New Year's Re-release: Six Ways of Looking at Ritual
plus, a discount 😎
Hello friends,
I have been slowly easing back into my regular rituals since the holidays.
I thank you for your patience, for giving me the space to read, take walks, catch up with loved ones, and not write for a while.
But I am in planning mode for 2023 and spending time thinking about what sort of art, astrology, herbalism, poetry, food, mysticism musings I want to share with y’all in the coming year.
I also wanted to ask for any feedback or desires from you, gentle reader; is there a certain subject you want to learn more about? Or a particular topic you like to have me, specifically address? Share your comments on what you’d like from Recent Bedroom below!
In the meantime, I wanted to share this previously paywalled essay that is part 3rd house musing, part love letter to Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s “The Shamanic Bones of Zen”. The New Year is usually a time when we desire to make changes or shift our habits. I believe that intention, presence, and slowing down— all virtues cultivated by ritual— is an essential part to really changing your life without feeding into the productivity-obsessed capitalist trap.
How you do things matters; every moment spent present can be a portal.
May these reflections serve your 2023 and beyond.
🪩Year Ahead Sale🪩
If you want a more personalized look at what 2023 is looking like for you, my January books are open!
For the rest of the week, I am offering 25% off my year-ahead consults with the code “cozy”. This code affirms a vibe I am leading within the new year: one that allows our particulars, our ebbs and flows, our needs *and* our desires.
Spending time with your astrology for the next year often just reaffirms the goals and cycles in which you are already participating. Astrology is not something added on to your experience; you are already living it! Reaffirm exactly where you are and see where there is to go next. Snag a reading by 1/6 and get that 25% discount.
Once, a seer said to me, “You know they aren’t doing nothing but magic over there where you are.” I asked, “Where? Who?” She said, “Those people running around in black. They’re doing witchcraft and it’s dangerous the way they are doing it.” She was talking about the Zen center where I was training. I laughed but heeded the warning in my own way. I didn’t leave. I was already one of those witches, so to speak.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
I happened upon Zen on a whim. A friend, in the midst of an acid trip, mentioned a Buddhist Monastery near where we went to school. Intrigued, I carried this information with me until I faced an empty summer break and pieces of my life to rearrange. I knew nothing of what living in a monastery was like but something deep told me that seeing this whim through was crucial.
I spent a month at Great Vow Zen Monastery that summer but it took only a few hours to know I belonged. In the words of Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, “There was a memory in my bones of something old”. And despite my complete unfamiliarity with Buddhism and Zen particularly, “I saw myself sharing those teachings.”
Though Zen originated in China a thousand years ago, though I had never meditated for more than two minutes in my life, the deep home I felt there transcended my bounded Chloe identity.
Through my 8 years of subsequent practice (2 of which were spent at the monastery), the feeling has only deepened. I learned so many things from my stay but perhaps the most potent was the presence of the unseen in all moments. More importantly, it affirmed my ability to tune into this unseen world and change my life through it. I believe everyone can do the same.
As the above quote states, it became clear to me at the monastery that we were performing magic, though it was rarely discussed in such blatant terms. Zenju’s book, “The Shamanic Bones of Zen,” made this quiet part loud enough for me to want to share about my time at the monastery, hopefully to help you live more deeply into your own existence.
Though living in a monastery is certainly a 9th house activity, I learned so much about my own spirituality and daily practice that I carry with me into my lay life. My time there also points to a crucial point: any activity, from eating to going to sleep, can be a spiritual act, if we approach it with intention. Ritual is one of the best ways to bring forth the esoteric threaded into all physical things and times.
As you may recall from earlier newsletters, the Third House is how we make Spirit our own. It’s our rituals, our intuition, our ability to divine through concrete, mundane things. I want to share my experience to help you bring the divine into your everyday life.
Using my own experience and the beautiful, eloquent words of Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, I will give you tips on working with your Third House and seeing the mystical in the every day.
Read on and may all beings be supported by your attention 🙏.
Everything can be (already is) Sacred:
In her book, Manuel explains that the word “shaman,” what we generally call any spiritual leader who moves between worlds, comes from the Tungus language of ancient Mongolia. Some etymologists note that it “originates from šamán, which means ‘to know.’” (17) But this knowing “is not an intellectual process. It is to know the spirit of things, of people, of life—the nature of the unseen world behind our physical world”. Shamans, in other words, look deeply enough into their direct experience to understand it mysteries.
With the idea that everything contains a sacred spirit, we can find the divine in every place. In Zenju, Sensei’s words:
Communing and communicating with beings one has never met is shamanic activity. Making offerings to ancestors and those whom one does not know or love personally is shamanic activity. To bow in gratitude to those who have caused harm is shamanic activity. Zazen is a ritualized act that opens one’s heart to grow, expand, and connect, enabling one to hear crying, even when sitting quietly alone.
At the monastery, we perform a ritual before eating, before sitting, before work practice, before seeing the teacher. Every new activity began with a chant, a prayer, an offering of incense, a specific gesture. By adding these sacred pauses, we leave space for the divine to enter.
Anything done with an open heart and mind can be a shamanic activity, one that breaks open the unseen world.
Try finding or fashioning your own prayer before a single activity in your daily life. Now do it for a month. See where that small gesture takes you.
Practice is on behalf of all
It can be easy to underestimate the power of a single open heart and mind. You see, Zen is a form of Mahayana Buddhism, which translates to “Greater Vehicle”. This designation comes from the idea that individual liberation is only half the battle; we pay attention to awaken all beings. Similarly, “[w]e do not make offerings to ancestors for our own sake” Manuel tells us. “We make offerings for our families and communities, through our bodies. Others are inherently with us, as we would not be on the planet without them.”
An easy way to access this interconnection is gratitude rituals: give an offering to the land on which you live. Save a small bit of your meal to give to those who don’t have enough. Dedicate your morning walk to the liberation of the world.
Being present is a gift to all. Remember this when you don’t feel like your rituals are “doing anything”. Even when you can’t see the effects, ritual acts like psychic surgery, transforming you from the inside out and perhaps changing the world in turn.
Awakening Doesn’t Happen in the Mind
“In zazen, it is only through the body that awakening is revealed” explains Zenju, Sensei. You can’t use your mind’s evaluations to understand your spiritual progress, in other words. I would often enter long retreats with a grasping mind: I wanted an intellectually legible kernel of knowledge I could grab onto and parade around as evidence of my hard work. But, really, the work of ritual and contemplation does not announce itself in thoughts.
At the monastery, we recite a series of chants every day, and we chant them more with enough speed that we can’t dwell on the words. It can be tempting to try and study the chants and glean their meaning but we are usually encouraged to simply let them wash over us, letting relevant lines float to the surface at the appropriate times. We are not told what the significance of each drum beat, incense stick, or bow during our elaborate morning rituals mean because we don’t need to know to be impacted by the gestures. “Participation in a living ritual tradition reaches beyond the vagaries of the intellect to one’s somatic being,” author Sam Scharf tells us.
There have been many times during retreats that random snatches from those chants, like “a silver bowl filled with snow” or “you are not it but in truth it is you” have entered my mind, suddenly illuminated in new ways that my intellect alone couldn’t explain. Let your rituals work on you in mysterious ways, too.
Believe in magic (the only way it will show up for you!)
My dear friend Svvd shared a Psi study that basically finds: those that believe in psychic abilities find evidence for it at a much higher rate than those who don’t believe.
Similarly, us Westerners tend to like Buddhism because it “seems" more like a philosophy than a religion. Part of this is intentional erasure by our increasingly materialistic, “rational” society: “The exclusion of magical practices and powers from most discussions of Buddhism in the modern era can be seen as appropriation of Buddhism by Europeans and Americans, and also as a result of modernization movements in Asia and within Asian Buddhism.”[7]
If you believe Zen or any spiritual practice is merely placebo or only affects the mind and can’t transform your whole life, then that’s all it can do. If you are open to the mysterious and unexplainable, and make this desire explicit, then the universe and its spirits will meet you in kind.
You can do this by explicitly stating your intentions, and sticking around for the world’s answer.
Trust in Nature
Zenju tells us that “[w]e have moved away from nature—the shaman’s only source of wisdom and healing”. Nature is constantly changing but constantly cycling through the same stages. Spending time outside or in nature helps attune us to the larger world and its constant pivots. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that any knowledge we receive comes not from us but from the earth itself: “Wisdom and skills may not come through a person at all but through the earth itself, as it did for Shakyamuni Buddha.” (76). This makes gratitude or collective liberation all the more crucial; we are sending gratitude for what is also changing us.
You don’t need fancy, expensive tools or books to uncover the divine. Nature is a great avenue for exploring magic because it is already so alive and enchanted. Sitting outside in the grass or taking a walk and sticking around for downloads is a beautiful form of Third House practice.
Personal Ritual as Rebellion
All major religions, when they spread, partially erase and partially integrate the indigenous traditions of the place they invade. Or, if you are a colonizer, you take parts of an indigenous religion that works for you while discarding the rest. Foulk, in “The Denial of Ritual,” tells us that “both the idea of ritual as an identifiable type of human behavior, and the tendency to denigrate ritual activity as something that is grounded in irrational or superstitious beliefs, are products of the age of enlightenment in the West and the efforts of European intellectuals to come to grips with foreign cultures they encountered in the course of world exploration and colonial expansion.” Indeed, even the idea that ritual is something separate from your daily life is a conditioned belief.
Manuel points to this Westernizing impulse as to why American Zen has mostly been adopted by White people, and often sanitized of its shamanic potentials in the process.
Each form of a religion, when it enters a new place, contains a palimpsest for the distinct practices of that land.
Figure out what works for you. Cannibalize only the good parts of Christianity and fill the rest in with your own feral practices. But treat each thread you encounter with respect. Understand its context. Pay homage to those who have come before you and keep showing up. There is always something new to witness and to touch.
xo,
Chloe
I would love to hear your takes on the dark houses! I think angles would also be a fun topic to engage with! Also, please keeping doing dives into the fixed stars, they are always excellent. Keep up the good work this year!!