Ceremonies for Life Events

Ceremonies for Life Events and Life Transitions

Are you planning a life event - getting married, welcoming a child, saying good-bye to a loved one? Would you like to add a spiritual element to the celebrations, without a traditional church service - or maybe in addition to it?

Maybe your life event is not even usually celebrated in our culture (going abroad, retiring, becoming a parent?). You still can create a ceremony around it, to mark the occasion, honour the past and empowering the new.

We can design and facilitate a ceremony for you that connects your celebration to a deeper truth. This experience will inspire and enrich people of many faiths as well as atheists, as it is not based on Gospel, but on direct connection with Earth wisdom - the power of the elements, the gifts of the four directions of the Medicine Wheel.

Some thoughts about the power of ceremony:

Ceremonies often mark a transition; We honour what we leave behind, find closure and give space to the new.
We can express our emotions - our regrets, our sorrow, our joy. We can allow forgiveness, re-engage with our vision and find our strength. Hence, we walk into the new with a renewed sense of purpose and hope.
Ceremonies create connections: They connect individual life events to the community, to the flow of time and to the greater whole. We can stand strong in the circle and gather new energy.

How we create your Ceremony

We first have a chat with you to find out about your ideas and needs, and how the ceremony would fit into the rest of the celebrations (we do not organise full weddings, etc - just the ceremonial bit).
We will explore whether/how you would like to work with nature, the teachings of the medicine wheel, sacred rituals (candles, drums, chants, prayers, etc.).
I will then go on a Visualisation journey to find inspiration and guidance on what we need to do to make this powerful for you and your loved ones.
I will share the journey with you and we design the ceremony based on these inputs and your needs. This includes deciding what role you would like to play.

Ceremonies for all Occasions

We custom-design all ceremonies to match your needs; the following themes are just examples.

Weddings

The focus here will be on celebrating the gifts the partners bring as individuals, and the beauty of them connecting these gifts to a greater whole. The connection between the eternal feminine and masculine (which is beyond gender; it is the yin and yang of two parts coming together) might be a theme, as well as 'spreading the love' from the centre of the circle to the broader community and the world.

Baby Welcoming

Giving thanks for the wonder of life - which has given us this child - is a common theme here. The Soul of the baby is honoured and welcomed, people in the community may express their commitments to support this child - and to take care of their own inner child. The Wheel of Life might be celebrated by honouring the eldest person in the room, who has walked the path before...

Divorce - Separation

Every ending is a new beginning, and ceremony can help create healing and good energy for the new path ahead.
Starting point often is the honouring of the past and the gifts of both partners, followed by supporting the former partners to step away and into their new circles. A symbolic cutting of the cords might be part of this. Well-wishing and blessing for both former partners conclude the ceremony.

Life Transitions

Farewells, Funerals

Birthdays

Every significant step on your life journey may be worth a ceremony; moving abroad, becoming a parent, retiring, etc. These ceremonies can just be for you - or you can invite friends and family. If you have a teenage child who is coming of age, you may want to engage together in an initiation ceremony.
Examples of transition ceremonies are a sacred walk that symbolizes your life, or a fire ceremony with drum journey-meditation during the night to go into the dark and step into the morning light; the new phase of your life.

Ceremony can happen at several points in the farewell process: As part of the wake or as part of the funeral. Instead of a funeral. Before a cremation. When the ashes are spread. Or a few months later when people want to get together again.
Part of these ceremonies will always be honouring the life of the person who passed - not just with words but through stories, exhibition etc., and by bringing in the energies that the deceased person connected with; if he/she was a keen climber, we may work with rocks...

We can add a ceremony to a birthday party (for example story telling from the heart, followed by 'power drumming' for the future) or we can create a whole ceremonial event instead of a party.
One example would be to go into nature together and 'walk' the birthday person's life path in a symbolic way. Or it could be creating a medicine wheel together, with rocks and other gifts of nature that can represent the journey of the birthday person and give her/him energy and perspective for the future.

Example of a Farewell Ceremony

I was supporting a family who was saying good-bye to their father/husband/friend (named Doug). The funeral had already happened, but they wanted a more intimate and ceremonial way of saying good bye. As Doug had a strong spiritual connection to trees, we decided to plant a tree in his memory. His partner also wanted to guide his soul home and re-create balance in her house after his long illness - this was the pipe ceremony.

Tree Planting Ceremony

Planting a tree in a ceremonial way includes honouring the Spirit of the land where the tree will be planted, giving thanks to Mother Earth who will carry and protect the tree, and calling in the elements to nurture and support the tree.

A big hole was dug out and every participant added a little symbolic piece into the earth (we made sure that these were ecologically accetable). This act was followed by storytelling and giving thanks for the gifts Doug had brought to us. At the end, we added tobacco and other little gifts for Mother Earth and the Tree itself – a crystal, a sea-shell, a pinch of salt.

Sacred Pipe Ceremony

The Sacred Pipe is originally a Native American spiritual tool, but it is now used across the world to pray and meditate. It brings many gifts; one of them is connection. The joining together of the pipe bowl and the stem is a strong symbol of creating connections, of unifying separate forces: Connection between the eternal feminine and masculine, between the elements (the rock of the pipe bowl and the wood of the stem), between the people who sit in the circle to smoke the pipe, between the heaven and the earth, between the ordinary and the non-ordinary reality.

It also intensifies prayers; with every pinch of tobacco that goes into the pipe, a prayer is spoken, once the pipe is filled and lit, the prayers are carried to the spirit world through the smoke. While doing this, there is a lot of time to quietly reflect, meditate, to laugh a bit or cry…

A third wonderful gift of the pipe for life-death transition ceremonies: It can serve the deceased soul to pass over (the soul can ‘ride’ on the smoke, together with the prayers, and find the way home easily).
Prayers can also be spoken for the people who are left behind. For example, when we filled the pipe towards the direction of the South – the direction of the heart and the flow of water and emotions: we gave thanks for the great heart of Doug, acknowledging the strong energy of the midday sun reflected in his life.
At the same time, we prayed for the people left behind; so that they would dare to step into their emotions, to cry, to be authentic and real in their grief. And when time has come, that they would manage to get back into the flow of their lives - becoming part of the broader community again and not isolate in grief.

It was a good day and Doug certainly found his way home.