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Also, an insight that came alive from enacting this ritual was how much grief there is around the loss of relationship to home in the form of my body, the Earth, and the symbolic feminine. I would love a grief ritual to help heal how we (as individuals and a culture) have separated ourselves from our bodies, earth, home, and the feminine.

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Thanks so much for your feedback Holly and that beautiful Bayo Akomolafe quote.

I love the idea of a ritual of grieving for our separation from the more yin aspects of our nature and nature as a whole I'll give it some thought. A regular ritual practice oriented to the moon is really helping me with this, I hope you can find aspects of this ritual or invent your own to form your own practice. I will post a dark moon ritual sometime soon so look out for that one :)

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I enacted this ritual during the last full moon and the words that comes up to encapsulate my experience are "divine," "revelatory," and "health-full." The full arch of the experience, from the preparation phase, to the enactment, to the post-integration process (still happening) directed my attention to something that is always under nose but often hidden. It's akin to walking along, staring at the pavement, and then having a friend (in this case the ritual and the Moon) holler, "Hey, look up, there's an owl/rainbow/cool thing happening overhead." I'm so thankful to have these rituals to help me slow down and build my spiritual and attention muscles. I hope collectively more engage in these incredible gifts of art Rebecca is offering to help us remember how to be in love with the world, and thus, with ourselves. I recently came across this quote from Bayo Akomolafe, which to me highlighted the necessity of ritual. He says: "Home is a place-making ritual that convenes memory, desire, loss, possibility, hope, and hopelessness in related networks of becoming. We are not in charge of how home turns out to be, we are part and parcel of its re-enactment of how the world comes to create the conditions of home." These rituals are helping us both construct and find our way home. Thank you, Rebecca, and if you are on the fence in trying this ritual, I invite you, I implore you, I invoke you give the Moon a shot. She makes a pretty hot date.

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Thank you so much for these words and the explanation of these rituals Rebecca. I must have signed up the The Stoa at some point and this morning I ended up listening to you speaking about Peter's Ascent! But the weird thing is that I am being drawn to ritual more and more. I don't know fully what it is, but I keep seeking it in some way. I asked a writer on a course last week if she had any rituals, and she said, 'no, it's not like I use the same pen every time'... My heart was like nooo, no... I meant something else! But I didn't even really allow the sense of loss to rise in me. And I know I have block. And I know they can only be fixed if I get out of the way! Blimey, sorry, massive overshare. But thank you. Emer x

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Hey Emer!

Not an overshare at all. I know what you mean about that feeling of being drawn to ritual, I think it was mounting in me for a long time before I acknowledged it.

Hope you give this one a try, it might undo your block. I think a lot of people make the mistake of waiting, hoping the block will lift so they can do 'the thing' but I've found if I just force myself to do 'the thing' by the time I'm halfway through the block has disintegrated. Anyway, the next full moon is Friday 12th and if you are in a rush you could 'ask her out' that night as the moon rises and see if she's free at the last minute.

Let me know how it goes x

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