🎧 Listen to the Essay and/or Meditation 🎧
Why, yes, those are 2 separate audio links – 1 below, 1 above. || My reading of this essay is right before the opening Hi friends. 👇🏾 || A guided meditation is at the top of this email. 👆🏾 || An archive of meditations lives here.
Listen to me read this essay:
This is the second in a 3-part series based on my online course, Soulful Cycles. You can find all posts here.
[This is a long one. Thanks for hanging in there…]
Hi friends
It’s just really ruff right now on Earth. How are you holding up? I hope you’re finding more inspiration than overwhelm.
Everyday, I try carefully discerning where to place my attention and how to act amidst multiplying political horrors. I aspire to maintain good boundaries with the data deluge that poses as news today. For me that means no social media, no push notifications, No News Before Noon, and mostly longer, written content. And I still feel the challenge of staying grounded and clear. As deluded, greedy, devious bozos continue to foment destruction all over our planet, centering my physical health is the priority. Protecting my mental and emotional balance too. I focus on staying better and getting stronger because me becoming re-debilitated helps no one (especially not me!). I’m also trying to adopt a small rescue dog knowing that will contribute immensely to my well-being because dogs are simply the best and a tiny dog I can take everywhere with me would be a fabulous vibe enhancement. Despite all of this, I’ve felt fairly scattered lately. I can’t tell if that’s because I was unwell for too long or because the world is. Oof.
While systems crumble around us, it may seem superfluous to focus here on Soulful Cycles, my course exploring sacred intentions and rituals. OR, it’s the perfect time for re-enchanting our world (n.b. it’s always the perfect time for re-enchanting our world!). I’ve written plenty about the conditioned rational defenses we are taught by the larger culture. I’ve observed in myself how, in the past, learned skepticism kept me from sharing publicly the realities that are not immediately explainable by logical or scientific standards. Some of us feel more comfort with these mysteries. Some less so. That’s why today, I want to dive into the power and importance of intention and rituals by first exploring the rational (nay scientific) case for them. Next time we will delve into the woo of it all. But first, let’s talk about placebos.
As you know, placebos are the supposedly inactive substances in double-blind, controlled studies used to test the efficacy of perceived active treatments. Placebos are designed to look and feel like the “real” medicine, but assumed not to impact the condition being treated. Except, in many cases (and more and more), it’s understood that placebos do work. The “placebo effect” shows time and again that placebos produce significant changes for pain, anxiety, depression and Parkinson’s and provide benefits for many other conditions including Irritable Bowel Syndrome, PTSD, Alzheimer’s, and asthma. The list grows as research increases. Placebo studies even show benefits for some surgeries. Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 New York Times Magazine article on the phenomenon:
“Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air — even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t.” — Gary Greenberg, What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?1
And, you don’t even have to deceive patients. A doctor can give someone a sugar pill, telling them as much but insisting that placebos are known to work to help their condition. The placebo will likely work just as well as a drug. Of course, this is not true for every illness. But for many chronic, stress-related issues, placebos perform just as well if not better than the usual medical intervention. In her book, Placebos, Harvard professor and researcher, Kathryn T. Hall2, carefully explores the history of quackery connected to placebos as well as the growing, solid studies on their true power. She posits that there is an ethical issue here as well. If placebos are effective and otherwise harmless, why use drugs with sometimes dangerous side effects? See, placebos have a sinister opposite in nocebos, the phenomenon where even knowing about side effects will increase their likelihood (and not knowing reduces them). Why not simply use placebos?
Fascinating stuff. And, for the record, I still take pain meds. Daily. What I find most intriguing about Hall’s inquiry (and why I’m going on about this in a series ostensibly on soulful engagement with our reality) are her speculations as to why placebos work. Researchers do not have concrete conclusions, but they believe response expectancy plays a large role. It’s precisely because the patient expects it to do so that a placebo works. Expectations elicit a suggested or believed response. However, this is not true outside of a theater (my word) of intervention. That is, if I randomly take a sugar pill on my own for pain, I’m unlikely to get the same relief. Hall hypothesizes that’s because the process of modern medicine is “steeped in ritual.” Medical staff maintain designated roles executing prescribed procedures in specific sequences, various symbols are used to communicate, and people even wear costumes.
Children have a greater response to placebos; Hall believes this is because they have fewer rational defenses. Again, researchers do not know the actual mechanism of the placebo effect, but they do know rational defenses don’t help. As the theologian, Paul Tillich, said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt; it is certainty.” In fact, particular personality traits determine any person’s positive response to a placebo. These include: being open to experience, emotional awareness, reduced distraction about discomfort or pain, the ability to describe inner experience, and optimism. [Hmmmm, sounds like mindfulness practice to me.] The positive impact of a placebo is directly linked to whether we cultivate open, conscious, hopeful attention and surrender to the rituals involved.
Some believe that ritual is humanity’s basic social act. Rituals are natural—and not just to humans. In his book, Ritual3 (from which I learned all the following), anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, details how rituals exist everywhere in the natural world. Various animals engage rituals—yes, for courtship, but also for inexplicable reasons. Dolphins dance in group dance. Humpback whales sing collective songs. Various marine mammals have mourning rituals. Giraffes move in a love dance resembling tango. Wolves sing together. Elephants perform mourning rites and ”bury” their dead with dirt and leaves, paying tribute to grave sites and visiting them over years. And many of these don’t seem to be automatic behaviors but are culturally transmitted. For example, the mating ritual and elaborate nest-making of the bowerbird changes if the bird migrates to another area, adapting it to the customs of the local population.
Primates (that’s us!) have some of the most elaborate rituals. Chimpanzees perform waterfall dances in a spectacular display which can last up to fifteen minutes. Standing upright, they stamp and sway rhythmically from foot to foot in a state of hyperarousal. They swing from tree vines and hurtle large rocks into the water. Once the commotion is over, they sit down and gaze quietly at the water for several minutes in something resembling awe. They also have been recorded collecting stones and carrying them to specific trees. Placing them inside the hollow cavities or piling them at the base, they then drum on the trunks. Later, they will often change their routes in order to visit these specific trees. Standing upright in front of them, they sway back and forth, panting, hooting and jumping up and down in a state of feverish excitement. At the end, they drum on the trunk with their feet or with rocks. Primates (including humans) have social rituals too. Chimpanzees have special, secret handshakes that are unique to each chimp group.
As you can imagine, humans have the most extensive use of rituals. Many scientists now believe that human cognition and intelligence developed side by side with ritual as an evolution of symbolic thought. Xygalatas says:
“Ritual functioned as an embodied protolanguage that provided an ‘external support system’ to individual cognition — a crucial step on the road to language itself… And because of its close connection to symbolism, rhythm and movement, as well as its role in demarcating the extraordinary from the ordinary, ritual has also been linked to the evolution of art.” — Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual
This model challenges our concepts about how civilization evolved. Archeologists are realizing that the old idea that large settlements developed because of agriculture does not make sense because agriculture was a detriment and costly for health. They now they believe these settlements congregated around early ritual sites. Religion itself may have emerged from ritual. Cities developed because of temples, not the other way around.
Numerous studies show that rituals have measurable positive effects. Rituals can increase focus, stimulate dopamine and serotonin production, activate the immune system, and increase social connection. They increase performance and skills in games or tests and decrease anxiety, depression and negative expectations in all sorts of environments. Across cultures, rituals are often used to support situations with unpredictable outcomes or in moments of danger (like hunting or conflict). Rituals also serve as social glue. Children engage in spontaneous ritual but also are more willing to imitate action when it appears to be ritualized. Many people perform personal rituals in times of stress. Athletes especially are notorious for this. Tennis great Rafael Nadal’s rituals4 truly take the cake in the array of pro-athlete prep.
Like with placebos, we do not know why rituals work. Not rationally we don’t. The late great West African spiritual teacher, Malidoma Patrice Somé, said rituals are necessary because there are certain problems that cannot be solved with words alone, that the food of the psyche is the symbol and it is through ritual that our spirit is fed. He states that “ritual is a tribute to the human capacity to create, remember, and imagine.” In his book, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, he outlines a simple 4-step process that anyone can use to design a ritual. 1. Preparation of Ritual Space (Arranging the Symbols and Elements) 2. Invocation (Expressing the Intention) 3. Healing (Performing the Recitation, Dance, Song, Meditation, etc) 4. Close (Giving Thanks and Sharing the Merit). We will be exploring this process more next time.
I hope you’re starting to understand why I’m so intrigued by all this. In my course, Soulful Cycles, we explored how through openness, emotional awareness, consciousness, and hopefulness (i.e. mindfulness practice) our sacred intentions and rituals can serve as placebos for any change we wish to bring to our lives and our world. There are as many types and expressions of rituals as there are people and cultures. I’m not here to offer specific prescriptions, but to encourage us to release our rational defenses and open to the potential power of sacred intentions and rituals.
Phew. Thanks for hanging in there today. I know so many of us long to create personal & collective change. We each need to experiment and find our own ways. And, I believe a contemplative life—one rooted in conscious and compassionate awareness—can best hold the radical imagination needed for ritual to manifest as a soulful (and efficacious) practice. For the New Moon, we will explore how we can engage our ancestry, cycles of nature, the elements and other symbols, systems, and energies to create our own sacred intentions and rituals for change.
Until then, may we find moments of beauty and grace to fortify us for what’s ahead.
With love
Sebene
JOURNAL PROMPTS:
What comes up for you in hearing about the power of placebos? What questions or curiosities do you hold?
How do you feel about ritual? What are your experiences? What are you questions?
What change, personal and/or collective, are you wishing to create at this time?
ONGOING PRACTICES:
Using my definition from last time (RITUALS are intentional habits & routines and/or singular soulful practices) Notice what rituals you engage in daily, weekly, monthly. How do you approach these? Is there a way to bring more soulfulness to them?
Make note of the below qualities that allow for the placebo effect. Notice if and how you can encourage them within your self.
being open to experience, emotional awareness, reduced distraction about discomfort or pain, the ability to describe inner experience, and optimism
If you’d like to practice with me in person this year…
Learn to Let It Be: Acceptance & Equanimity for Individual & Collective Liberation (with Kate Johnson, Dawn Mauricio & La Sarmiento)
August 22–24 at Omega Institute
There is so much that is unacceptable in our world. And yet, the first task of change is accepting things just as they are. It's a paradox, and it's a ripe place for practice.
Join us for a weekend of meditation and dharma talks mixed with reflective journaling, nature walks, and music and dance activities. Together we explore "letting be" as the antidote to both unnecessary struggle and resigned indifference.
Register Here for Let It Be
Meditation Party: Reckless Conviviality With Mindfulness Superfriends (with Dan Harris and Jeff Warren)
October 24–26 at Omega Institute
Many of us meditate solo, especially these days. This is a chance to get all of the high-occupancy-vehicle-lane benefits of meditating in a group.
Join self-proclaimed meditation nerds Dan Harris, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for a weekend “do-nothing” party with lots of meditating. This is definitely not a silent retreat. It is an opportunity to connect with others, move your body, nap, and discover the power of applying your practice to everything in life.
Note: Meditation Party is one of Omega's most popular workshops and will host as many as 425 participants. Register early to secure your seat and housing.
Share this post