You are most likely performing a ritual often, every single day, and you don’t even know it yet

iRitual vs. Ceremony – What’s the Difference?

  • Ceremony is the container — a larger sacred event that marks a threshold (e.g. a wedding, a funeral, a seasonal gathering).

  • Ritual is the action within the ceremony — symbolic movements or offerings (e.g. lighting a candle, chanting a mantra, pouring water, burning paper).

Think of a ceremony as the sacred theatre, and ritual as the acts that move the soul through the play.

Rituals can also exist on their own — daily, personal, simple. Not every ritual needs to be part of a full ceremony.

Ritual

A ritual is a specific set of actions performed in a structured, intentional, and often repetitive way to create meaning, transformation, or connection (spiritual, emotional, energetic) (your morning coffee, your route to get freshly baked bread every Wednesday)

  • Usually personal or small-scale

  • Can be part of a ceremony

  • Often practiced regularly (daily, weekly, etc.)

  • Focused on inner transformation or energetic alignment

Examples:

  • Lighting a candle and setting intentions every morning

  • Smudging or cleansing a space

  • Chanting, breathwork, or sacred movement practices

Think of rituals as tools because they’re ongoing, customizable, and often private.

Creating a ritual 

Rituals don’t have to be long, elaborate or something that takes up all of your time, everyday. They can be small acts that you do to help you shift your energy into a higher frequency

1. Set Your Intention

Ask yourself:

  • What is this ritual for?

  • What energy do I want to call in, shift, or release?

Examples:

  • To let go of an old identity

  • To call in abundance or clarity

  • To connect with the womb or Divine Feminine

  • To mark a transition (new home, new moon, breakup, birth)

Clarity in intention = power in ritual.

2. Choose the Timing

Rituals are more potent when aligned with natural or personal rhythms:

  • Moon phases:
    🌑 New moon = intention-setting, planting seeds
    🌕 Full moon = release, visibility, celebration

  • Seasonal shifts: equinox, solstice, Samhain, Beltane

  • Life transitions: birthday, menstruation, motherhood, grief, creative rebirth

📅 You can also choose intuitively — whenever you feel the need to pause, shift, or honor.

3. Create the Space

You don’t need a temple. Your intention turns any space sacred. But physical cues help your nervous system soften into presence.

  • Cleanse the space (smoke, sound, salt water, intention)

  • Set up an altar: candle, crystals, flowers, sacred objects

  • Music, incense, dim lighting, floor pillows — whatever helps you drop in

  • Phones off. Distractions cleared.

🪞 Let your space reflect the beauty and care of what’s unfolding inside you.

4. Call In Support

Ritual is a co-creation. Invite in energies or guides to support you.

  • Spirit, Source, God/Goddess, ancestors, angels, higher self

  • Nature spirits, archetypes (e.g. Isis, Kali, Mother Mary, wild woman)

  • Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water

You can speak aloud or silently:

“I call upon the spirits of the East… I welcome the energy of clarity and new beginnings…” (read more about the directions here)

5. Activate the Ritual Body

Drop from the mind into your body — that’s where the magic lives.

Ways to do this:

  • Breathwork

  • Movement (dance, gentle stretches, pelvic circles)

  • Touch or anointing (oils, rose water)

  • Sound (humming, drumming, singing)

Let the body lead. Let your voice come through. Let it be felt, not just thought.

6. Perform the Core Ritual

This is the heart of the ritual — the symbolic action that makes it real.

Ideas include:

  • Writing & burning what you’re releasing

  • Speaking desires aloud while anointing your womb or heart

  • Planting a seed with intention

  • Lighting a candle & saying a prayer

  • Pouring water into the Earth

  • Holding an object and breathing love into it

It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It just needs to be honest.

7. Close with Gratitude & Grounding

Always close the space intentionally.

  • Thank your guides, ancestors, body, Earth, the elements

  • Blow out candles, dismantle altar, say a final prayer or blessing

  • Ground: drink water, eat something, walk barefoot, journal, rest

Ask:

“What has shifted?”
“How will I live differently now that I’ve done this?”

Optional Extras:

  • Oracle or tarot card pull

  • Offer a song, poem, or spoken word

  • Create ritual art or sigils

  • Share the experience with someone you trust (if it feels right)

Ritual is not about performance.
It’s about presence.
It’s a way to speak with the unseen, to come home to yourself, to give the soul a moment to breath

My morning ritual

Every Morning I wake up and write my dreams down.

After that, I go to my altar(after I use the washroom and clean my face).

I have a glass of herbs to drink, and which ones they are that day depend on the temperature and my vibe. Sometimes I oil pull, other times I don’t.

I sit in the chair that I have. I always use it to mediate, so the energy of the chair is high vibrational.

I light a candle and I keep the blinds closed.

Then I either smudge myself with Sage, or light a Palo Santo stick.

I then sit in the dark and either I silently mediate, which you can learn here, or I do a shamanic journey(more intense, requires moment, intention and music).

After this, I ground myself by drinking the water.

Then, I will either pull a card for myself or journal what I saw.

I feel it out and see what the messages were, and then I move. Either a 15 minute yoga sessions, a quick stretch and I literally shake my ass or dance. Anything to move and feel better.

Somethings I work out.

Then I get to work.

This is my ritual.

Rituals and the ancients

Ancient Rituals

Rituals are the heartbeat of every spiritual tradition. They are small, repeated actions that align us with something bigger: nature, Spirit, community, self.

They don’t always need a special day or public gathering. They are woven into daily life, deeply symbolic, and meant to shift energy. (like lighting the candle or sitting at my altar every morning, or going to get fresh bread).

Here’s how different cultures practiced ritual in their everyday sacredness:

Africa

In Indigenous African traditions, ritual is not separate from life — it is life.

  • Pouring a libation (water or alcohol) to the ancestors every morning before work

  • Speaking prayers into the cooking pot or onto a child’s forehead

  • Sweeping the threshold of the home with intention to remove negative spirits

In these traditions, ritual is repetition with meaning — restoring balance daily, not just in ceremony.

India

In Hindu and Vedic cultures, ritual is a sacred offering of the senses.

  • Daily puja: lighting incense, ringing a bell, offering fruit or flowers to a deity

  • Chanting mantras at sunrise to align with divine vibration

  • Touching the feet of elders as an embodied act of reverence

These rituals remind the practitioner: God is here, now — in breath, in flame, in food.

🍃 Japan & Shinto

In Shinto, Japan’s Indigenous spiritual path, rituals are about maintaining harmony with nature and spirit.

  • Hand-washing and bowing before entering a shrine

  • Leaving offerings of sake, rice, or paper cranes to the kami (spirits)

  • Seasonal house-blessing rituals to purify space and invite good fortune

Shinto rituals are quiet, clean, minimal — yet rich with sacred intention.

Mesopotamia

In ancient Sumer and Babylon, ritual was essential to keep the cosmos in balance.

  • Priests performed daily temple rituals: washing statues of gods, offering incense and food

  • Ritual formulas were recited to protect cities or rulers from misfortune

  • Lunar and solar rituals were tracked precisely to align with celestial forces

Ritual was not optional — it was how the heavens and Earth stayed in harmony.

Mesoamerica

In Maya and Aztec cultures, ritual was often about offering life-force to maintain the cosmic cycle.

  • Bloodletting rituals (from tongue, ear, or skin) to feed the gods

  • Ritual ballgames reenacting the myth of creation and death

  • Ceremonial burning of copal resin to cleanse and communicate with the gods

These may seem intense today, but they held deep symbolic meaning — sacrifice not as punishment, but as sacred offering.

The Arctic & Siberia

In the far north, ritual was a bridge to the spirit world.

  • Shamans (like the Evenki or Sámi noaidi) used drums, chant, and trance to travel between worlds

  • Rituals were used for healing illness, finding lost souls, or calling back the sun in winter

  • Offerings of fish, antlers, or tobacco were left for spirit allies

Here, ritual was about relationship — with animals, ancestors, and other realms.

Polynesia

In Oceania and Hawai‘i, ritual honored the spirit in all things.

  • Daily offerings to the sea, volcano, or family altars

  • Ritual chants that retold genealogies, ensuring ancestors were remembered

  • Ritual tattooing, which marked rites of passage and sacred identity

To do ritual was to remember: you are not separate from the land, the gods, or your people.

What All Rituals Share:

Across time and space, rituals have always:

  • Involved symbolic action (lighting, offering, chanting, moving)

  • Aligned the practitioner with the sacred

  • Created a moment of presence in everyday life

  • Offered a way to release, receive, and remember

Whether it’s lighting a candle or dancing for hours, ritual teaches us that the sacred and its something you embody.

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