Ceremony as Medicine in an Age of Empathy Erosion, Moral Inversion, and Spiritual Starvation

Photo credit: The Edges at Holly Farm, Carmel, CA

Medicine For Our Times

We are starving for depth. For meaning. For something real.

We’re constantly connected, yet often disconnected from what truly matters. The rituals we once relied on to mark time, to tether us to each other, and to metabolize joy, grief, endings and beginnings have been flattened, commodified, diluted, or rendered irrelevant.

Traditional religion, once a container for reverence and shared moral imagination has, for many, been replaced by self-obsession, superficiality, and scrolling. In the absence of something meaningful to believe in, many people have turned to opioids, porn, gambling, influencer culture and globalizing the intifada to fill a gaping emptiness. In this climate, self-importance becomes a kind of spiritual decoy - making us more susceptible to bad ideas, harmful behaviors and dangerous ideologies.

There’s an impoverishment of the soul in western life - where we operate in silos, think only of ourselves, and believe we can live without community and belonging. Indigenous teachings remind us that these aren’t luxuries. They are foundations essential to all life.

The human psyche demands a connection to a greater whole. We need something to believe in and orient to. We need a cause, a story, an outlet. And when people lack faith in something larger, something sacred, it becomes dangerously easy to fill that longing with anything that delivers dopamine, even if it’s destructive.

We seem to be living through a profound erosion of empathy, a hollowing out of the sacred, and a slow moral bankruptcy that makes it harder and harder to know who to trust, what to believe, or how to connect.

Many of us are aching for a return to something real. And ceremony, when done well, can offer us that homecoming.

What Ceremony Can Do

I believe that ceremony has the power to transform our world. That it's an antidote to the divisiveness, pathological distraction and excruciating disconnection that defines modern life. That it's a life-giving alternative to an extractive culture that only consumes, but never reciprocates. 

“The only cure I know is a good ceremony” wrote Leslie Marmon Silko. I believe that a good ceremony is the cure. I believe that ceremony is the ultimate medicine for these times.

What Is Ceremony Anyway?

In my years as a ceremonialist, I’ve described ceremony in a thousand different ways. If I had to distill it, I’d say: ceremony is an animating force that reconnects us to what matters.

Ceremonies mark life’s turning points, reminding us that we are not alone, not adrift, but part of something vast, ancient, and ongoing. Ceremonies don’t merely witness change, they shape it - transforming fleeting moments into potent opportunities to witness, bless, reconcile, and renew.

I didn’t learn about ceremony in a single weekend workshop. I learned it by saying yes, again and again, to the winding path of initiation and apprenticeship. By immersing myself in cross-cultural spiritual studies. By sitting in countless ceremonies with medicine women, indigenous elders, and wisdom keepers over many years. I am forever grateful to them for shaping how I approach ceremony: not as performance, not as product, but as a living, breathing art form.

My Orientation & Approach

My work is a quiet rebellion against the flatness of wedding industry culture. I believe ceremonies should feel like soul events, not line items or transactions. I care far less about timelines and trends than I do about how we mark and metabolize change. I'm here to help couples envision a ceremony that pulses at the center of the day and continues to ripple long after it. Botany, archetypal psychology, indigenous wisdom, astronomy and mytho-poetry all inform my approach.

I look to the more-than-human world for models of resilience and renewal. I study how ecosystems harmonize and adapt. These natural systems remind me that love - like nature - thrives through diversity, creativity, attunement, and deep relational intelligence.

I turn to mystics, poets, and indigenous wisdom for guidance about how to be with mystery and liminality - how to stand in betwixt-and-between spaces with grace and surrender, and honor the rare, handful-in-a-lifetime threshold moments we get to experience during our brief time on earth.

I look to the heavens for perspective. The stars help me remember the miracle of existence - that we are here, alive, on a spinning rock warmed by a distant sun, with hearts that beat and eyes that can behold beauty. They remind me how improbable our existence is, how vast the cosmos is, and how small we are. This resets me. It stretches my perspective past the confines of the personal and into something infinite. The stars return me to awe, and give me a way to recalibrate wonder in a world that can get bogged down with tedium and pettiness and mundanity.

Cumulatively these disciplines and approaches help me contemplate, generate and transmit reverence, wonder and awe, unity consciousness, and open-minded, pure-hearted presence, especially during big moments of transition and uncertainty.

To Make Holy

At the heart of my work is a deep commitment to re-sanctify what has been degraded, commodified, and emptied of Mystery - to infuse ceremonies with meaning, and to create rituals that leave a visceral, psychic, and emotional imprint.

While I am not part of a specific religious lineage, the ones standing behind and beside me are a miraculous mix of luminaries, shamans, botanists, depth psychologists, cantadoras, mystics, poets and wisdom keepers. They have shaped my worldview and my ministerial work in profound ways. You can check out a curated list of their most powerful offerings here.

A Life-Giving Alternative

When I speak about ceremony, I’m not talking about the spiritually shallow, overly-curated spectacles, or overly casual non-events, that we’ve come to accept as normal. I’m talking about a life-giving alternative to hollow, empty ritual.

I’m talking about what Francis Weller meant when he wrote: “What ritual and community and the sacred do is stitch the tears in that code of belonging and then we come back into a sense of participation and intimacy with the larger life.”

I’m talking about the kind of ceremony that reminds us what it means to belong - not just to each other, but to the watersheds, the root systems, the ancestors, and the unborn. A ceremony that lives inside an older memory, where the world is alive, ensouled, and listening.

For our ancestors, ceremony wasn’t all pomp and performance. It was a way of being in right relationship with all of life. A way to express grief, offer praise, make beauty, and stay accountable to the whole. We don’t need to return to organized religion to return to this ethos/ethics. But we do need to remember our place in the web of life.

This is not nostalgia for a time gone by. This is medicine for what ails us here and now.

In an age of collapse and forgetting, remembering how to mark moments with reverence, clarity and power is one way to return to the living fabric we were never meant to leave.