تفسیر درس

Family Ritual Magic – Commentary

Hello and welcome to the commentary. Let’s talk specifically about how to create, how to design family rituals, because you want to think about this. You know, we all have certain family rituals that we got from our parents, from our grandparents that are kind of traditions in our family.

Those are good, keep doing those of course. Of course, you want to keep those, but you can also add more family rituals or you can even modify some of your existing family traditions to make them even more powerful.

Because that’s what this is about right? The purpose of these family rituals, these traditions and rituals is to create a stronger family. That means stronger connections, more love and respect between all of the members of your family. It also means a stronger connection to the values, the important values of your family.

So that’s the thing I think a lot of people miss with family traditions, especially now. I think maybe in the past people understood this more, but now a lot of people will do family rituals, family traditions but they don’t think more deeply about them. I mean, even in my own case, that story I told about the Christmas visit to my family, to my extended family and that happened every year. So I can see there were lots of good values that were communicated to me in that, especially love and connection and respect for my extended family; very important.

But my parents didn’t really think consciously about family rituals, they just did what… they wanted to see their family so we went there and that’s fine, but you can make it even more powerful, even more powerful when you think about it more carefully, more consciously and you think, well how could I make this ritual more powerful so that it creates a stronger connection between my children so they have good relationships with each other, and between myself and my children, between myself and my husband or wife, or maybe it’s uncles and aunts whatever, or even just friends?

How can you strengthen those connections, and strengthen the connection to values that are important to you, whatever those values are? Maybe for you or your family generosity is an important value. Maybe it’s forgiveness. Maybe it’s understanding. Maybe it’s strength and respect. I don’t know, you decide but the point is to think about these things more consciously.

And, of course, the other thing you can do besides those big family traditions that you already have, you can actually create new ones. This is where there’s a really big opportunity, so that you start actually consciously leading your family. This is what the true topic is this month. It’s really about leadership. It’s about being a conscious leader of your family, of your tribe, of your group. Instead of doing everything automatically the way you used to do it or without thinking, instead you start to consciously plan and design traditions, rituals, actions daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, for specific purposes. This is leadership. This is leadership.

You’re designing these rituals to communicate and strengthen relationships and values and you’re doing it by choice and you’re thinking carefully about it, so that they become more and more and more powerful. This is leadership. This is your responsibility, your job as a leader of your family, of your tribe, of your group.

So let’s talk specifically, how do you do it? How do you design a ritual? What does a ritual need? To be very, very, very simple, a very simple way to think about this is that any ritual should have like basically, a beginning, a middle and an ending. But let’s talk about how to make each of these more powerful.

The beginning we can call the initiation that just means the starting, the beginning, the initiation, the start of the ritual. It’s often good for any kind of ritual to have some kind of clear beginning, a symbolic beginning, instead of just starting with just kind of doing it. Instead you have some kind of special way to start it, so everybody realizes ah, this ritual or this tradition is now starting.

Why is that important? Well, it’s important because it creates greater attention.

Remember we talked in the main lesson about how attention, greater attentiveness… another way to say this is greater mindfulness, greater awareness. That’s an important part of making these rituals more magical, more meaningful. If people are distracted and they’re not paying attention, then the ritual will not be very powerful. It will not be very meaningful, you want everybody focused in the present moment. How you do that is you have some very clear, symbolic special way to begin the ritual.

For example, Christmas dinner… so we would all come to my grandmother’s house and there were all these very special steps before we would start eating. I mean, first of all of course, there was cooking the meal. So my grandmother would be running around in the kitchen and maybe my mom and aunts and uncles helping. Then they would set up the table. So they would set up the table in a special way, not the normal way, because they had a lot of guests. And they would put a special tablecloth, a special decoration on top of the table that was only used for like these special moments, these special times such as Christmas or Thanksgiving for us, our holiday.

Then, when we started the meal, usually there would be some little like, maybe everyone would hold hands and someone would say a small little prayer or say thank you or something like that.

You know, thank you for this food or something like that. Simple, but still a special little beginning and it would again focus everybody’s attention. Because maybe before the meal started everyone’s just kind of talking and chatting, maybe some people are watching TV, some people are reading. Everyone’s kind of distracted, so then we all come, we sit down and we do this special little opening, this special beginning. Say ah, now the special Christmas meal is beginning and everybody’s attention focuses on that moment. They stop all the other distractions. People stop talking. They stop their conversations. They stop watching television.

They stop reading. Everyone comes to this one point, they all sit down together, hold hands and do this little special beginning of the meal, and then we start eating.

So you can see how having a special initiation, a special beginning for every ritual is super important and it’s because it gets people to pay attention.

In meditation, for example, most meditation retreats, or courses or like at Buddhist temples they have special ways of beginning, you don’t just walk in, sit down and start meditating, not usually.

Usually they have incense, so they light some incense which creates this really nice smell and there’s a small ritual for that. So you light the incense, then you bow in a certain way, then usually there’s a bell (ding..), then the meditation starts. Again, why do they do that? To get the attention. To show this is beginning, we are beginning this special ritual of meditation in this example.

So it means, pay attention this is special, this is different and by using the bell and the incense and the very specific beginning, it gets everybody’s mind to focus on the present moment, to focus on what they’re doing, to focus on the ritual and the meaning of the ritual and the performance of the ritual. So it eliminates all the distractions and now everyone is focused.

That’s why you need these special beginnings.

So how do you do that? What kind of things can you do to start different rituals? Well, a sound. I mentioned a bell that they use in Buddhist temples a lot. Sounds are great. You can use a bell.

Some people use maybe a certain song which you can sing or which you can play. For example, when I was teaching Kindergarten children in Korea, my first teaching job, I would sing little songs to start different activities, like certain activities we would do every day.

One activity, for example, was cleaning up. I would want them to clean up the room, because they would make a big mess and they would throw stuff around. The room would get messy and I didn’t want to clean it myself, I wanted to teach them to be more responsible, so I had a cleanup song. I would start singing the little clean-up song– (clean up, clean up la, la, la, la, la)– and I would sing the same song. Then they would start to sing the same song with me and so they would become quiet and they would become focused and then they would immediately start to clean up the room.

Now that was not a very magical ritual. I didn’t have a deep purpose for it, but it’s a good example of a start. It would get them to immediately focus with this little song on, ah, now we’re changing our activity we’re going to focus on cleaning up. Especially with kids you could sing a little song to begin your special rituals or routines.

You can use gestures, like certain actions with your hands or your full body to start. I mentioned the bowing right, bowing that’s a gesture, it’s a movement. You can use candles, some people will do candles. You can have like a certain light, special lights, special decorations. Maybe you put up a certain decoration in the room or in your house and that shows that something’s starting. So, Christmas is a great example of that.

At my grandmothers they had all these special decorations and it shows ah, the Christmas holiday is starting now, because now we have put up the tree. We’ve put on the special lights on the tree and then we’ve put up these other special decorations around the house, boom, we are now in the Christmas holiday. The Christmas holiday has now officially started. It gives a clear beginning.

So next we have the middle, which we might call the main part of the ritual. The main part of the ritual that’s the part that communicates the value or the values or the meaning that you want to show. This is the part that really needs to have good attention. This is again why the beginning is so important, because you want to get everybody focused so that when you do the actual ritual, the main part of the ritual that everybody is focused and aware. And when you design these you want to make sure that you’re creating also, peak emotion. Meaning, a high level of positive emotion.

So when you design your rituals, constantly be thinking how can I increase the attention of everybody, so everyone’s more focused in the moment, the present moment not distracted?

And how can I increase the positive emotion of the moment, of the ritual? And how can I increase the value that I want to show? Maybe the value is togetherness. Maybe it’s loyalty to family. Maybe it’s, again, generosity. Whatever it is.

So, for example, again I’ll use Christmas as an example. When I was a kid we would, of course, be very excited to open our gifts, like I mentioned in the main lesson. But, there was a whole ritual about opening the gifts, we couldn’t just run in and start opening the gifts when we woke up. No, no, no, no that would be kind of communicating more selfishness right, so the value my family wanted to communicate, I think unconsciously they didn’t think about it maybe consciously, but unconsciously was that the whole family’s important. That we need to have and show gratitude for everybody, especially the people who are giving the gifts. So the children need to appreciate and show gratitude for the adults who were giving them these gifts, and that this is a time of togetherness, that we’re all doing this together, this is not about each person individually.

And so therefore, that was the whole ritual and it had rules, right? The actions had rules.

Everybody in the family, the whole family had to be in the room. We could not start to unwrap a gift, not even one gift until every single member of our family was in the same room with the tree, everyone was sitting, everyone was paying attention and focused.

So, if somebody got up and went to the bathroom, everyone had to stop. Can’t open gifts. If someone wasn’t awake yet we couldn’t start. And this used to make us crazy as kids, because one of my uncles would always wake up late. He was a night person, so he would always stay up late and he was always the last one to wake up in the morning. It was my Uncle Barry and we would always get frustrated, ah Uncle Barry, wake up! We would run into his room, bang on his door, because we couldn’t start to open our gifts until everyone was there. He was always the last one, so we would always get frustrated and have to wake him up, and bug him and drag him out of bed.

But what did it communicate to us? Unconsciously it communicated, the whole family’s important, everybody has to be there together.

Other things we had to do, we had to thank. When we opened a gift from somebody, like from my grandmother, we opened it, awe get excited yeah, and we had to then turn and look at my grandmother and say, oh thank you. So we had to individually thank every person for every individual gift. Of course, that was teaching us the value of gratitude and appreciation. So, even though I don’t think my parents really thought about it carefully, because these were just traditions that they also had from their family, but it’s such a powerful tradition, such a strong one that it really communicated very powerful values, and of course, a very magical ritual.

Because, of course, there were super high levels of positive emotion, excitement because of the gifts. So, for a kid, you’re opening gifts, getting toys so of course there’s excitement, excitement, very, very, very, very, very positive, right? So intense, positive emotions that’s one important point and then the other important part, the values, gratitude, family togetherness right that’s where the rules came in. That’s why the rules were important, the structure of the ritual. If it was just gifts, if they just let us run in and open up our gifts, nobody’s there, just get up early in the morning open them all up by ourselves yay. We would still have been excited. We would have had high peak emotion for sure, but no values, no meaning, just selfishness. Just kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah I got a bunch of fun stuff that’s fun, right.

Without thinking about the rules and the structure and the values, all the magic would have been gone. It’s the combination of the two that’s powerful that’s why you need both.

And then finally, of course, an ending. Again, I think, for most rituals not all, but for most rituals you want to have also, some kind of clear symbolic ending that shows aha, now this special time, now this special action, now this special ritual is now finished and now we’re going back into our more normal life, our normal way of doing things. And again, you can do that in the same way using sounds, gestures, having different rules, different things that you do to end the ritual.

So, again, the whole holiday of Christmas, how would we end it? Well, taking down the tree really was the symbolic, the clear symbol that Christmas is now over, right? Oh, we take down the Christmas tree. We take off the lights together, the whole family’d come in, we all take off the lights. We take off the decorations and the tree would be gone, and Christmas is done, right? So it gives a feeling of finishing, which is important too.

So, what I want you to do this month is to design rituals for your family, and to make them as magical as possible. So there’s two things you can do.

1. Look at the rituals you already have. Maybe holidays, maybe religious, maybe just traditions from your family.

Look at those and ask, how can I make them more powerful? What little steps could you add to make them even more powerful? Maybe make the beginning more clear and more symbolic.

Maybe add more rules or more ways of doing things that communicate certain values that are important to you. Maybe create certain actions so that there will be higher positive emotion.

That’s looking at ones you already have.

1. Create new ones. Create some new ones.

When you do this maybe the first thing to do is think of what values are important to me for our family? Or, what values do you want to make stronger in your family? Maybe it’s loyalty and togetherness. Maybe it’s generosity. Maybe it’s appreciation and gratitude. Maybe something else, communication, whatever it is it doesn’t matter. You decide what’s important.

Then, you think okay, what rituals, what repeated actions could we do, new ones that you just make completely new, that will communicate these values? That will show these values that will get us to use these values and then just design it. Make a beginning, make a middle, make an end. You can have visual parts to it. You can have sounds. You can have actions. And they can be big or small, remember too finally when you do these, you can have little daily ones.

Like, for example, eating breakfast. You could just eat breakfast, everybody just runs to the table, here’s their food, eat, eat, eat really fast and it’s all done. That’s not a ritual. But instead you could make it into a ritual by having a special way to begin the breakfast. Maybe again everybody holds hands and you say a small prayer of gratitude. Some people do that, and now it becomes a little ritual that communicates gratitude.

Maybe during breakfast you also, everybody has to say one positive thing they want to do that day. Right, so everybody says okay, today I’m going to… whatever. I’m going to clean my room so that mom will be happy, because the house will be cleaner, it doesn’t matter right. But you say every morning while we’re eating breakfast, each person’s going to say one positive thing they’re going to do or maybe they say one positive thing they’re grateful for. It’s up to you what value is important to you.

Again, by adding that little action to breakfast, instead of just everybody eating fast, you add some little thing like that that you do every single day, it becomes a ritual then that starts to communicate a value, that creates positive emotion, that starts to become more magical. Makes your family stronger. Creates very powerful, strong positive memories to for your children and for you. So you can make them very small, like just your everyday meals, brushing your teeth you could turn that into a ritual, anything you can turn into a ritual. So small or big, every day or once a year it’s up to you.

I look forward to hearing more about the rituals that you create or make stronger. Tell me about them on my Twitter at @ajhoge, is my name on Twitter. All right, have a great month.

See you next time. Bye for now.