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The Art of Ritual: Finding Solace and Connection in Personal Ceremonies
5 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of The Glam Reaper Podcast, our host Jennifer sits down with Megan Sheldon, the CEO and founder of Be Ceremonial to talk about Megan’s journey with recurrent pregnancy loss and grief, which ultimately inspired her to create the Be Ceremonial app.
As the conversation unfolds, Megan highlights the significance of marking life's significant moments, a sentiment that resonates deeply with Jennifer. Together, they explore the innate human inclination towards ceremony, reflecting on the ways in which rituals enrich our lives and offer comfort in times of need.
Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation that celebrates the human spirit and the transformative power of ceremony. Tune in now!
Key Topics:
-Celebrate life's moments uniquely with loved ones.
-Nurturing healing through meaningful traditions.
-Crafting cherished moments that honor your journey.
-Embracing tradition while adapting to modernity.
-Cultivating self-care habits for a balanced life.
Quotes From The Episode:
So many of us are scared to bring that grief to the surface.
- Megan Sheldon
And that's really what grief is. It's just the closing of a chapter.
- Jennifer Muldowney
Timestamp:
[00:00] Podcast Intro
[00:35] Megan discussed her personal experience with recurrent pregnancy loss and grief, leading to the creation of an app called Be ceremonial.
[3:19] Megan described how the pandemic prompted them to consolidate their knowledge of creating ceremonies into an accessible platform.
[06:12] Megan explained how they structured their app around the traditional rite of passage.
[10:57] Jennifer reflects on the importance of marking significant life moments.
[13:06] Jennifer and Megan emphasizes that humans are inherently ceremonial beings.
[14:52] Megan recounts a touching story of her father's improvisation of a meaningful ritual during a lunch gathering for a terminally ill friend.
[17:46] Jennifer shares her experience of celebrating her 40th birthday in Ireland with friends.
[20:19] Megan reflects on Maya Angelou's sentiment about the lasting impact of emotions over words or actions.
[24:16] Megan discusses the inception of their app during the early days of the pandemic.
[30:11] Outro
Connect with Megan Sheldon
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/megansheldon
Website - beceremonial.com
- seekingceremony.com
Connect with Jennifer/The Glam Reaper:
Facebook Page - Muldowney Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/MuldowneyMemorials/
Facebook Page - Rainbow Bridge Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/rainbowbridgememorialsdotcom
Instagram - @muldowneymemorials & @jennifermuldowney
Twitter - @TheGlamReaper
Email us here: glamreaperpodcast@gmail.com
Website: http://www.theglamreaper.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Glam Reaper Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I always say to people, I'm not here to teach you how.
00:00:02
Speaker
I'm here to help you remember.
00:00:04
Speaker
Because like you just described, you created a ceremony.
00:00:07
Speaker
But for whatever reason, the word ritual, the word ceremony, it's been kind of circumvented.
00:00:12
Speaker
So
00:00:25
Speaker
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper
Origin of Be Ceremonial and Personal Journey
00:00:29
Speaker
podcast.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper and on today's episode we are getting all ceremonial.
00:00:36
Speaker
We have Megan joining us from Be Ceremonial.
00:00:40
Speaker
Megan welcome.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello thank you for having me.
00:00:42
Speaker
You are so welcome we're delighted to have you.
00:00:45
Speaker
So tell us what is Be Ceremonial?
00:00:47
Speaker
How did you get started?
00:00:49
Speaker
And tell us a little bit yeah about who you are and the many millions of hats I'm sure you wear.
00:00:53
Speaker
I know you're a mom so that's my god.
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's a long story.
00:01:00
Speaker
I think that's often as entrepreneurs and innovators, when we start creating something from scratch that's never been done before, I think it's you kind of trace back and look at where the seed started.
00:01:11
Speaker
So my husband and I built Be Ceremonial.
00:01:14
Speaker
It's an app, a platform, an online platform that helps people create their own ceremonies across the
The Purpose and Features of the Be Ceremonial App
00:01:20
Speaker
life cycle.
00:01:20
Speaker
with a focus on grief and loss and kind of those less visible moments in life surrounding fertility and divorce and organ transplants and all the kind of moments that you go through in life that you might not know what to do.
00:01:33
Speaker
And this idea kind of came to us about 10 years ago.
00:01:37
Speaker
My husband and I had recurrent pregnancy loss.
00:01:39
Speaker
We had three miscarriages at different stages while also losing his dad to ALS.
00:01:45
Speaker
And I learned very quickly during that experience that there were so many moments of grief that nobody else knew or saw, but that were so pivotal for us.
00:01:53
Speaker
You know, the day you get a phone call where somebody tells you that they'd received a terminal diagnosis.
00:01:58
Speaker
What do you do on that day?
00:01:59
Speaker
The day that you have a miscarriage, but then seven months later when you reach your due date, what do you do on that day when you're no longer, you knew that day was coming, but you don't know what to do in honor, you know, to honor the love and the loss that you hold.
00:02:13
Speaker
So I got really curious about how we mark these moments of change in our lives.
00:02:18
Speaker
I'm not religious.
00:02:19
Speaker
I don't have a strong kind of spiritual framework.
00:02:23
Speaker
I'm a naturalist.
00:02:24
Speaker
I live in the Pacific Northwest.
00:02:26
Speaker
The forest is my temple.
00:02:27
Speaker
The ocean is my church.
00:02:29
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I go to nature to kind of experience that connection.
00:02:33
Speaker
But it's not, there's nothing kind of set in stone.
00:02:36
Speaker
Nobody tells you when you leave the hospital after miscarriage what you should do to honor that loss.
00:02:41
Speaker
So I just started to get really curious and I studied and researched and took courses.
00:02:46
Speaker
I became a life cycle celebrant.
00:02:48
Speaker
I became an end of life doula, became a grief educator.
00:02:52
Speaker
You know, I spent the last 10 years training up, I guess, to really understand how we could create more ritual and ceremony for those of us who might not feel like we have access to it.
00:03:02
Speaker
That is incredible.
00:03:04
Speaker
I didn't actually realize that Be Ceremonial was so many things, actually.
00:03:09
Speaker
I guess probably because I'm engulfed in the funeral space.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, an organ transplant and that's amazing.
00:03:18
Speaker
Can you touch a little bit more on that and sort of how the app helps people?
Turning Ceremonial Practice into an App during the Pandemic
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:23
Speaker
So as a ceremonialist, I've been helping people around the world for many years create ceremonies.
00:03:29
Speaker
And when the pandemic hit, I started having people reach out from all over the world, especially around end of life, trying to figure out how to, you know, honor somebody who died when they were able to be there with them or they couldn't fly home or there was no opportunity for a celebration of life or a funeral because of COVID.
00:03:46
Speaker
So my husband who works in tech said, what if we were to make all of these things that you've been learning and exploring and experiencing all of these tools?
00:03:54
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What if we were to put them in one place and then let people access them?
00:03:57
Speaker
And a big value for us is being descriptive, not prescriptive.
00:04:01
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So we don't want to tell you here's the ceremony you should do when your father-in-law is diagnosed with a terminal illness.
00:04:06
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Like that, that's not helpful.
00:04:08
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But what we do want to say is, wow, this must be really heavy and hard.
00:04:12
Speaker
Here's a framework that's universal, that's existed across time, across culture.
00:04:16
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Here are a bunch of rituals that you can
Expanding the Use of Rituals Beyond Traditional Ceremonies
00:04:19
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be inspired by.
00:04:20
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We say it's like a choose your own ritual adventure.
00:04:22
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So you get to pick and choose the things that are meaningful to you and then adapt them, bring your own life into them and
00:04:28
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So we kind of started around grief and loss and our experiences.
00:04:31
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But then very quickly, it became clear that as you flex these muscles, these ritual muscles, you will then use them in different parts of your life.
00:04:39
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So we had somebody reach out who was moving out of a childhood home and her dad had died in that home.
00:04:45
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So she thought she was reaching out to create a ceremony around
00:04:48
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you know, selling the childhood home, but really selling the home brought up the grief of losing her dad four years ago.
00:04:54
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So the ceremony is just intertwined with so many different aspects of life.
00:04:58
Speaker
So when you go through a divorce, the same thing happens, right?
00:05:01
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Like how do you create a ceremony to acknowledge a divorce when your community came together to witness you getting married and then suddenly nobody is really there to witness you separating?
00:05:11
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Really, it's just about looking at the life cycle as all these moments that deserve to be acknowledged.
00:05:16
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And that for me is what that ceremony does.
00:05:18
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It acknowledges what we're feeling.
00:05:20
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It doesn't make it go away.
00:05:22
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It doesn't fix it or solve it.
00:05:23
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It's simply giving us a chance to say this is what I'm feeling and it's real and valid.
00:05:28
Speaker
And here are some rituals that can help me process that.
00:05:30
Speaker
So interesting.
00:05:31
Speaker
You touched on something there that I was, I'm actually still toying with the idea of doing a podcast episode specifically on.
00:05:38
Speaker
We just sold our childhood home.
00:05:40
Speaker
Well, we, my parents sold my childhood home there last summer at the end of last summer.
00:05:46
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And it was very emotional.
00:05:48
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It nearly severed yet another tie for me back home in Ireland, which is even more sort of emotional for me.
00:05:54
Speaker
Can you talk us through what a ceremony for something like that would look like?
Personal Story of Leaving a Childhood Home
00:05:59
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You know, an example of what is available on the app?
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, so we built our app with the traditional rite of passage as a framework.
00:06:07
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So if you look, you know, having been a bit of a research nerd, I love kind of looking at all the academics.
00:06:13
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knowledge.
00:06:14
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And there's been people for the last hundreds of years who have explored and looked at what makes ritual, what makes ceremony, what is it that helps us as culture to process change.
00:06:23
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So I really drew from the science of ritual.
00:06:26
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And the traditional rite of passage typically follows a three-stage approach.
00:06:30
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So it has the separation, which is letting go of who you were or what was, the transition, which is that kind of middle part where you're neither here nor there, but how can you be present and in the moment,
00:06:41
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And then the third part of the rite of passage, which is incorporation.
00:06:44
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So weaving what you've learned through that experience into your life moving forward.
00:06:49
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So if you think of something like coming of age or a wedding or a funeral, like typically you'll go through these kind of structured ceremonial approaches.
00:06:58
Speaker
So with that in mind, there are so many ways to create a ceremony that's unique to you.
00:07:03
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Again, there's not just one ritual that you should do.
00:07:06
Speaker
And I'll preface this by saying that there's a beautiful, important role in the world for religious and cultural ritual.
00:07:13
Speaker
And for those of us who might not feel like we have access to that, there is something else.
00:07:17
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There's this opportunity to invent and create and reimagine ritual so that it fits our life.
00:07:23
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So that's what I'm playing with.
00:07:25
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It's not about throwing out what's already there.
00:07:27
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It's about creating space for something new as well.
00:07:30
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So if you think about a childhood home, and my father was diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago, and he survived.
00:07:37
Speaker
But my parents were in the midst of selling our childhood home.
00:07:40
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We'd been there for 35 years.
00:07:42
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And my mom was in the hospital with my dad most of the time.
00:07:44
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So I was the one that had to go through the home and decide what we keep, what we give away.
00:07:50
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You know, I invited all my friends over, invited them to just take what they wanted, because we were all kind of moving into our homes at that point.
00:07:56
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But my mom came home one night and I said, I think it's really important that we honor this home.
00:08:00
Speaker
And so we did a couple of different rituals.
00:08:02
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But the first one was saying goodbye, like separating from what it was.
00:08:05
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And for us, that involved moving from each room in the house and thinking about a specific story that happened in that room and sharing that story and kind of the house was empty at the time.
00:08:16
Speaker
There was no funeral or no, sorry, there was no furniture.
00:08:19
Speaker
And it did feel like a funeral to the home.
00:08:21
Speaker
But we walked through the home totally empty.
00:08:23
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And I remember walking into a room and I could picture the furniture still there.
00:08:27
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And I would remember a Christmas morning we spent or I remember a big party that we had in this other room.
00:08:33
Speaker
So we went through this house and we shared these stories.
00:08:35
Speaker
And it was emotional.
00:08:36
Speaker
It was hard.
00:08:37
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I know.
00:08:39
Speaker
But it should be.
00:08:40
Speaker
It should be emotional.
00:08:41
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I think that's there's so much about what we do in this world where we push those down and we try to we sell at home.
00:08:46
Speaker
Well, it's not about don't look back, look forward.
00:08:48
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Where are we moving to next?
00:08:50
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And we need to take the time to grieve and to walk through and spend that time.
00:08:53
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And mom and I were crying the whole time we were going through.
00:08:56
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But we were also laughing and shaking our head and remembering when, you know, so and so cut his finger and all these funny stories and weird stories.
00:09:04
Speaker
So we took our time.
00:09:05
Speaker
We walked through the home and we honored what was.
00:09:08
Speaker
And then we decided to do something to kind of be really present and in the moment.
00:09:12
Speaker
And we lit a candle and we just spent a couple of moments of silence just looking at the house.
00:09:17
Speaker
It's a really old house.
00:09:18
Speaker
It was built in Vancouver, at least it was built.
00:09:20
Speaker
You know, one of the original homes on the North Shore.
00:09:23
Speaker
So it had a lot of history and a lot of, you know, soul to it.
00:09:26
Speaker
So we just spent a few moments just kind of being in that house that had held so many families before us and hopefully will hold so many families after.
00:09:33
Speaker
And then we thought of a ritual that would help us kind of carry forward.
00:09:37
Speaker
And there was two parts to it.
00:09:38
Speaker
One of them, my older brother had found this giant log on the beach nearby.
00:09:42
Speaker
that looked like a claw and he had scared all of our kids with it.
00:09:45
Speaker
So we had this big giant claw.
00:09:47
Speaker
So mom and I walked down to the beach with this big claw and we, this log and we threw it in the ocean just to kind of send it out to hopefully somebody else would find.
00:09:55
Speaker
And then we went into the garden and we dug up some of the plants.
00:09:59
Speaker
I chose, my husband and I had moved into our home at that point and I chose three lilac trees because the house reminded me so much of lilac every spring.
00:10:07
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So we
00:10:08
Speaker
dug those up carefully and cried while we were doing it and then put them in my car and brought them home and planted them in my yard.
00:10:15
Speaker
So kind of carrying something forward.
00:10:17
Speaker
So now every spring when those lilac trees blossom, it transports me right back to my childhood home.
00:10:22
Speaker
It's a phenomenal experience.
00:10:24
Speaker
It's I told you you get emotional on this podcast.
00:10:28
Speaker
I think maybe because it's so fresh for me.
00:10:31
Speaker
Like we didn't know we were doing a ceremony or ritual, I guess, at the time.
00:10:35
Speaker
But like that, I felt it was so important.
00:10:38
Speaker
And so I got my my brother, my mom and my dad together and no no grandkids, no, you know, spouses or anything, just the four of us.
00:10:48
Speaker
because, you know, we were who we were in that, you know, family home and just the four of us gathered and we actually had a bottle of bubbly and we opened that and, you know, over the kitchen table, as we had done for many, many times only last year or the year before I did my 40th where we, you know, all of these moments of life celebration and like that, we went out into the garden and
00:11:11
Speaker
I took something and this piece of bar that was in our garden and I brought it back to the US.
00:11:18
Speaker
I was like, oh my God, I hope you have TSA or anything.
00:11:21
Speaker
Don't try and take it back, take it away.
00:11:23
Speaker
Because I don't know if you're allowed to bring sort of, I don't know.
00:11:25
Speaker
I mean, it was just a piece of wood, but I was always, I was afraid.
00:11:29
Speaker
And yeah, we just, we took, we kind of took a piece of it with us.
00:11:32
Speaker
And I like that, like a new family has moved in and I hope they have as many happy members as we did, but it's,
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's I do think it's so important to mark those moments and notice the grief, which is why I'm kind of should I do a whole podcast
Understanding Grief Beyond Death
00:11:46
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on this?
00:11:46
Speaker
Because even my TEDx talk, it's and a couple of the episodes actually touched on it with people like yourself, who we all know that grief and loss isn't just in the death space.
00:12:00
Speaker
It's divorce.
00:12:01
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It's
00:12:02
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friendships it's everything it's a job it's sometimes it's a it's a physical item you know your grandmother left you something and now it's broken or now it's gone you've lost it like grief just comes out in a million different ways moving out of a house nobody died you know we're all but we're all still good but um it's still just closing one chapter and opening another and that's really what grief is it's just the closing up chapter
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, and we are naturally ceremonial.
00:12:30
Speaker
We have ritual in our bones.
00:12:32
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This is not new to us.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I always say to people, I'm not here to teach you how, I'm here to help you remember.
00:12:38
Speaker
Because like you just described, you created a ceremony.
00:12:41
Speaker
But for whatever reason, the word ritual, the word ceremony, it's been kind of circumvented.
00:12:46
Speaker
And you look at Wikipedia and what it calls it and how it defines it.
00:12:49
Speaker
And that's not my version.
00:12:51
Speaker
Because that feels so constrained and prescribed and performative.
00:12:55
Speaker
Whereas what you described, it was an emotional connection.
00:12:58
Speaker
You know, I always say this is about our mental health.
00:13:00
Speaker
This is about processing the emotions as they show up.
00:13:03
Speaker
And so many of us are scared to bring that grief to the surface because we weren't raised in a culture that, you know, was often permissible.
00:13:12
Speaker
And I mean, Irish culture, I think, is a little bit different.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, we, a lot of Irish people are born Catholic and sort of, so there's ritual for sure, absolutely, but it's very
Adaptation of Personal Rituals to Unique Life Events
00:13:24
Speaker
tight and specific and according to certain things, but a bit like America and, you know, North America and all that, it's,
00:13:31
Speaker
We're evolving.
00:13:32
Speaker
You know, those like I often say when I started my journey, a lot of people would have said sort of that I'm trying to do away with the funeral.
00:13:40
Speaker
And I am absolutely not.
00:13:42
Speaker
I think it's such an important ritual.
00:13:44
Speaker
I think it's imperative.
00:13:45
Speaker
And so I believe in ritual.
00:13:47
Speaker
It's just that these rituals are evolving and it's not just so, as you said, it's not so prescriptive.
00:13:54
Speaker
Well, and also the more that we show people that it's accessible, that it's simple, it doesn't have to be complex, the more we break out of them.
00:14:02
Speaker
I remember my dad phoning me a few months ago and his best friend was dying and they knew it was coming.
00:14:08
Speaker
And he was part of a group of men who had played tennis together for the last 40 years.
00:14:13
Speaker
And they were meeting for lunch and it was the man who was dying.
00:14:16
Speaker
It was his birthday.
00:14:17
Speaker
And they didn't know how much longer he had, but they knew it was close.
00:14:21
Speaker
So they knew this was likely the last time they would all gather.
00:14:24
Speaker
And my dad called me up that morning and said, I need to do something to mark this lunch.
00:14:29
Speaker
Like it's an important lunch, but nobody else is going to do anything.
00:14:32
Speaker
And nobody, they're going to keep their head in the sand, kind of, what do I do?
00:14:36
Speaker
And I said, Dad, I can't tell you what to do.
00:14:37
Speaker
That's, you know, that's not my role.
00:14:40
Speaker
But tell me about your friendship with this man.
00:14:42
Speaker
Tell me about this group of men and what it means to you.
00:14:44
Speaker
And, you know, so what he ended up doing was going into his garage and finding an old tennis racket from the 1950s.
00:14:51
Speaker
And he brought it with him.
00:14:52
Speaker
And around the lunch, he kind of bravely and uncomfortably, this is a man, you know, born in the 40s and, you know, from Edmonton.
00:14:59
Speaker
So this, you know, ceremony is not natural.
00:15:02
Speaker
But he kind of said to everybody, you know, I really want us to do this, to mark this lunch as special and meaningful for this man.
00:15:12
Speaker
And I brought this racket and I'm going to pass it around the circle.
00:15:15
Speaker
And I want everybody to share a story.
00:15:16
Speaker
It can be a funny story.
00:15:18
Speaker
It can be a memory story.
00:15:19
Speaker
It can be, you know, something that this man impacted you with in your life.
00:15:24
Speaker
And you could see the kind of, you know, groans and moans and, you know, these, you know, men in their 70s and 80s trying to figure out what to say.
00:15:32
Speaker
But my dad said the most phenomenal thing happened.
00:15:34
Speaker
As this rack, tennis racket made its way around this group of 12 men, the tears came up, the laughter came up, the hugging, the touching, the inappropriate jokes.
00:15:44
Speaker
But slowly by slowly, each one of them got a chance to tell this man what
00:15:49
Speaker
meant to them.
00:15:50
Speaker
And the man after told my dad it was probably one of the most meaningful days of his life.
00:15:55
Speaker
And all of these men got a chance to share something and to be together as a community, to listen to each other's stories, to be reminded at how tight-knit they were as a group.
00:16:04
Speaker
And now one of them was dying.
00:16:06
Speaker
And so how do we honor that?
00:16:08
Speaker
And my dad said it made such a difference months later at the celebration of life that they had had that time because they felt like they said they needed to say.
00:16:16
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So that's ritual.
00:16:18
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It doesn't have to be much more complicated.
00:16:21
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It's storytelling.
00:16:22
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It's speaking from the heart.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's creating space for us to feel what we're feeling.
00:16:26
Speaker
No, God almighty, I don't know what's wrong with me.
00:16:29
Speaker
You're getting worse than the can of it.
00:16:32
Speaker
I have this effect on people.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, because like my 40th last I keep saying last year.
00:16:38
Speaker
How is it already 2024?
00:16:40
Speaker
My 40th in 2022, I went home to Ireland and I gathered all my friends.
00:16:44
Speaker
So I'm not married.
00:16:45
Speaker
And my old thing for my 40th was I wanted it to be like my wedding.
00:16:50
Speaker
So I kind of was like, no, I'm deciding it's all my favorite foods.
00:16:54
Speaker
My favorite drinks, you know, I get to be a diva for the day and that's it.
00:16:58
Speaker
Rather than trying to please everybody.
00:16:59
Speaker
So a few people flew from America and we it was in my childhood home.
00:17:04
Speaker
My dad built like a mini bar.
00:17:05
Speaker
I mean, it was just incredible.
00:17:07
Speaker
And it was it was a lot of work, you know, and I'm an event planner.
00:17:11
Speaker
It was a lot of work because I was the client and I was the planner.
00:17:14
Speaker
Right.
00:17:15
Speaker
But it was amazing.
00:17:16
Speaker
And at one point in the evening, one of my closest friends, one of my longest friends, she said, you know, let's all say something that we love about Jen.
00:17:25
Speaker
And I was a bit like, and I'm used to obviously working in this space.
00:17:29
Speaker
I'm used to encouraging people to do that.
00:17:31
Speaker
But I guess when the mirror is, you know, when you're looking at it, then.
00:17:35
Speaker
and it's turned on you, it was quite a shock.
00:17:37
Speaker
And two of my friends are, we joke that they're like cold hearted, like they don't, they panicked.
00:17:44
Speaker
They did not know what to do.
00:17:45
Speaker
But, you know, they kind of did back out a little bit, but they did, you know, in their own way.
00:17:50
Speaker
But everyone around the group said something.
00:17:53
Speaker
And I, Megan, was mind blown.
00:17:56
Speaker
Like I never knew the impact I'd had on these people.
00:18:00
Speaker
Like I knew we were great friends.
00:18:01
Speaker
You know, I knew what I thought I brought to the table, but just hearing some of the words that they had to say back to me, I just my only regret.
00:18:10
Speaker
And it's actually something that I tell people about in the funeral space in general when they're doing a memorial or a funeral is to have video to record.
00:18:19
Speaker
My only regret is that, you know, we said it over a few drinks late at night.
00:18:23
Speaker
And, you know, the next day I was like, wait, I can't I know it was so special, but what was it?
00:18:26
Speaker
I can't remember what such and such said.
00:18:28
Speaker
It was all, you know.
00:18:29
Speaker
It all became a blur.
00:18:30
Speaker
But it was so incredibly special.
00:18:33
Speaker
And I'll remember it forever.
00:18:34
Speaker
I can't necessarily remember exactly what everybody said, but I just remember being floored that my little life had impacted these other people.
00:18:42
Speaker
They loved me so much.
00:18:44
Speaker
So I genuinely, whether you wait for every decade or whenever or for a diagnosis or just some sort of a moment in life.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, incredible.
00:18:54
Speaker
Absolutely incredible.
00:18:56
Speaker
And so fair play to your dad for doing that.
00:18:59
Speaker
One of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou is people will never remember what you said.
00:19:03
Speaker
They will never remember what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel.
00:19:06
Speaker
And I think I paraphrased that a little bit.
00:19:09
Speaker
But it's that feeling, you know, that's it doesn't really even matter what they said because you felt it like that.
00:19:15
Speaker
You know, the care bear stare of love kind of coming out at you.
00:19:18
Speaker
And it just, yeah, a friend of mine, she was also turning 40 and was not married and had decided to become a solo parent and go the IUI kind of fertility
The Need for Diverse Life Rituals
00:19:29
Speaker
route.
00:19:29
Speaker
And she invited 30 of us and they helped her kind of with some of the planning.
00:19:33
Speaker
It was over Zoom.
00:19:34
Speaker
We live in different parts of the world.
00:19:36
Speaker
And 30 of us came together over Zoom to witness her marriage to herself.
00:19:40
Speaker
And she said her own vows.
00:19:42
Speaker
And she kind of walked through a traditional kind of the wedding ceremony that she imagined she might have.
00:19:47
Speaker
And it was phenomenal.
00:19:48
Speaker
She mailed each of us a bracelet with rose quartz on it.
00:19:50
Speaker
So we all had the same bracelet connecting us in, I think, 12 countries around the world and multiple states.
00:19:56
Speaker
And anyway, it was just to see her have that moment.
00:20:00
Speaker
It showed it reminded me and just like shone a light on how
00:20:05
Speaker
how crappy it is in our life that we only really know ceremony around birth and marriage and death.
00:20:11
Speaker
Because if you don't have a child, if you don't get married, you're just basically waiting for death.
00:20:16
Speaker
And then you're not going to be there.
00:20:18
Speaker
You're not going to be at your own funeral.
00:20:20
Speaker
So how can we start to bring ritual and ceremony into other parts of our lives?
00:20:24
Speaker
Like when you get promoted at work, when you get fired, like where's this, you know,
00:20:29
Speaker
Whereas really, like we need to have these rituals when we're all of these little, you talked earlier about, you know, there's so many moments of grief.
00:20:36
Speaker
And on one of our video storytelling episodes recently in B Ceremony, we have like a library of interviews that we do with different experts in different fields around ritual, like what ritual and ceremony means to them.
00:20:48
Speaker
And I was talking with a psychologist and he said for children, every day, every night when they're preparing to go to bed,
00:20:54
Speaker
It's a little death.
00:20:55
Speaker
It's the death of the day.
00:20:57
Speaker
And traditionally, the lullaby, if you think about what a lullaby does, and you think about the lyrics, they're really sad.
00:21:03
Speaker
And the melody is really sad.
00:21:05
Speaker
And what it's meant to do is it's meant to sing that lullaby to the child to help bring their grief to the surface about the day ending, about that little death.
00:21:14
Speaker
And having that moment of that lullaby kind of allows that grief to surface and release, and they go to bed without carrying that forward into the next day.
00:21:22
Speaker
And that's, I think, if you think about our culture, grief-phobic, death-denying culture, where we don't process our grief, we kind of push it down and it transforms into other things that we don't recognize.
00:21:32
Speaker
We need to find more ways to acknowledge that the daily grief that we feel.
00:21:37
Speaker
And that's the muscle building for me, is if we can bring ritual into our everyday life and acknowledge those small little moments of grief when something big and hard and complicated happens,
00:21:47
Speaker
we already have this ritual muscle ready, like we're ready to step in.
00:21:51
Speaker
It doesn't make it easier, but it does, in a sense, give us a plan and remind us that we know what to do.
00:21:57
Speaker
It's, yeah, I did not expect to get this emotional on this podcast talking about, and I don't mean to say, but talking about an app, you know, it just holds the heart of the world.
App Features and Audience
00:22:08
Speaker
And that's what I love about this podcast.
00:22:09
Speaker
It's just the interesting conversations I have with people like yourself.
00:22:13
Speaker
They tell me how does Be Ceremonial, how does the app, so who should download it, sort of what should it affect?
00:22:20
Speaker
Is there charges or, you know, obviously you're a business or, you know, or I don't know, you tell me how that works.
00:22:28
Speaker
And yeah, who should, we'll leave the links for everybody in down below and stuff.
00:22:33
Speaker
But yeah, who, if people want to get in touch and kind of find out more about
00:22:37
Speaker
who should kind of definitely have this app on their phone.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:41
Speaker
And it's interesting thinking back to those first few months of the pandemic when Johan and I had two small kids at home and we're just kind of, he'd been laid off.
00:22:48
Speaker
He was the head of technology for a travel company.
00:22:51
Speaker
So that was not good.
00:22:52
Speaker
I had a marketing company and that kind of went under it for a few, you know, for six months or so.
00:22:57
Speaker
So we were sitting in our, you know, living room floor one night
00:23:01
Speaker
And he was saying, what if we were to kind of turn all this into an app?
00:23:04
Speaker
And I thought, that's crazy.
00:23:06
Speaker
Like, this is sacred, important work.
00:23:08
Speaker
Like, ritual and technology do not go together.
00:23:11
Speaker
But then you kind of look at who Johan and I are.
00:23:14
Speaker
And we're, you know, we're the head and the heart.
00:23:15
Speaker
We're the earth and the sky.
00:23:17
Speaker
Like, you need that balance.
00:23:19
Speaker
And we believe in something called slow tech or slow technology.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's like slow fashion, slow foods.
00:23:24
Speaker
So how can you use technology not to overrun your life and not to be so addicted that you only need, like, I don't want people to only be able to create a ceremony when they go into the app and have us guide it.
00:23:35
Speaker
But we want to give them when they feel stuck, when they feel lost, when they know that there's a moment happening,
00:23:41
Speaker
They're not quite sure how to acknowledge it.
00:23:42
Speaker
We want to give them a place to start.
00:23:44
Speaker
We want to kind of inspire them with ideas.
00:23:47
Speaker
The app is now becoming this beautiful community, which is for me what I always wanted it to be.
00:23:53
Speaker
And Yohanda too.
00:23:53
Speaker
We want it to be other people teaching each other about ritual and ceremony.
00:23:57
Speaker
So within the app, you can create your own daily rituals.
00:24:00
Speaker
So there's rituals for how you wake up in the morning and how you go to bed at night, rituals around like anger and burnout and frustration and grief and healing.
00:24:10
Speaker
So and they're there to take five minutes or less.
00:24:12
Speaker
They don't require any like
00:24:14
Speaker
fancy gadgets or, you know, you don't need to go and buy a whole bunch of stuff.
00:24:17
Speaker
We really want to show people that they have this already inside of them.
00:24:20
Speaker
You can also create life cycle ceremonies.
00:24:22
Speaker
So these are more kind of rites of passage that you might go through.
00:24:25
Speaker
So you've had a pregnancy loss or maybe you're making the decision to end breastfeeding and you want to kind of create a ritual around that.
00:24:33
Speaker
where you move through across the life cycle.
00:24:35
Speaker
Maybe you're moving into a new home or out of a home or having a wedding or a divorce.
00:24:40
Speaker
And then you kind of move into the grief and loss space.
00:24:43
Speaker
So you might be planning a celebration of life or a living funeral.
00:24:47
Speaker
There's all the way up until like death anniversaries and reaching the age that somebody was when they died.
00:24:52
Speaker
What do you do on that?
00:24:53
Speaker
So with that, you kind of choose your own ritual adventure.
00:24:56
Speaker
You choose the ceremony you want.
00:24:57
Speaker
You go through our pick and choose kind of menu and you pick the rituals that you like.
00:25:02
Speaker
And so there's that.
00:25:04
Speaker
There's the daily rituals, the lifestyle ceremonies.
00:25:06
Speaker
And as of yesterday, where are we?
00:25:09
Speaker
February 7th, 2024.
00:25:10
Speaker
If you're listening, we had a big day yesterday.
00:25:13
Speaker
And we launched a whole new platform within our app that has video workshops and stories from other people.
00:25:18
Speaker
So I'm interviewing different experts across the field.
00:25:22
Speaker
So, you know, looking at everything from motherhood to grief and loss to, you know, matrimony and divorce and all of that.
00:25:31
Speaker
So finding all these experts and getting them to talk about the importance of ritual and ceremony.
00:25:35
Speaker
in their lives and the work that they're doing.
00:25:37
Speaker
So having that community choir and having a stability within the app to learn from each other and to not just see ritual as this one flat kind of version, but to really see it can be something that you can adapt in your own life.
00:25:50
Speaker
So
00:25:51
Speaker
Majority of people that come into our app usually come through grief and loss.
00:25:54
Speaker
That's usually when we feel that ceremony shaped hole when we're like, oh, God, like I don't know what to do.
00:26:00
Speaker
And I know I need to do something and I don't know where to start.
00:26:03
Speaker
But our hope is that when you come in, then you can kind of poke around and realize, you know, when you're maybe you're, you know, your niece is about to graduate from kindergarten and you want to create a ceremony to kind of honor that big stage in her life, because that's huge for a little kid.
00:26:18
Speaker
Or maybe your friend is going through a divorce or.
00:26:21
Speaker
Maybe, you know, your mom is turning the age that her mother was when she died and you want to kind of support and reach out and offer ideas.
00:26:29
Speaker
So it really becomes this language that we can all communicate through.
00:26:32
Speaker
And the app is free to use for certain parts.
00:26:36
Speaker
You know, you can download it in the App Store.
00:26:37
Speaker
You can access it in a web browser.
00:26:40
Speaker
We really try to make sure that there's something there for people who want to just explore and poke around and
00:26:46
Speaker
And then we have a monthly or yearly subscription.
00:26:49
Speaker
So we have membership models.
00:26:50
Speaker
We have an online community that you can join.
00:26:53
Speaker
You can ask questions of others, kind of put it out there, like say, you know, we're selling our childhood home.
00:26:58
Speaker
What should I do?
00:26:59
Speaker
What have other people done?
00:27:00
Speaker
Again, that crowdsourcing mentality.
Conclusion and App Promotion
00:27:02
Speaker
So yeah, that's what we're, it's still just me and my husband and we're, you know, working hard to try to make it accessible to people wherever they are in the world and to also listen and grow and change based on what people are requesting of us.
00:27:16
Speaker
We want to stay small and nimble.
00:27:17
Speaker
We don't want to become this giant kind of machine that just pumps out rituals.
00:27:22
Speaker
That's the opposite of what we're doing.
00:27:24
Speaker
It sounds like it's for everyone.
00:27:25
Speaker
That's what we make it on that one.
00:27:29
Speaker
Sounds like that everyone should have in their phone or their iPad or whatever other device you have.
00:27:34
Speaker
It sounds like it sounds very important.
00:27:36
Speaker
I mean, it sounds like there's just there's something in there for everyone, which is amazing.
00:27:40
Speaker
Megan, thank you so much for joining us.
00:27:42
Speaker
This has been enlightening.
00:27:44
Speaker
I did not expect to shed some tears, honestly, today.
00:27:47
Speaker
and we've talked about some harrowing stuff on the glam reaper but I can usually hold it in today must be just an emotional day which is good okay and so thank you for giving me that bit of release yeah thank you so much for coming on and we'll keep an eye on your journey and everyone download Be Ceremonial Half wow thank you so much yeah it was lovely to be here and
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think the more we realize how natural it is to have these rituals and ceremonies in our life, the less scary it feels.
00:28:16
Speaker
So thanks for the chat.