Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
00:00:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
00:00:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
00:00:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
00:00:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s get started.
00:01:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
I am so excited to talk about ritual and ceremony today.
00:01:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
So here at the Coaching Revolution podcast and inside of my entire business at Applied Depth Institute, we get off the beaten path of traditional coaching.
00:01:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
We certainly learn and master
00:01:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
a lot of aspects of traditional coaching, but really what we’re doing here is bigger, different, and sometimes outside of the box in so many different ways.
00:01:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And for today’s episode, it’s included in that because ceremony and ritual are not traditionally talked about inside of
00:02:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
coach trainings.
00:02:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re not necessarily really done so much inside of coaching sessions.
00:02:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I will tell you, ritual and ceremony are 100% embedded into Applied Depth Institute, into Sacred Depths coaching, and honestly into really everything that I do.
00:02:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in some ways,
00:02:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual and ceremony is at the heart of why I’m able to go so deep and be so transformational in my one-on-one work and in my group work, whether I’m actually leading ritual or whether principles of ritual are informing the work that we do.
00:02:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:02:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is truly, ritual and ceremony are truly one of my favorite, favorite things to teach about, to train on, and also to do, not just with clients, but also with myself.
00:03:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual and ceremony in so many different ways are woven through my life.
00:03:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I also do them with my kids.
00:03:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
My teenager these days, not so much.
00:03:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s kind of too cool for school, but with my younger one, Yael, she’s still really into it.
00:03:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I really believe that ritual is one of the most powerful coaching, healing, and facilitation tools that you can have for your clients and for yourself.
00:03:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I say this, and I kind of stand by this,
00:03:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
because of the powerful impact that I’ve observed that ritual has had for my clients, in my groups, and on myself, both in terms of short-term shifts and breakthroughs, as well as long-term transformation and results.
00:04:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
I also say that ritual is one of the most powerful coaching, healing, and facilitation tools you can have, not just from what I’ve observed, not just anecdotally, but also because there’s a ton of scientific and neuroscience research that provides evidence of how powerful ceremonies can be.
00:04:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll just name a few things right now.
00:04:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
So studies have shown that ceremony, that ritual, have impact on emotional regulation.
00:04:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Rituals can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, and then that leads to a state of calm.
00:04:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
It reduces stress hormones.
00:05:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ceremonies and ritual can offer a structured way for people to process emotions
00:05:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
and even difficult ones like grief.
00:05:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s why there are so many funeral rites across so many different cultures.
00:05:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Research has shown that ceremony and ritual can positively impact focus and attention, that the structured nature of ceremonies
00:05:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
can improve focus and concentration by calming the mind.
00:05:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Research has shown that they have positive impact on social connection, that engaging in communal or group rituals can increase levels of social bonding and the bonding hormone oxytocin.
00:05:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then that fosters even more of a sense of community and belonging.
00:05:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Research has shown that ceremony and ritual
00:06:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
activates dopamine release.
00:06:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
And dopamine, if you know, is associated with the feelings of pleasure and satisfaction and motivation.
00:06:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then ceremonies also signal to the brain that a significant or a transformational event is occurring.
00:06:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then that affects the brain’s interpretation of the situation.
00:06:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
So anecdotally, I’ve witnessed, I’ve experienced the power of ritual and ceremony, and also research shows the power of ritual and ceremony.
00:06:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I really, one of the things that I advocate for is to bring more of this or pieces of this
00:06:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
more into our coaching work, our one-on-one and our group work.
00:06:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, we could spend many, many months on this topic, but we’re going to just toe dip today.
00:07:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I do spend a full four days on ritual and ceremony and group facilitation.
00:07:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
in my training called Into the Depths.
00:07:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s 4 days that are in person here in Charlotte because it really is best to learn about ritual, ceremony, and crafting experiential exercises.
00:07:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s best to learn it in person because of how experiential and dynamic it is.
00:07:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
I only offer Into the Depths.
00:07:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
once every three years or so.
00:07:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
The next one is happening in just a few months in December 2025 at the beginning of the month.
00:07:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we have just a few spots left.
00:07:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if this is something that interests you, I’ll drop a link in the show notes.
00:08:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so let’s start here.
00:08:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I want to just share briefly how I
00:08:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
came to be a ritualist.
00:08:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
I do consider myself to be a ritualist.
00:08:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it’s been a journey for sure.
00:08:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
Without realizing it, actually started from when I was a little girl.
00:08:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
and my family observed many Jewish traditions and a lot of the traditions in Judaism are really rich with ceremony and ritual and I just loved them.
00:08:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just have that has been
00:08:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
one of my favorite parts of the culture since I was a little girl.
00:09:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just really connected to ritual.
00:09:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
But from there, when I was in my mid-20s, I was living in New York City on the Upper East Side.
00:09:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s really when I more deeply stepped in to all of this and stepped into all of this in a little bit more of a formal way.
00:09:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it started with one day I was in my studio apartment and I was leafing through a brochure from an organization that was in the West Village called the Open Center.
00:09:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
The Open Center had been
00:09:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
in Manhattan for a really long time.
00:09:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Lots of different meditation classes, philosophy classes, visualization classes, journaling classes, that sort of thing.
00:10:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I was flipping through the brochure and I came upon a blurb for a course that was going to be offered there.
00:10:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the name of the course was called Woman Ritual.
00:10:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I don’t know, it caught my attention.
00:10:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I said, well, let me read the blurb.
00:10:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I honestly don’t remember the words.
00:10:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t remember exactly what the blurb said.
00:10:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
But what I do remember was that when I read this description of this ritual course,
00:10:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it spoke about how women in particular had been the keepers of ritual for millennia across so many different cultures.
00:10:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
There was just something about this description that reminded me of something I knew when I was a little girl, but
00:11:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
I had kind of forgotten.
00:11:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
I had kind of temporary loss, temporarily lost.
00:11:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it was that the world is a magical place.
00:11:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s more than just the surface.
00:11:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s more than meets the eye.
00:11:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that we as human beings are connected to that magic.
00:11:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that was enough for me
00:11:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
to decide to take this course at the Open Center, which by the way, I was in my mid-20s then and I was working at a museum and I was making very little money.
00:11:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t even think I was making $30,000 at the time.
00:11:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was in the year, it was 99, maybe 1999.
00:12:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway, I bring this up because I
00:12:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think the course, the woman ritual course was, I don’t know, maybe it was like $200 for six weeks or something like that.
00:12:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
was a big investment for me at the time.
00:12:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
I was, you know, paying rent on a studio on the Upper East Side.
00:12:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Money was tight, but this, there was something about this that just called to me so deeply that I was willing to make that investment.
00:12:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
I taught, I took this six week course.
00:12:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was taught by a woman named Susan Mary Hellerer, who I really consider as one of my, now as one of my first mentors.
00:12:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
And those six weeks opened up so much for me.
00:12:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
I learned so much and I felt so connected.
00:12:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
to ritual to women’s circles and a lot of ideas about the Wheel of the Year were woven through it.
00:13:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I connected so deeply to it.
00:13:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
I resonated so much with it that I went on to become an apprentice with Susan Mary and I apprenticed in her community for a number of years.
00:13:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
set up before all of the rituals and the women’s circles cleaned up after all of the circles.
00:13:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was a lot.
00:13:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
I learned A lot.
00:13:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was incredible.
00:13:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then from there, I went on to lead women’s circles.
00:13:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And, I won’t get too much into my story with this and my journey with this right now, but just to give you some idea and some examples, I went on to lead these women’s circles that were related to the wheel of the year or the wheel of the month.
00:13:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I would lead new moon ceremonies and full moon ceremonies.
00:14:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then
00:14:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
different ones related to the wheel of the year.
00:14:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
So for example, I would lead winter solstice ceremonies where we would use the metaphor of the longest night of the year and the shortest day of the year.
00:14:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
And inside of that, the concept that it’s important in life sometimes to be in the darkness, to be in the mystery, to be in the silence, the not knowing, et cetera, and then find that spark, the winter solstice, kind of like the spark.
00:14:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I led lots of
00:14:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
circles and rituals along those lines, lots of circles and rituals related to women’s development and leadership, queen ceremonies, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then along the way, I also became a celebrant.
00:14:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I became a legal wedding officiant because
00:14:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
At least at the time, I’m not sure if it’s still true for New York City.
00:15:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
It wasn’t that anyone could officiate a wedding legally in New York City.
00:15:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
You needed to kind of go through hoops to become a legal wedding officiant.
00:15:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I became a celebrant.
00:15:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
I did weddings, I did funeral rituals, baby blessing rituals, house blessings, ceremony.
00:15:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
ceremonies and lots of other rites of passage, circles and ceremonies.
00:15:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I did all of this even before I became a coach.
00:15:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And all of this, as I said earlier, it really informs so much of my coaching.
00:15:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I bring ritual or elements of ritual or philosophies of ritual into my one-on-one coaching, into my groups.
00:16:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
It makes all of it so much more powerful.
00:16:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
And one of the many reasons that ritual and ceremony are so powerful are because
00:16:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
They allow you to tap into the cognitive level of learning and processing.
00:16:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
So they activate the intellect.
00:16:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual also allows you to tap into the emotional level of learning and processing.
00:16:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
So it allows you to activate the heart, emotion,
00:16:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual allows you to tap into the spirit level of learning and processing.
00:16:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
It activates a connection to something bigger than the ego.
00:16:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And ritual also allows you to tap into the somatic or the body level of learning and processing.
00:17:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the thing that’s so incredible about ritual is that all at once,
00:17:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
In a well-crafted ritual, you are tapping into all of those four levels of learning and processing, the cognitive, the emotional, the spiritual, and the somatic.
00:17:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
It really, ritual really poises you and your clients for deeper embodiment and integration of breakthroughs and new awarenesses and outer action.
00:17:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
As an aside,
00:17:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
We want to be activating the four levels of learning and processing in all of our coaching work, whether we’re doing ritual or we’re not doing ritual.
00:17:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you want to learn more about the four levels and how they can apply to your client work, go to podcast episode #3.
00:18:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
I did a whole podcast episode on those four levels of learning and processing.
00:18:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
processing.
00:18:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
I often say that ritual and ceremony were the original embodiment and somatic work.
00:18:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
That was like, this is ancient and it’s the original embodiment and somatic work.
00:18:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And of course, there’s that deep connection to the spiritual
00:18:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
that happens during ritual and ceremony.
00:18:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s why so many religions use ritual and ceremony inside of their services, right?
00:18:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s an energy also inside of a really well-held ritual containers
00:18:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
that activate a connection to the divine or to something larger than the ego.
00:19:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, when I say ritual, a couple of things.
00:19:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
So first of all, inside of this episode,
00:19:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m using ritual, the terms or the terminology, ritual and ceremony interchangeably.
00:19:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m not really inside of this podcast episode making a difference between ritual and ceremony.
00:19:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
That being said, you know, when we go deep into it, there is a little bit of a difference between ritual and ceremony.
00:19:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re absolutely related in many, many ways.
00:19:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
and a ritual can be a ceremony, vice versa.
00:19:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual is, though, if we just want to lightly kind of make a distinction right now, ritual is something ritualized.
00:20:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
It happens in a particular way consistently.
00:20:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
A ceremony can be a one-time thing.
00:20:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Also, what we’re talking about here,
00:20:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this is really important.
00:20:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
When I say using ritual inside of your client work, your group work, I don’t mean that you’re using any pre-created rituals, any canned rituals.
00:20:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
What we’re talking about here is
00:20:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
ritual that is created by you and or you and your client co-create them together and tailor them 110% to your clients or your group’s needs.
00:21:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Along those lines, I also want to be clear that when I use ritual and teach coaches and practitioners to use ritual, we are not appropriating sacred ceremonies from cultures that aren’t ours.
00:21:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
So
00:21:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s a lot of really good information about cultural appropriation of ritual online.
00:21:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll drop some resources in the show notes on this.
00:21:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I make a point of this, even in this podcast episode where it’s not a training, it’s important to say because
00:21:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
A lot of, I’m going to call them new age or spiritual, whatever it is, practitioners have really stolen from other cultures.
00:22:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we don’t want to do that when we create ritual.
00:22:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, of course, use elements from your own cultural or religious legacy, or if you’re working with
00:22:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
a client from your clients and create your own.
00:22:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s so much about the co-creation, what we’re talking about here today.
00:22:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s so many ways that ritual can look inside of your client work.
00:22:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And inside of one-on-one work, if you’re skilled and masterful at ritual,
00:22:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
You might either do a ritual inside of a client session with a client, and most likely you’ll have prepared the ritual beforehand together.
00:23:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes you might just create a ritual on the sly inside of a session.
00:23:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
In one-on-one work, you might also co-create a ritual with a client, and then they go off and do it on their own in between sessions.
00:23:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I also, as I’ve said, I love to use rituals inside of my group work as well.
00:23:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
What you’ll see as we continue on with this episode is that no matter what your expertise is, no matter what types of clients you work with, no matter if you work on Zoom or in person or even on the phone,
00:23:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
I have absolutely led ritual on the phone one-on-one or on bridge line.
00:23:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
I was one of those, I was just telling this to some friends of mine who are coaches.
00:24:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
We were out to dinner the other night.
00:24:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
I was one of the last holds out, hold outs to move from those conference bridge lines when I taught classes or led rituals.
00:24:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
to Zoom.
00:24:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I can attest you can even do ritual on the phone.
00:24:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway, it doesn’t matter what your expertise is.
00:24:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
It doesn’t matter what types of clients you work with.
00:24:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
It doesn’t matter what your curriculum is.
00:24:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
No matter what it is, you can use ritual and it’ll make the work more effective, more engaging,
00:24:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
more transformational.
00:24:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
It really is for all different kinds of work.
00:24:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll just give a few examples right now for you to think about.
00:24:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you are working with a client and they are moving through a divorce, let’s say you’re a relationship coach, you can create a ritual to be able to release
00:25:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
what your client might be clinging on to from the marriage or old definitions of their relationship.
00:25:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can create a ritual to support your client to move out of a pattern where they’re holding back from new love.
00:25:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or let’s say you’re a business coach and you have a client that’s starting a new business, let’s say,
00:25:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can work with them to create a ritual to embody the vision of their new business, to be able to set strong foundations for the new business, to activate more inspiration and motivation.
00:25:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
That ritual can also help you and your client work more deeply through your client’s limiting beliefs, ones that are holding them back from starting a new business.
00:26:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Here are some other examples.
00:26:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can create a ceremony to help a client release unhelpful habits.
00:26:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
For example, codependence with a sibling or overworking.
00:26:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can use ritual to support a client to really own and embody forward movement that they’re making, that they’ve worked on.
00:26:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe you’ve worked with your client and they’re much more confident in themselves.
00:26:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can create a ritual around that to embody that more deeply.
00:26:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe you’ve worked with a client and they’ve finally raised their rates.
00:26:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can create a ritual to honor and own that more deeply.
00:26:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you can even use ritual inside
00:26:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
of corporate culture.
00:26:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can use ritual to help a team level up their agreements or level up the team environment.
00:27:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can use ritual if, let’s say, a client of yours is stepping into a new role.
00:27:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
in the organization and you can, ritual can help them feel more grounded inside of it, more confident inside of it.
00:27:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you’re saying to yourself as you’re listening to me, let’s check what I’m talking about.
00:27:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is way too woo.
00:27:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
for corporate culture.
00:27:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
It might be for some, I’m not saying, every single corporation or CEO that you work with or team leader that you work with is going to be into this.
00:27:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
But what I will say is there actually has been research to back up that ritual is powerful even inside of
00:28:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
the corporate culture.
00:28:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it has been shown that simple business rituals can increase oxytocin levels, promote stronger team cohesion, do so much.
00:28:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, I just gave a sliver of examples of types of scenarios that you can use ritual in.
00:28:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
I mean,
00:28:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
Honestly, the possibilities are endless.
00:28:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is one of the things that I love about ritual.
00:28:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is so, versatile.
00:28:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Well, one thing I want you to know is that, and I know it goes without saying, but still it’s important.
00:28:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ritual alone isn’t going to help create these changes that I’ve been talking about, right?
00:29:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
Embodying the vision of a new business.
00:29:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
helping to let go of things that you’re clinging from an old marriage, et cetera, et cetera.
00:29:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
The ritual or the ceremony will most likely come after you’ve done other work that’s related with your client.
00:29:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
So you’re not going to
00:29:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
create and do the ritual or the ceremony at the start of the work, you’re most likely going to do it towards the end of the work.
00:29:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
It might be after a session or more likely a number of sessions that
00:29:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
maybe support the client to befriend fears on the topic that you’re working on, or rewire unhelpful thought patterns on the topic you’re working on, or do visioning work on the topic you’re working on.
00:30:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
After that, the ceremony, right?
00:30:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
The ceremony is often most effective once inner and outer movements have started to take place.
00:30:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
So for example,
00:30:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
A ritual to release codependence with a parent will most likely, in your work with a client, come after the two of you have done deep work around your client’s fear of isolation if they set boundaries.
00:30:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then the ritual after you’ve done that deep work
00:30:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
will help to really integrate all of the learning and forward movement that has happened already.
00:30:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or the ritual to help your client claim that they’re ready to be more visible in their business.
00:31:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
The ritual will most likely come after the two of you have done deep work, probably over some time around
00:31:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
your client finally really believing that they’re good enough.
00:31:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or after you’ve done deep work over time around your client working through the fear of being seen.
00:31:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then the ritual through symbol and metaphor and maybe archetypal energy will integrate all of the learning and forward movement that has already happened.
00:31:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
And, I’ll also share, so even all the years, for example, that I officiated weddings, I loved to officiate weddings.
00:32:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
I always used to tell couples when I started working together with them in advance of the wedding, you know, I would say, we want to create a ceremony whereby
00:32:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
you feel like something changes on the altar, where you walk away from the altar different than how you walked to it, where you walk away from it in deeper union.
00:32:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway, I’m bringing this up because of this idea of pre-work, of the idea that the ceremony, the ritual,
00:32:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
comes, it works best after preparation has been done.
00:32:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
So in the case of weddings, I would work with couples over time, over a number of months, sometimes shorter if they called me last minute for the first time, but we’d at least have a few sessions where we would work together on what does marriage mean to them?
00:33:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
What are the values?
00:33:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
that they want to bring in to this union?
00:33:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
what are they scared of?
00:33:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
What are they leaving behind?
00:33:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
What are their hopes and dreams?
00:33:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
What kind of household do they want?
00:33:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
What are some issues where they can still work through things?
00:33:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
We did all this pre-work, as well as prepping together what the ceremony would look like.
00:33:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
So that by the time the ceremony came, they had already done so much work around their relationship and what this coming together and this new creation, this new birth, right?
00:34:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
This really, they were birthing this next iteration of their relationship.
00:34:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
You know, we’d already done so much work on that together that the ceremony meant even more.
00:34:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
even for birthday rituals.
00:34:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you’ve been listening to the podcast, I’ve shared about rituals that I do on my birthday every year.
00:34:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Before I get to the actual ceremony part, the actual ritual part, the metaphoric part, I’m doing pre-work, journaling work, visioning work to get there, right?
00:34:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
So something to think about.
00:34:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
So let’s take a step back for a moment and I want to share a couple of my definitions of what ritual is and a couple of foundational philosophies around ritual that
00:35:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
I think will be really helpful for you as you consider all of this for your own work.
00:35:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
So the first is ritual is taking an action in order to make the intangible tangible.
00:35:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
taking an action in order to make the intangible tangible.
00:35:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And when we do this, when we take this action and we make an intangible feeling, idea, intention, et cetera, tangible through the object, right, that we’re taking the action on, it signals to the psyche
00:36:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
that we mean business.
00:36:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
It signals to the psyche that this is something important, that something important is happening here.
00:36:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
So inside of popular culture and religion, we have lots of different rituals.
00:36:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m going to give some examples of how they make the intangible tangible.
00:36:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
lighting and then blowing out birthday candles, right?
00:36:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
We make a wish, something intangible, a desire for ourselves, a wish or a desire for the year.
00:36:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the blowing out of the flame is taking that wish and turning it into a tangible thing.
00:36:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Here’s another example.
00:36:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
Graduations are ceremonies, right?
00:36:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
there’s the giving of the diploma, but let’s focus on the moving the tassel, right?
00:37:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of the very last things that happens in a graduation ceremony, which marks the end of, you know, a series of education and then moving on, right, is
00:37:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
you move the tassel on the graduation hat from one side to the other, that is making the intangible that we’re moving from one way of being to another.
00:37:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
We’re moving from this education on to the next place, right?
00:37:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s making the intangible tangible by moving the tassel.
00:37:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
When we throw a penny in a fountain, that’s a ritual, right?
00:37:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
We make a wish on the penny, a tangible thing, we throw it into the fountain.
00:37:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Ribbon cuttings for new business.
00:37:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s the cutting of the ribbon symbolizes the birth and the opening of a new business.
00:38:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
Baptisms.
00:38:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
make the intangible tangible with water.
00:38:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of the many rituals we have inside of Judaism is dipping an apple in honey for a sweet new year, right?
00:38:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
So the desire is to have a really sweet new year and it gets symbolized.
00:38:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
We make the intangible tangible by dipping an apple in honey
00:38:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
and eating it.
00:38:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And at my Rosh Hashanah table, the New Year’s table, for years now, we’ve kind of added on to that ritual.
00:38:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
Everybody has a turn.
00:38:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
They go around the table.
00:38:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
They say one sweet thing that they would like for the new year.
00:38:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then they dip the apple in the honey and eat it and just savor the sweet taste.
00:38:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then beyond all of that, I could give so many other examples of how ritual makes the intangible tangible.
00:39:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes some divorce rituals might include burning the marriage mattress, right?
00:39:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s a big way of making the intangible tangible.
00:39:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ve led rituals where with the women in the room,
00:39:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
We’ve created almost like a human birth canal to birth a new idea, a new vision, a new part of ourselves.
00:39:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
We can have ceremonies that ritually cleanse us of certain things we’re ashamed of or that feeling of shame, et cetera, et cetera.
00:39:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
Please don’t underestimate how powerful this concept is.
00:40:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
So as we’ve seen, making the intangible tangible has been woven into different cultural and religious rituals for a very long time because they do something.
00:40:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
They speak to the psyche.
00:40:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
There is something about
00:40:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
the language of the symbol and metaphor and taking action with symbol and metaphor that really activates so much.
00:40:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so that leads me to my next piece around ritual is, and I learned this,
00:40:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
from Susan Mary Heller, who I mentioned before, she always used to say, ritual is sacred play.
00:40:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the first time she said that, I didn’t totally understand what she meant.
00:41:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
I didn’t really get it, but I came to understand pretty quickly, when we take these ritual actions,
00:41:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
to make the intangible tangible, we are playing ourselves into our next evolution of being.
00:41:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s very similar to the ways that children play, right?
00:41:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
Children play house as an example.
00:41:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s
00:41:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
almost ritual.
00:41:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s making the intangible tangible, this kind of play, this learning about relationship, learning about responsibility, etc.
00:41:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
Another thing that I love about ritual and that we want to remember when we create or co-create rituals or ceremony is that
00:42:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s an opportunity for us to create sacred space.
00:42:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Don’t underestimate the importance for yourself, for your clients to have container, have space that feels sacred, that feels
00:42:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
different from the mundane.
00:42:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
When we have sacred space, we feel more connected to ourselves.
00:42:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
We feel more connected to others.
00:42:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
We feel more connected to spirit.
00:42:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
However we’re going to define spirit, it doesn’t have to be about God or in a religious sense at all.
00:43:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
It could be higher power, inner wisdom, nature, etc.
00:43:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
and even for myself, I’ve been creating sacred space consciously for over 25 years, since my mid-20s.
00:43:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even for me, it is sometimes easy to give this short shift.
00:43:28 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s sometimes easy to just get busy with life and skip over making sacred space, not make the time for it.
00:43:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And yet it’s so vital for our psyches and for our bodies and for our ability to make meaning.
00:43:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
And going back to all of the research that I shared earlier.
00:43:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Another way that I understand ritual is that it’s an opportunity to mark an important moment.
00:44:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
and work through transition.
00:44:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
And this can be solo.
00:44:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
So marking an important moment or working through a transition solo, or it can be inside of community.
00:44:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
So, okay, what do I mean by this?
00:44:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Transitions
00:44:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
are a crossing of some sort of threshold or a change in status, whether that change of status is outer or inner.
00:44:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
Transition is about moving from one way of being to another way of being, crossing a chasm of some sort.
00:44:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
00:45:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just believe it’s so important to prepare for these transitions and or to mark these transitions or else they end up going unnoticed and then we don’t get to honor them or celebrate them or learn the lessons from them or really own those transitions.
00:45:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
And rituals can help us with all of that.
00:45:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we obviously see some of this in popular culture, transitions, rituals around transition, whether it’s a funeral, wedding, graduation, right?
00:45:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
All of those are transitions.
00:45:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
But actually, so many coaches and transformational practitioners lead their clients and their groups through transition.
00:45:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Changing jobs or careers or getting promotions, that’s transition.
00:46:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Finding love or leaving a romantic relationship or a familial relationship or a business partnership, that’s transition.
00:46:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Starting a business, ending a business, pivoting a business, moving from a business looking one way to another, changing rates, et cetera.
00:46:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
Those are transitions.
00:46:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
getting healthier, balancing hormone, going from unbalanced hormones to balanced hormones, moving into motherhood or perimenopause, right?
00:46:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Those are all transitions in health and times of life.
00:46:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Transitions from chaos around money to organization around money.
00:46:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
We can see moving out of a lifelong habit of overworking into knowing how to create more space in your life as a transition.
00:47:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
We can see shifting out of a belief like I’m not good enough to a belief of I am good enough as a transition.
00:47:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
We can see starting new habits like a yoga practice as a transition.
00:47:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:47:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you’re a coach of any sort, chances are you’re doing the work of transitions.
00:47:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you’re doing the work of transitions, ritual is a rich way and a powerful way to mark those transitions and to prepare for those.
00:47:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
transitions.
00:47:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I guess just one other foundational thing right now to share around ritual that I think will be helpful for you is that while we do have the birthday candles and the graduations and all of that and culture and all of that is really wonderful, I also really feel
00:48:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
that we don’t have enough ritual in our lives and embedded into our culture.
00:48:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And culture has become a bit devoid of sacred space, a bit devoid of ritual.
00:48:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that gap, it contributes
00:48:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
I believe, to a communal lack of connection, to lack of meaning, to lack of feeling connected to self, to spirit, to community.
00:49:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
And ritual is, I think, an opportunity to support us personally
00:49:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
communally to do less sleepwalking through our lives and to have more presence in our lives.
00:49:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s a way to activate love and compassion and so much more.
00:49:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I really see it as a gift.
00:49:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
I often say before there was therapy, there was religion,
00:49:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
And before there was religion, organized religion, there was a ritual.
00:50:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
All right.
00:50:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
So we’ve already looked at a lot today, even though we’re actually just skimming the surface when it comes to ritual.
00:50:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
We haven’t really gotten into specific
00:50:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
ritual strategies, how to hold ritual, how to create ritual, how to hold space for it.
00:50:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I do hope what I have shared has provided inspiration, ideas, you know, it’s creating some brainstorming.
00:50:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I want to give you some questions that you can ask yourself to help you get started when it comes to working with ritual.
00:50:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
or to go deeper.
00:50:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
So first of all, to know, in order to know, is my client in a place where ritual would be valuable, you might want to ask one of the following questions.
00:51:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
What is a transition, inner or outer, that my client is currently going through that would be valuable and meaningful to Mark?
00:51:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or what is something that my client is initiating on the inner or outer levels that would be valuable to mark or to process more deeply or to embody or to integrate?
00:51:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or what is something that my client is releasing either on the outer or the inner level?
00:51:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or what is something that my client is ready to honor or own
00:51:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
either on the outer level or the inner level, that would be valuable to mark or to process more deeply or to embody more or to integrate more.
00:51:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you can think about this also with groups that you lead, right?
00:51:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is it something that the entire group is initiating, like a commitment to be more visible, as an example?
00:52:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
That might be an opportunity to create a ritual around.
00:52:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then from there, next question to kind of get you a little bit deeper into it, what are some things, some objects, some symbols that might symbolically represent these events or these transitions?
00:52:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
and then start to create the ritual actions based on that.
00:52:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I want to put a little bit of a plug in for Into the Depths.
00:52:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
As I said earlier, it is 4 days in person here in Charlotte.
00:52:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is some of the deepest personal work.
00:53:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
that you will ever do if you are feeling called to do archetypal energy work and religious work and ceremonial work, if you are called to go deeper into your processing of the archetypal energies of the maiden, the mother, the queen, the crone, if you are feeling called to do experiential work with your groups,
00:53:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
in person and online, if you are feeling called to learn how to facilitate your groups with more skill and mastery and gravitas, to know how to really create and hold containers where alchemy can happen and deep, deep learning and transformation can happen.
00:53:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you want to
00:53:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
do some inner work around your value, your worth, your willingness to be seen, your ability to stick to your goals, then please consider joining us for Into the Depths.
00:54:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
There’s just a few spots left.
00:54:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is
00:54:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m not being dramatic when I say this.
00:54:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is life-changing work, not just for your business and your client work, but for you.
00:54:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t offer it very often.
00:54:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it’s really amazing.
00:54:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of the bonuses for Into the Depths is curriculum lab.
00:54:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
So we meet in person for four days in December.
00:54:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then in January, February, we meet online for you to step by step develop your thought leadership, your curriculum, and your program.
00:55:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’m there not only to train you how to develop your own work and teach you all of it, but I’m also there to give you feedback on your course, on your workshop, on your program, on your retreat, whatever you’re working on as you move through it.
00:55:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’ll drop the link into the show notes.
00:55:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
And just thank you for, as always, for your presence and for listening.
00:55:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
I hope that you enjoyed the episode today.
00:55:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you have any friends or colleagues that would love this and value this, please share this episode with them.
00:55:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll see you next time.
00:56:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
The.
