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Traditional religion, once a container for reverence and shared moral imagination has, for many, been replaced by self-obsession, superficiality, and scrolling.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.
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 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, biomimicry, archetypal psychology, Indigenous wisdom, 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 look to mystics, poets and Indigenous elders for guidance about how to be with liminality, how to stand in betwixt-and-between thresholdy places with surrender and grace, and how to make the most of these precious, handful-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
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, and wisdom keepers. They have shaped my worldview and my ministerial work in profound ways. Below is a curated list of some of their most powerful offerings.
Please note there are some affiliate links in this post.
Malidoma Patrice Somé
📘 Ritual: Power, Healing and Community
📘 Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
Sobonfu Somé
📘 The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationship
Janine Benyus
📘 Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
Martin Prechtel
📘 The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
📘 Long Life, Honey in the Heart
📘 Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village
💿 Grief and Praise Lecture
Stephen Jenkinson
📘 Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble
📘 Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
Francis Weller
📘 The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
📘 Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother's Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul
📘 Mother Night: Myths, Stories and Teachings for Learning to See in the Dark
John O’Donohue
📘 To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
📘 Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
🎧 The Inner Landscape of Beauty - On Being podcast
Michael Meade
📘 Awakening the Soul
David Whyte
🎧 Seeking Language Large Enough - On Being podcast
📘 Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Robin Wall Kimmerer
📘 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Tyson Yunkaporta
📘 Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Gregory Orr
🎧 Shaping Grief With Language - On Being podcast
📘 Poetry as Survival (The Life of Poetry: Poets on Their Art and Craft)
Joshua Michael Schrei
🎧 The Emerald Podcast
Jeff Chu
🎧 A Life of Holy Curiosity - In Friendship with Rachel Held Evans
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. We only need to remember our place in the web of things.
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, care and clarity may be a way to return to the living fabric we were never meant to leave.