know, I'm borrowing and
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: trespassing on your language here. Safe, secure, heard, lifted, upheld.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: which is why, you know, when I then go into
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: my sort of there are five things that rituals need,
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: one of them, right, one of them is empathy. One
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: of them is the sense of we are here to
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: give you what you need, okay? But it's important to
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: remember that what each of us needs in that moment
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: might be slightly different, right? Which is why I begin
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: with you want to welcome with joy, okay? You want
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: to create that boundary, okay? Then you want to, you know,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: you want to sort of, look, Circuses have rings, right?
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: Trials have courtrooms. Games have boundaries, right? You need a
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: boundary that says out there that this is non-ordinary time.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: That's ordinary time. Now we're going to cross the threshold
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: into non-ordinary time. And then you're going to say this
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: is why we're here. We're here to celebrate, okay? There's
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: a graduation, right? There's a baby naming. There's a wedding, right?
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: There's a new achievement of some kind. Or we're here
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: to mourn. right? Because there's a loss, there's a death,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: there's an ending. And the other thing, this reminds me
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: of something else I wanted to say earlier, Lisa, in
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: response to your comment about there being some mourning in
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: the new baby ritual for the woman who had the
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: lost child. Every ritual contains every other ritual. This shocked me,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: but it's so true. And I learned this from my kids.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: When we did a little ritual when they went to college,
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: They were much more anxious and emotional and maybe even
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: sad about the end of their childhood than they were
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: about the dawn of their young adulthood. And the same for,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: I was much more sad and emotional about the end
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: of my everyday parenting than the dawn of what becomes
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: a new kind of parenting that happens kind of long distance.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: And that's why what you need in the middle is
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: you need that sense that the number one phrase I
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: heard in the hundred ritual designers I interviewed and all
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: the places I went, was holding space. And what you
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: want is to hold the space that can accommodate all
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: of those different fields. This book is called A Time
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: to Gather because of Ecclesiastes, right? A time to mourn,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: a time to dance, a time to laugh, a time
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: to weep, a time to scatter stones, a time to
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: gather them, because we need to realize that we can't
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: fully anticipate All the emotions people are going to have,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: which is why, interestingly enough, at the death of the
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: organ donor, it's honoring their giving as opposed to you're
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: not honoring their passing. It shows that there's often complex
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: emotions in these times of change.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: And I think you make such a good point. I
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: just had a big graduation in my family.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Congratulations.
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: All of a sudden, she came home and just cried.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: And we don't pay enough attention to that. It's such
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: a joyful, wonderful experience. And there is that, too, where
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: the ritual of graduation with speakers and faculty marching and
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: the graduates in their caps and gowns. But we don't
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: know what we're going toward. I mean, when your twins
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: depart for college, You know what the past is like
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: and to miss it. And people say, well, you know,
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: they're embarking. We don't know what exactly we're getting ourselves
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: into next. And we as humans have an awfully hard
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: time holding that uncertainty.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: You know, I want to sort of build that out
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: a little bit. I once looked into traditional rituals around marriage.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: And what I discovered is that in traditional cultures, there's
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: usually a period of mourning, and it looks different. There's
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: one culture, I can't remember which one it is, where
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: the groom comes and kind of makes a pantomime of
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: stealing the bride from her home, and the parents of
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: the bride kind of, you know, run their chests and everything.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: And it looks different in every culture, but there's some
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: part of the marriage ceremony that is about mourning what
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: is being lost. And that is completely missing in our culture,
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: except for the bachelor and bachelorette parties. That's the kind
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: of degraded version of the mourning part of I'm saying
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: goodbye to my single life.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Well, so many responses. Let me go back to Deb,
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: and then I'll add a note about what you just said.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: I read a newsletter called The Nonlinear Life, and I
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: wrote one when my kids graduated from high school. why
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: do parents cry at graduations, right? And it was getting
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: into this question of a kind of sense of uncertainty
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: but also another feeling that we have, which I want
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: to put a pin in, because I think it's just
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: so good for the work that you guys do, both
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: in your personal lives and professional lives, and also in
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: these conversations. It's because there is a kind of time travel. Okay. Again,
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: this is another like completely out there idea of mine
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: that when I first had it, so I went to,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: I went to Chile to go, uh, to go forest bathing.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: And on that trip, I also went to Easter Island,
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: which is in the Pacific nominally part of Chile to
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: look at kind of the, kind of the fascinating return
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: of placenta rituals, uh, You know, and this gets to
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: one of the places I was hoping we were going
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: to go in this conversation, which is kind of the
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: return of a lot of these sort of Jungian universal
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: images and themes. And, you know, you'll help me with
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: a more precise language.
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: Archetypes.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: I was hoping we would get to it in this conversation,
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: but let's put that opinion out for a second and
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: go back. So I went forest bathing. So forest bathing
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: is another classic modern ritual. It begins, I lived in
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Japan in the 80s. It began in Japan in the 80s.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: Japan is 80% uninhabitable because it's like forests and mountains.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: You have 150 million people, 160 million when I was there,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: living in an area the size of South Carolina. Very crowded.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: They wanted to get people out of urban areas into
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: the forest. So they created this movement from the top
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: down called Shimunyoku, which translates as the kind of the
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: English term forest bathing has caught on. And it's now
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: done in 160 countries around the world. And it's going
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: into the forest in groups with sort of guided meditation
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: and experiences where you go out and you seek experiences
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: in nature and then come back and share with the group.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: So same thing. Shared unnecessary act that makes us feel
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: at home. You can take a walk in the woods
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: with your dog or yourself. That's a different thing. This
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: is going to connect not just with nature and then
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: with others. And in like the second of the guided
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: meditations where we're lying on the ground, the guys were
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: walking us through this, I was convinced that I saw
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: some figure, some sort of nameless, shapeless figure that appeared,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: you know, in my vision. And again, my first instinct,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: don't tell anybody, which usually is a sign to me
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: that I should explore this, right? And I should not
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: only explore it myself or privately with my Jungian analyst,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: but in a book and now on a podcast that
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: will go around the world. And I started thinking that
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: there were these different, I first called it like a ghost.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: And I thought, oh, you know what? There've been other
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: ghosts that have appeared to me over the years. I
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: was thinking of my bar mitzvah when like, I, you know,
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: disassociated from my body and look back at my future
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: self and, and particularly, oh my God, I'm telling the
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: story on my, on my wedding day. Okay. So this
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: is my wedding anniversary. I just called it my wedding day.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: I'm already traveling through time. My wife, Linda, we're sitting
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: on the dance floor. This is in my hometown. She's
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: from Boston and I'm from Savannah. She chose to get
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: married because she thought her fifth cousins wouldn't come because
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: it was too far, but it was Savannah, Georgia, and
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: it's romantic and they all came. And my parents were
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: giving a toast and I simultaneously, and this feeling is
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: still so clear to me, imagined myself as a child
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: looking back at photos of their wedding and then imagine
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: myself as my own potential future children looking back on
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: pictures of this wedding.
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: And I was simultaneously in all three places. And so
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: what I realized is that this is something else that
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: happens in rituals. It's not ghost. Obviously not in a
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: bad ghost or even a, you know, my father killed,
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: you know, my uncle killed my father ghost like Hamlet
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: or even like a friendly ghost like Casper. That this
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: is a kind of time travel and that what happens
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: when we go inside the circle of the ritual is
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: that not only are we in place outside of place,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: but we are in time outside of time. We've created
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: a kind of special time where we move freely through
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: the otherwise kind of firm divisions and borders and those
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: boundaries and life and life becomes porous.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: And Van Genep called that liminal space.
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: So you're talking about Arnold Van Gannop, right? So Arnold
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Van Gannop is a German-Dutch anthropologist, by the way, very
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: liminal because he was born in Germany and moved to France.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: And he says that that is, you know, there's a
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: bunch of problems with Van Gannop, which I've spent the
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: last 10 years talking about, because he says there are
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: three phases to these things and they must happen in
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: order and they don't need to happen in order. My book,
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: Life is in the Transitions, is all about that, and
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: I'll leave that offstage now. But yes, there's a kind
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: of liminality, and that liminality allows us to move around
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: in time, but also to swim more freely in the
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: different emotions that come forward. And it's why, to come
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: back to what you said, Lisa, that I have in
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: A Time to Gather set out to rename these rituals,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: not the Van Gannett Big Four of birth, coming of age, marriage,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: and death. I've now renamed them. First of all, I
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: think there are five, not four. And I've renamed them
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: as welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning, and renewing. Precisely because each
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: is a combination of all of those things. And we
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: need a new language for them. Because if you don't
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: get married or have children, which is I'm sure many
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: people who are listening to us, either by circumstance or
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: by choice, you can go most of your adult life
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: without an approved life ritual. Like the language doesn't work anymore.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: So we need to update it and we need to
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: accommodate that rituals contain multitudes and we need words that
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: give us permission to do that.
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: I like the idea a lot of the sort of
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: the time travel or the Jungian word is kairos, which
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: is that different order of time. But the connecting principle,
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: the alchemical coniuntio of bringing the past and the future
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: together in some way that has a kind of eternity
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: to it. We all know this, but it's the first
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: time I've heard it named, really, that we all remember it.
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: We remember what this celebration was. The rituals around a
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: baby's birth and naming, weddings, and certainly death.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: You hear it in Jungian. You also hear Eliade did this, too.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: And Eliade talked more about the primordial. So what's interesting
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: about that is that you've got both the end of time, right,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: you know, in this sort of utopian kind of fantasy
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: of a future time. But you also got the primordial time,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: which is a time before all of the different civilizations,
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: the different religions and all of this. kind of breaks
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: it down. And what's interesting to me, if I can
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: just geek out on the history of the idea for
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: a second, is that we have this idea that religion
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: created ritual. And therefore, we impose on ritual a lot
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: of the complex emotions that we have about religion. But
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: that's not what happened. What happened is that ritual creates religion.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: So you have, just to go back and underscore this,
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: We have evidence 300,000 years ago and lots of evidence
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: from caves, 100, 150, 200, 300,000. We're not anatomical humans
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: until 150,000 years ago. So we know that the first
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: thing that we do is gather together to bury our dead.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: And then the only way to make those instincts to
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: embody them and then make them portable so that they
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: can be transported is to tell stories about them, right?
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: And to codify them, and then to make them something
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: that others can understand and that we can pass down.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: So that's going on for hundreds of thousands of years
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: before organized religion comes along. In the second half of
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: the first millennium BCE, the Axial Age, I don't have
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: to tell you guys this, but you've got Judaism, you've
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: got Christianity, Islam comes later, you've got Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: And then because these universal religions are very effective, they
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: sort of take over ritual. five of the sacraments. I mean,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: we could go right down the list. And so for
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: the next, let's just say, you know, 2,000 years, they
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: control it until the 19th century when religion takes a
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: step back from the center of daily life. And then
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: what steps forward? The academy. And so you have all
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: of the great thinkers here. So you have first Durkheim,
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: descended from eight rabbis, like the head of the sociology
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: department in the Sorbonne, who talks about collective effervescence. we
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: begin to realize this is a universal thing. It doesn't
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: just belong to one religion. It belongs to all religions
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: and to the non-religious. And then you've got Van Gennep,
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: who comes along at the same time with rites of passage.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Those two in an ideal world would have cooperated. But
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: in fact, and of course, as you know, I tell
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: the story in A Time to Gather, Durkheim is threatened
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: by Van Gennep and blocks him, and rites of passage
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: as an idea disappears from human civilization for 60 years.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: Until a graduate student in Chicago translate rites of passage
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: in the 60s. And this is exactly when Victor Turner,
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: the great anthropologist, is, and now suddenly, and what's going
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: on in the 60s? Sleep-ins, love-ins, you know, all of
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: these kinds of collective effervescent experiences. And so what happens
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: is ritual then merges kind of with theater studies and
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: you have a new wave of this that begins to
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: take over. And so I think what's interesting is that
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: whether it's Jung, whether it's Freud, we can go with
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: all of these thinkers are there at the moment that
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: religion separates from ritual and they jump in and help
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: us redefine our relationship with this core human act.
• 40:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great.
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: I want to just go back to this idea about
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: kind of collective storytelling. You were talking about how we
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: sort of made it portable by almost creating it as
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: a thing that we could then pass on, right? And
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: what I want to say about rituals as stories is
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: that rituals are also always symbolic. And, you know, if
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: you think about, I don't know, the ritual of baptism,
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: for example, You dip the baby's head in water.
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: Or I just had a big graduation too.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: My son just graduated from college. And there's that moment
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: they say, okay, you can turn your tassel now. Something
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: has changed. You're different. You've walked through a door. These
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: little things, they're symbols and they feel significant. I mean,
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: that moment in the graduation where they moved the tassels over,
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: you know, everyone kind of gets choked up. Like you
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: made your point, the act itself doesn't mean anything, but
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: it symbolizes something very, very big. And what we know
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: from Jung is that symbols canalize psychic energy. Symbols can
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: move energy internally and through groups. And so rituals become
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: a way, to shape the psychic energy of the individual,
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: to shape the psychic energy of the group, they become
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: a container for meaning, for emotion, and for experience.
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: You know, I quote the anthropologist Leslie White in the
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: introduction of A Time to Gather, saying that our greatest
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: human invention is symbol, right? And we're, you know, we're
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: not inside all of our primate ancestors and other animals,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: but it looks pretty clear that symbol is a very
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: powerful human idea to invest meaning in something that, as
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: we've been saying, doesn't necessarily have that meaning. That tassel is, what,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: a piece of nylon thread with some gold around it,
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: and yet the act is a way of communicating something
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: across time and across speech and across language. So, so
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: this allows me, you know, to, to almost come back
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: to you with an idea. I want to tell a
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: couple of stories here and get your take on them
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: through the Jungian lens, because these are things that I've
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: been wondering about and I, and, and I don't know
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: the answer to them and I want to tell two stories.
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: Oh, we will certainly have the answer.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. That thing. I mean, that's the, the, uh,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: this is good.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: You know, I, I, I, school me here, you know,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: give me some free, give me some free counseling here.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Because this is something that I can't answer.
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: One of the ideas that I talk about a lot
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: in the book, and that now that the book's been
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: out for a few weeks, it seems to be an
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: idea that's resonating quite deeply, is that one of the things,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: ritual does a lot of things. It connects us, right?
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: It chronicles our lives, right? It creates these moments. But
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: it also, the fourth C, is that it corrects imbalances
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: within the group, that there is conflict in the group.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: And part of the purpose of the ritual is to
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: titrate the conflict, okay? So Deb, you and I are
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: getting married, okay? You want a big wedding? I want
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: a small wedding. You and I lost a loved one, okay?
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: You want, you know, you want to lie under the
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: covers with a cat and, you know, go into a
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: dream state, and I want a big old Irish wig.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: So that prevents a lot of people from doing the ritual,
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: and yet that's the purpose of the ritual in a
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: lot of ways, is to get it out so that
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: we deal with it. And I learned this you know,
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: most visibly when my father died, okay? My father grew
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: up in Savannah, Georgia, great storyteller, never depressed a minute
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: in his life until he gets Parkinson's, loses control of
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: the dopamine, tries to take his own life six times
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: in 12 weeks.
• 43:54
  Speaker 4: Jeez.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: And this story I share at the opening of Life
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: is in the transitions because it was a pivot in
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: my life because the only thing that brought my father
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: back to life, when we tried everything, you know, medicine, therapy,
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff, the only thing that saved
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: him was when I sat down on a Monday morning
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: and sent him a question. Tell me about the toys
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: you played with as a kid. And he answered that question.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: He had never written anything longer than a memo. And
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: I was so happy. I sent another question. Tell me about,
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: you know, the house you grew up in. And this
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: went on for eight years until weeks before my father died.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: He finished a 65,000 word memoir, one question, one answer
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: at a time. It's the power of life story. And
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: anybody within A hundred miles. And we published this book
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: last year. I had a memorial service. And it was
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: a reminder of the healing power of the human story.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: He died in 2021, not from COVID, but during COVID.
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: And so we all flew down to Savannah. And my job,
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: this was before I was like the ritual know-it-all. My
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: job was to interface with the rabbi. And my mother
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: says she hates throwing the dirt on the coffin because
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: she finds it barbaric. She wants to use long stem
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: yellow roses. And my fifth sister, my younger sister, says,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: you can imagine, throwing dirt on the coffin is my
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: favorite part. It's not a funeral unless we throw the
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: dirt on the coffin. And so I'm like, and like
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: no one was backing down. And I'm like, Rabbi, you know,
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: I'll call you back. And so I then proceeded to
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: kind of middle child my way through this conflict by.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: By doing what I now know smart ritual designers do,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: which is, okay, what do you really have to hear, mom?
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: And what do you really have to hear to my
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: sister Carrie? And I finally was like, she lived with
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: a guy for 60 years, including some very difficult years.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Let's give her what she wants, you know? So what
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: did we do? We got three dozen yellow roses, long
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: stem yellow roses. And then we got three dozen little
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: packets of Tybee Island sand from the beach where my
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: dad was like the de facto mayor. And you know
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: what we did? We gave everybody the choice. And we,
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: the ritual kind of raised the conflict and the ritual
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: resolved the conflict at the same time. Okay, four years later,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: I'm in Ireland. I go to six weddings in a
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: day in Las Vegas on this trip and 10 funerals
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: in a week in Ireland. I think the Irish story
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: is like, I just, the Irish chapter is one of
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: my favorites. And the next to last wedding I went to,
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: excuse me, funeral I went to was from a woman
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: who died in her 90s she's actually having a religious wedding,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: unlike a lot that I went to, because she was
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: very active. She loved to sing penny opera. They were singing,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: you know, Rodgers and Hammerstein at the funeral. And then
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: we all get in. And then after the funeral in
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: the church, we're going to go to the cemetery. And
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: so the funeral director says to me, how'd you get here?
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: And I gave like the most modern answer. I'm like, Uber?
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: And she's like, oh, how are you going to get
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: to the funeral, the cemetery? I don't know, ride with us.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: And before I could think, she opens the back door
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: of the hearse, puts up the jumper seat, and I
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: ride to the cemetery next to the dearly departed soul
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: of this woman who we're burying, holding, you know, literally
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: holding on to the casket. We get there and they
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: have a little ceremony. They lower, in Ireland, everyone's buried
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: in family graves. So they lower her into the arms
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: of her husband who had died 10 years earlier. He
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: does the dirt to dirt and ashes to ashes. And
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: then there were three dozen people and someone shows up
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: with three dozen yellow, long stem yellow roses. And one
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: by one, everyone takes one and throws it in. And
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: I'm sitting there And I'm at my father's funeral, right?
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: I am weeping all over again. And that's one story.
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: And the second story will be far less long. But
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: I went to South Africa and I went to a
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: traditional bride price negotiation. And before the finishing of the
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: 17th year, before the traditional wedding or the white wedding,
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: all in one day, the family gathered to pour a
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: homemade beer from the marula tree and pour it at
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: the base of the tree. And when I was in
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Chile and I went to meet a traditional Mapuche healer,
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: he poured the traditional beer at the base of the tree.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: And so this is what I wanted to ask you
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: in this conversation. There's no internet. There's nobody writing what
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to do, which is a universal code of togetherness.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: How do those yellow roses show up in Savannah, Georgia
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: and show up in Dublin, Ireland? And how does that
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: homemade beer show up in a tiny village in South
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: Africa and on top of the Andes Mountains in a
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: traditional tribe? How are these universals somehow connected spread and
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: shared and become this language of how we communicate.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: Well, there is a very definite Jungian answer to that question.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: That's what I've come for.
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: And I know, Lisa, you're thinking the same thing that
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: I am. Collective unconscious. Jung posited and had the idea
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: pretty early on and then did all kinds of travels,
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: study of myth, art, religions, etc., to basically substantiate this
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: idea that he had that there is a collective unconscious
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: that all of humankind shares. Just as we have evolved
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: physically over many many thousands and thousands of years, Jung
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: posited that we have also evolved psychically, that we have
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: this vast storehouse that he called the two-million-year-old man somewhere
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: in our DNA, and that we recognize there are patterns.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: We recognize all kinds of symbolic, emotional, life stage things,
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: all the things that you say. We recognize the importance
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: of welcoming and loving and renewing and mourning and rites
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: of passage, and it's a long list. And so somewhere
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: we know about yellow roses or beer or many another thing.
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: But Elisa, let me pop over to you and you
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: fill in my gaps.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, everything you said, I mean, there is a way
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: that there is a kind of universal substrate to human
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: experience that gives us a shared symbolic language. And Bruce,
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: I know that some of the earliest evidence for rituals among,
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: I guess, you know, pre-humans was that in Neanderthal sites
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: where the dead are buried, there's evidence, there's fossilized pollen. Yes.
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: So we know that people were burying their dead with flowers. And,
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: you know, we still do that. And so there's something
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: about the way that we respond to the flower and
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: the image of the flower. I mean, people don't bury
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: their dead with sticks, right? They bury their dead with flowers.
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: And we have for, you know, like you said, since
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: predating when we were anatomically human.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: So the under, let me just make sure I understand this.
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: So what you're saying is that there is this unconscious, subconscious,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: prelingual kind of list of, kind of census of universal beings.
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: Feelings and emotions and ideas and tropes and.
• 51:25
  Speaker 4: I would say kind of universal patterns.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: Universal patterns. Okay. So this is what, from my own
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: reading of Jung, and I have, I was just thinking earlier,
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: I should have grabbed my book of Jungian wisdom off
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: my desk before this conversation. So I, that's the level
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: that I have processed this idea over time. But how
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: does that then manifest itself in a brewed beer, right?
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Or a yellow flower? Or you don't think the color
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: of the flower or the taste of the beer. Because
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: I'm seeing specific, not just abstract universal patterns. I'm actually
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: seeing specific tropes or songs or movements. That's just the
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: expression of the universal.
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, this would get into a pretty long conversation,
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: but I do want to say, if you look at
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: fairy tales and myth, there are mythologems that repeat, and
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: some of these cannot be accounted for by transmission. So yes,
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: sometimes the images that come up, for example, in religious
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: iconography are incredibly specific. Which is a little bit mysterious,
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: you know, but Jung didn't say that the archetypes have
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: this form. You know, you wouldn't say there's a yellow
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: rose archetype.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: Yes, right. Exactly. That's about my point.
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: But for example, the thing about the brewed beer and
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: the tree, I mean, so a brewed beverage is it
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: changes your state of consciousness and it is a spirit, right?
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: And I think that.
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: Kind of archetypally, we read beer as something that spiritualizes,
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: whereas the tree is universally a symbol of the great mother.
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: So there's something about watering the roots of the great
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: mother with spirit. It might be something like that. So
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: there's a common symbolic language.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: One thing that has resonated with me in thinking about
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: this is a lot of these rituals are OK, have
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: elements of, say, yeast or other natural elements that are
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: themselves embody and set in motion a kind of transitional state.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: And so it's not exactly surprising that in these times
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: of transition, which is fundamentally what we're talking about here,
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: we're talking about how individuals navigate change. and how groups
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: navigate change, that you would use things, you know, cover, cover,
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: if you go back to the, to write to Le
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: Rite de Passage, the Vangana book, Rites of Passage, it
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: talks about people leaving, you know, covering their bodies with
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: this or that, and they tend to be elements that
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: themselves are elements of change. And so for sure, the, the, fermentation,
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: the yeast, what, you know, what turns the grape into
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: the wine. These are one element of life that become
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: another element of life and therefore would not be surprising
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: on some kind of existential level that we would engage
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: them when we ourselves are going from one state to
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: a changed state.
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: I often think about this as theme and variations. So
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: there's a broad-based theme. around a ritual of mourning. And
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: as Lisa said, we don't bury our dead with sticks.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Because those are acts of violence, is what you're implying.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: Or they just don't carry a resonance of like, oh,
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: I'm going to throw a stick on here. Beer somehow,
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: and I had never heard of this as a ritual
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: of mourning, but we get it.
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: That's not a ritual of mourning. That's a ritual. Okay,
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: maybe I wasn't clear. That was not a ritual of
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: mourning so much as a summoning of the ancestors to
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: participate in the ritual of mourning.
• 55:27
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: Or celebrating in the case of the wedding, yeah.
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: But we get that beer works.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: We get that flowers work. We get that scattering dirt
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: on top of the coffin works. We get that sticks
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: don't work.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: Interesting. That's so well said.
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: So I'm just bringing in, we feel this in our bones.
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: And that is a telling quality of rituals. And that's
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: why we have to be there to feel it, to
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: experience it, to really get it. And the stories come later.
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: You know, I always think about the problems Moses had
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: of convincing the Israelites to stop worshiping the golden calf.
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: because they weren't there when he saw the burning bush.
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: And he goes back down the mountain and says, hey, listen, everybody,
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: gather around because you won't believe what happened to me today.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: I'm chuckling listening to you because on my Instagram page,
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: which is my name at Bruce Feiler, I shared yesterday
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: the image. It was Mel Brooks's 100th birthday. And it
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: was going around the internet with him dressed up as God.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: You mentioned the $ 2 million man, the $ 2 million era
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: of him showing up with the three tablets and saying,
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: I come to you from the gods on top of
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: Mount Sinai right before they discover that he's built the
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: golden calf. I wrote five books about the Bible and
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: two about Moses. He shows up and there's Mel Brooks,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: you know, in the bright beard and looking like Charlton
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: Heston with the brown robe. And he says, I brought
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: for you the 15 commandments. And then one of them
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: falls and breaks. He's like, oh, sorry, 10. But by
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: the way, that moment, you talk about the golden calf,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: that's also a universal moment, right? Which is the people
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: don't want the message, right? You know, that's also, you know,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: the sort of, you know, you are the stiff-necked people.
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: And we're all going to, we're going to get the revelation.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: We're going to miss the revelation because we're stubborn and
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: we don't want to change. But what I wanted to
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: say in response to this conversation about the universal, is
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: a thing that it came up a lot in my
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: travels and it's a thing that people are, you know,
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: asking me about when I've just come off a tour
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: of doing a lot of events around the time to gather,
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: which is this very interesting balance, right? What did you say, Deb?
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: You said theme and variation, okay? So what you've got,
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: the moment that we're in now, okay, the yeasty moment
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: of change that we're in now is how to On
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: the one hand, take the traditional rituals and vary them
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: so they apply to newer audiences while keeping some of
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: the universal resonance that they used to have. And then
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: also taking the new rituals that are being created, the
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: honor walks, the divorce parties, the ceremonies to mark miscarriage
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: or stillbirth so that your friend or your client, whomever
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: it was, Lisa, does not feel silenced, and how to
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: take the new rituals and give them the depth. Do
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: you need to add the beer, the yellow roses to them?
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: And that's where we are now, right? You know, there's
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: three ways. I talk about this at the beginning of
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: the book. There's three ways of talking about what's going on.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: Either the celebration recession is the real and that we're
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: going to turn our back from ritual. I do not
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: think that that's true, but that's a possibility. The second
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: possibility is that what on Wall Street, to bring in
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: Wall Street to this conversation where it doesn't belong, what
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: on Wall Street they call the dead cat bounce. which
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: is the ritual is declining, but there's a little bit
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: of a blip, but the drop is going to be real.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: The third is that this is green shoots of a
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: real change, what I call the ritual renaissance. And I
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: believe that that's what's happening, but it is still green.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: And therefore it's up to us to nurture, to water,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: to pour the beer onto the tree as it's growing.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: And I think the key to that success is updating
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: the old rituals, which, by the way, means accepting that
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: there is no or ritual. There is no one thing.
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, like, you know, we've been talking about Jewish
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: rituals here. I'll go one more. If I said, give
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: me five Jewish rituals, there's a 100% possibility, almost a guarantee,
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: that somebody would say, breaking the glass at a wedding.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: That ain't no Jewish ritual. That was a pagan ritual
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: that in the Middle Ages, the rabbis tried to squelch,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: and when they couldn't, they appropriated it, and they turned
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: it into a Jewish ritual. You were talking about the baptism, okay?
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: That ain't no Christian ritual. That was a Jewish ritual
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: that was there, which is why there are two baptisms
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: for Jesus when he was still Jewish.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: Um.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: of, of using water and every, every religion has one
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: of those. Okay. So every ritual is an adapted ritual.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: The white wedding dress didn't come up until queen Victoria.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: She also invents the, you know, popularizes the wedding cake. Okay.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: And the wedding photograph and the, the wedding registry, like
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: these things are constantly evolving and in times of change,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: they evolve even more. So it's okay to honor them. And,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: and I love this expression. I talked to this woman
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: who fifth generation, uh, woman who came from a long
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: line of male Hindu pundits. And she, and she went to,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: and she had a three-day wedding, which is very common.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: Her brother had an LGBTQ, her husband had an LGBTQ
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: sibling who felt unwelcome. And she's like, we ought to
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: be able to monitor, you know, modernize this. And she says,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: in order to do it, she started something called the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: Purple Pundit Project, which does LGBTQ plus weddings. And she said,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: it's got to serve the wedding, sure, and the parent,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: but for really to work, It's got to pass what
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: she calls the auntie sniff test. The aunties have to
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: feel that it is a ritual. Like that's the, it
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: can change, but there's some element. And a new ritual,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: in order for it to work, also has to have
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: some of these universal archetypes. Made modern, made new, but
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: it has to communicate to us in the sublingual, nonverbal,
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: embodied memory of collective rituals that we have.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 4: Imagistic, right?
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: Imagistic, exactly. It has to have the tassel, the yellow rose,
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: the beer, the action that evokes the tears when you
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: don't know why you're crying.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And essentially, you know, I think we're building off feeling,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: you know, and you really say this very explicitly in
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: your incredibly readable and compelling book, which is that we're
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: celebrating things that have a lot of feeling, life events
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: of things that are welcoming or loving or renewing, rites
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: of passage of puberty and marriages and so on. These
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: are all things we all know because we feel this
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: is important. That's why people travel from everywhere to go
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: to a bar or bat mitzvah. Weddings show up to
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: say goodbye. And what are the things that can symbolize
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: this kind of event? That's the anti-test of like, sorry, no,
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: that doesn't work. But yeah, that other thing could work.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Which is why the ritual, as one death doula told me,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: which is why the ritual begins with the first conversation
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: about the ritual. When we're actually doing the planning and
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: thinking about it, that itself becomes a ritual because it's
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: connecting about what will connect us when we get into
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: the room. And to me, you know, as we reach
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: the end of our time here, it goes back to
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: what I think of as kind of as a choice
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: that we're going to face, right? It's, you know, it's
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: virtual or it's ritual, okay? It's URL or it's IRL.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: We all know that in our hearts that we've abdicated
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: our relationships for our phones. We know even more and
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: to be even sharper in the point that we have,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: you know, given over our lives to these algorithms of
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: division that are designed to drive us apart and to
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: spread hate because that will get us to spend more
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: time on these devices and these networks. and in the,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: you know, in the yoke of these algorithms. Ritual is
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: the original human algorithm, okay? It is the, you know,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: you could argue the first universal, right? Because it predates
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: us when we're human. It was the coming together and
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: taking the symbols that you have described and investing them
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: with collective meaning. It's the only thing, in a world
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: where everything is pulling us apart, it is the only
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: thing strong enough to hold us together. which is why
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: the challenge is for us. If we choose ritual, we
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: can hold ourselves together. If not, then big tech and
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: the big algorithms, we know what they are capable of doing.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: And that's before AI comes for us.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: Right. And I loved your book because I think you're right.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: And I think, as I said before, there's so many
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: things right now that are troubling at this current moment.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: But this is something I think that can make a difference.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 2: I just want to say, just a little bit more,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: I think ritual, just to kind of frame it again
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 2: from a Jungian perspective, ritual really mediates our relationship with
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: the sacred. Jung said that the telling question of a
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: person's life is whether or not they are related to
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: the infinite. And we all need to feel that relationship.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: And ritual in some sense mediates that. And you were saying,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: is it a dead cat or is it green shoots?
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's green shoots because I think we can't not.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: Jung talked about the religious function of the psyche, by
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: which he meant that we are wired to relate to
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: the transpersonal. And that echoes what David Foster Wallace said,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: that you.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 4: Can't not worship. You may not know you're worshiping, but
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 4: you're always worshiping.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: And so ritual is just kind of key to our
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: neural architecture. We sort of can't not do it, but
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: it's much, much better if we can bring some consciousness
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: to it.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: Exactly. And intentionality. Exactly.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: And I would echo that with one perhaps cautionary thought,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: which is that when, you know, why are you guys
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: doing what you're doing? Why are people in this community
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: coming to this conversation in the 2020s, you know, for
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: ideas that were first promulgated in the world, you know,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: in the 1920s or, you know, around that period 100
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: years ago, because we must always make it anew, and
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: because we must always understand that our circumstances are different
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: in some way. And to me, the cautionary note, I
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: would say, is when Jung came up with these ideas
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: in a period of incredible change in the center of Europe, okay,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: in the early 20th century, as we had gone in
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: a very rapid period of time from an agricultural economy
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: to an industrial economy to world wars, you know, in
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: all of the dislocation when these ideas, and he saw
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: through that change to, you know, to the kinds of
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: liminal space wherein we can encounter the universals that we're
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: talking about, okay? Today, we are in a world where
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: I think that we are farther removed from that liminality
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: that allows us to make connection with these human universals.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: And therefore, I think that what's going on with this
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: kind of ritual renaissance, as I call it, is it's
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: put the intentionality to create the circles, the boundaries, a
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: time outside of time where we go into these places
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: which themselves become sort of launching points for the kind
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: of time travel that we're talking about. Time travel itself
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: was an invention of the late 19th century when there
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: was a period of massive change. And so I went
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: through a change in the course of working on A
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: Time to Gather where I was obsessed with the definition
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: of of ritual, which I love and which we've geeked
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: out on here and I could do it for another hour.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: Where I end is that the problem is so big
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: now that we need what I call a ritual state
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: of mind, okay? And the commitment to wake up every
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: day and connect and reconnect with others and to create,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: to spend even more intention to blocking out the noise
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: to find the signal of the kinds of universal archetypal
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: truths that these symbols contain, which is why we have
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: to wake up and do this. Forget rites of passage.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: I call it bites of passage, right? We need these
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: little nibbles of connection.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: And that's what I think. And that's what you're doing here.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: Inviting people to a podcast, you know, you can, you don't,
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: you don't need a podcast. You can go read the book,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: but what the, what you guys are doing outside of your,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: is you're putting a conversation into the world that reminds
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: everybody you have to turn off in order the dead end,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: nodes of understanding to open yourself up. That's what this
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: is doing. This is a kind of theater and a
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: kind of ritual space, but it mirrors the larger thing
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: that we all need to do to create a ritual
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: state of mind to allow us. it ain't gonna always
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: happen in every ritual but to allow us to be
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: able to hear the symbols that are speaking to us
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: often to our own dead ears.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: That's beautiful and a perfect place to glide into a
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 3: stop and you're right we We could all go for
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 3: at least another hour. Thank you very, very much for
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: your time and what you're offering so many people.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: And Bruce, when I read your op-ed in the New
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: York Times, I thought, I want to have a conversation
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 2: with him. He would be a great guest for this.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: I was right. So thank you.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you for inviting me. Congratulations for what you're doing.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: I'm honored to be a part of it. And I
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: look forward to more conversations down the road.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: So we need to wave to each other to have
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: a goodbye ritual.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: That's a good thing. It needs to be a little silly.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: If I feel like we should do it, like we
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: should do just a wave. I think we need something new.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: We need the end of the, you know, the podcast.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 4: The end of the podcast ritual.
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 2: or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisyonginlife.com. If
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: you enjoyed this episode, give us five stars and a
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: good review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: your podcasts. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and make sure
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: to click the notification bell to be alerted whenever we
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: upload videos. And keep up with all things TJL by
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: following us on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok.