You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. (It’s also available on YouTube.)

Bruce Feiler is one of the most delightful people to speak with. He was on Pulling the Thread a few years ago talking about life transitions, which was the topic of one of his many bestselling books. And now he’s back for a conversation around his new book A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us.

Today, Bruce shares some incredible stories of people around the world who are creating rituals for all kinds of moments—from celebrating professional and personal milestones to honor walks for organ donors, miscarriage rituals, and Taylor Swift divorce parties.

Bruce also guides me through a ritual design class in real time, showing how simple—and powerful—it can be to create a ritual of connection in our own lives.

A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us

Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

Bruce Feiler on Pulling the Thread: “The Non-Linear Life”

Bruce’s Website

Follow Bruce on Instagram

ELISE:

Bruce, I love knowing in a world full of uncertainty that like clockwork every two years I can see you again and we can talk about a big thinky book that you’ve written. You are so prolific and you do ... It’s my cup of tea, but these sort of landmark books around these topics that I think you’re quite prophetic. I’m sure people have told you that before, but life is in the transitions, for example. Didn’t that come out concurrently with COVID as we were experiencing one massive transition together and this book on ritual I feel like is a solve. It’s an antidote for the chaos that so many of us feel. So how do you know what’s coming, Bruce?

BRUCE:

Well, let me start with what has just come, which is this incredible privilege and honor and frigging pure delight to talk to you. I am doing a few conversations around this publication. I have looked forward to none more than the on that we are about to have. As you said, you and I met in the bottom of the pandemic and I just felt a kind of kindred ... I have such incredible affection for you and I have, as I just said to you before we came on air, if we can use that term, such appreciation for your willingness to go to places and pull the rest of us to places that we might stop before we walk through that door. And your voice is so singular and my ability to be in this orbit just thrills me to such end. And so I just want to say that publicly.

I know everybody listening feels that and maybe they don’t get the chance to say it, but I’m going to say it on behalf of them. So thank you. Thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you. Thank you for keeping me. So

ELISE:

Sweet. Thank you.

BRUCE:

I’ll take

ELISE:

That. I’ll hold it. Thank you.

BRUCE:

Yes, good. Please do because I can’t mean it more if I said it another three times. I don’t know. A few times in my life I’ve been able to see around corners. My wife likes to tell this story that walking the Bible, my book about tracing the five books of Moses through three continents and five countries and four war zones came out in the spring of 2001 and six months later of course was nine eleven. By the way, that’s 25 years ago walking the Bible. Wild.

That is wild. 25 years this very month. And five days after nine eleven, we were sitting at a friend’s Shabbat table actually and everybody was talking about what happened. That was on a Tuesday, this was on a Saturday. And I was like, “Yeah, this is the greatest family viewed in history. This goes back to Abraham. He’s the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And as Linda, my wife tells this story. Everyone’s nodding along and we’re connecting it to the ancient world, exactly the kind of stuff that you have done that you tend to be more like in the middle ages, but you get the point. And at the end of this, I said, Trust me, Abraham’s going to be on the cover of Time Magazine a year from now. And as Linda says, everyone’s nodding their head and then suddenly when I said that everyone’s shaking their head like, “What are you talking about?”

And obviously a lot of people are listening to us, but as you can see over my shoulder, there’s a cover of Abraham. There’s a picture of Abraham on the cover of Time Magazine a year later. I actually happened to put him there. That was an excerpt of my book on Abraham and sort of the interfaith movement that it launched. So every now and then I can see Around Corners. A lot of times I see Around Corners and hit brick walls and I’m dead wrong. And what happened with Transitions was when I started that work in 2017 of collecting and analyzing stories, I wasn’t thinking about transitions. I was just like, no one knows how to tell their life story anymore. What can I do to help? Because this happened to me. I was a storyteller with a very linear life. I figured out what I wanted to do early.

I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married. I had children. That’s the linear fantasy that we all have. And then suddenly my life blew up in my 40s. I got cancer. As you remember, I had financial troubles and then my dad got Parkinson’s, got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So I was the storyteller who was ashamed to tell my story. And when I did, it turned out everyone has stories when their lives blow up. And so I started collecting these stories. It’s now been 500 that I’ve collected in less than a decade, all bulks of life, all 50 states. And I wrote that book Life is in the Transitions. And in 2019, I came forth and I said, “I’ve got this book on transitions. Why is no one talking about life transitions?

Why has there not been a major book on this since 1979?” And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. I thought I had seen around a corner and I was wrong. And then the pandemic hit and suddenly the entire planet was in a life transition at the same time for the first time in a century. So it turned out in that case I had a language for what people were feeling. And I think that kind of the reaction to that book is this in a lot of ways. And it was like, oh, this is a technical scientific term, but you’re putting words to something that I felt that I didn’t know there were words for. Linda likes to say that I have soft knowledge about hard things. And most public discourse is about having hard knowledge about hard things. You need a hot take, right?

I’m doing hot takes on soft topics and therefore it’s a little confusing, I think for the culture. And then in a lot of ways this happened again what was I think then three years later and yet again, I had a feeling that I couldn’t describe I was ashamed about. And then when I started talking about it, it turns out that a lot of people had that feeling too. And that’s what led us to this conversation.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, I’m sure you’re probably familiar with the work of Francis Weller who does so much work around initiation and death and he talks about these rough initiations and what you’re describing is I think what happens to all of us if we live long enough, which are these rough initiations. And then he also talks about how trauma is formed when we are not able to integrate what’s happened to us on the most basic level. And so when you think about our culture right now, we are lacking, although you make some really good arguments for these nascent rituals and initiations that have started to percolate throughout or they just look a little different, but we don’t have as many holding rituals as we once had and that’s bowling alone, that’s a lack of people going to church, myself included, I don’t go to serve, I’m an unaffiliated spiritual person, but we just don’t have it.

And it’s would you say to our detriment?

BRUCE:

Well, I think we’re in this space. So let me talk about how I came into this space and then sort of what I feel like I have found in this space, which I do think is a quite hopeful and profound message. So what happened was my wife and I are the parents of identical twin daughters as you know. 21 years ago we went from empty nest to full nest in 32 minutes and then 18 years later, it’s a lifequake. It was joyful, but it was a lifequake. Everything changed. 18 years later, we went from fullness to empty nest in 32 minutes when we dropped our daughters off at opposite end of the same college. And we came back to our home in Brooklyn where we live now and I walked in our front door and I felt homesick in my own home and it was exactly that feeling.

I was very precise about it. I was like, “You are out of your mind. You cannot tell anybody this word. That’s what a kid feels on their first sleepover or an adolescent feels when they go to a sleepaway camp here, this disgraced word and feeling, keep it to yourself.” And as we’ve been saying, I spent the previous many years thinking about lifequakes and life transitions, right? Life quake is a massive burst of change that when it has pain and confusion but can hold hope and renewal. That’s what life is in the transitions is about. And I though, “Oh, I’m ready for this. I’m the transition guy. I wrote a busselling book and I gave a TED Talk and I teach a TED course. I am supposed to be qualified in the public sense for this. “ And I thought, “I need a ritual. I need something.” And that’s when I stumbled into this paradox because it wasn’t just my children.

My dad had just died, my mom was aging, my marriage now needs to be renegotiated, all my friendships remade. And I had this feeling that so many of us have, we’re cheating on our friends with our phones, that we’ve sort of abdicated human connection in favor of isolated interaction through screens and I didn’t really know how to do it. And what I stumbled into is this paradox that I think shapes so much of our lives. And the essence of the paradox, it’s like three parts. Part number one is ritual works. Ritual is the original elemental human act. It’s the oldest algorithm that we have. We have evidence going back 300,000 years before we were anatomically human that the first things our ancestors did to connect them with others was to bury their dead and to have ceremonies and rituals. We have this inside caves with bones and ochre and all this kind of stuff.

And so we think today that religion created ritual, which has created a lot of the confusion that you mentioned, but in fact, it’s the other way around. We have organized ritual hundreds of thousands of years before we have organized religion. So you have ritual going back to our oldest humanity. And essentially when organized religion pops up in the late first millennium BCE, it sort of does a takeover in modern language and it’s incredible. And they create infrastructures. Five of the Catholic sacraments are about moments of transition, right? You go to the Jewish calendar, the Hinduka. Every calendar that organized religion has all these life rituals in the middle of it. And then so what’s happened when organized religion begins to sort of take a step back and then later more steps back from the center of public life, we have disengaged our lives from the ritual calendar that we grew up with.

And so just to put some numbers on that, Arnold Van Ganep, when he coins the phrase rites of passage, says that what he calls the big four life transitions in 1909, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. Okay. At that time the average lifespan was in the 40s, of course now it’s in the 80s. And most of those we’ve turned our backs on. People are not having birth rituals, coming of age rituals are in shambles. Only half of us are married anymore. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Now only half of us are married at any one time. And maybe you were aware of this because you are so attuned to these questions, but we’re not getting buried anymore. Only a third of us are buried now. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65% going to 80, only one in four is buried, only one in five has a ceremony of any kind.

ELISE:

Wow.

BRUCE:

So as you say, we are in what I call a celebration recession. So the traditional ways we’ve interacted and the number, if you add up, and I ran the numbers on this, you add up births and deaths and marriages. The average person in 1800 had 80% more ritual occasions than we have today. So it took us essentially a hundred centuries, that’s 10,000 years to create these collective occasions around moments of instability to mark them ceremony, celebration, retro, or whatever you want to call it. And it’s taken us 25 years to abandon them. So that would be depressing if it weren’t for this other side, which is what you hinted at, which is that alongside this recession, there’s a recovery going on of people inventing new rituals, new ways of gathering. Some are just new names like celebration of life or commitment ceremony. Some are silly like promposals and gender reveals, but some of them are very profound and I think dovetail with a lot of your work because they are shadow rituals that organized institutions did not mark.

So not just marriage but divorce, not just fertility but infertility, not just birth but still birth, not just first menstruation, but last menstruation, groaning and aging and coming into your voice as a mature woman. And so this is very interesting. And then they’re so creative, as you said, marking things that we never marked, cancer versaries, sober versaries, NICU graduations, adoption ceremonies, honor walks for people donating organs, first cell phone, okay, mom proms, daddy-daughter dances. You can go right down the line. I think the hopeful message that I feel that’s been hiding in playing sight is that there is a backlash going on to digital saturation, political polarization, now to the AI onslaught where people are saying, “I’m just not going to let these technologies take it over.” And it’s being led by young people and the core thing, then you can take this wherever you want to go.

The core way to understand this in my view is that top down pre-scripted hierarchical, often patriarchal life rituals that were forced on people are dying and in many cases dead. They are being replaced by bottom up, bespoke, individually created occasions to get together for occasions that were not previously honored, but that except in these long, non-linear lives that we have, we spend half of our adult lives in transition and we go through multiple members. I want a doula maybe for my birth of my child, but maybe for the death of my mother, but also for the closing of a company or for any project that you’re bringing to a close. So people, there’s this craving for gathering, but no one knows how to do it. And so a lot of what I’ve tried to do in a time to gather is the old rules don’t apply.

The new rules haven’t been written. Let’s come up with a code that anybody can do at any moment to help people together.

ELISE:

Preach.

There’s this moment at the beginning where you describe the groundstakes in a way that I thought was so beautiful and revelatory. And so do you mind if I read to you from your book?

BRUCE:

Please. Your course will be better than mine.

ELISE:

Okay. So you write, “All humans go through times when we feel out of sync, out of touch, or out of step with those around us. This uncertainty often escalates in moments of addition or subtraction. When someone joins the group, a baby, a spouse, when someone leaves the group, a death, a divorce, a coming of age, when someone destabilizes the group, gets sick, retires, sets off on a new path. A hallmark of being alive is that when we experience such moments of unbelonging, we take steps to reaffirm our belonging. We gather, we honor, we weep, we mourn, we feast, we dance, we listen, we share. When the group becomes tender, we tend the group. We all become groupkeepers. We turn to ritual. Beautiful. And I just think I was like, oh, this idea of being out of sync or falling out of belonging I think is so resonant to so many people.

It’s when you’re going through something and you’re like, how is everyone just carrying on like normal? My world has stopped for wonderful reasons or terrible reasons. And I think one, this creativity that you describe is inspiring. There’s no reason that we need ... I don’t think anyone’s really interested in following sort of old scripts necessarily, but it’s also an invitation I think that many, maybe it’s women more than men, I don’t know, but it’s hard to be like, I need to call my circle. I need a ritual. And maybe as this becomes more pronounced in the culture, people will recognize that there’s a way to do this, to acknowledge whatever they’re going through in a really beautiful way. Can you talk, I mean, this is in some ways I think one example, but I was so moved by the origin story of these honor walks.

BRUCE:

Incredible.

ELISE:

Can you tell that story?

BRUCE:

I’m happy to tell this story. I’m going to give you a warning.

ELISE:

Yeah. You’re going

BRUCE:

To cry? No and everybody ... I might cry. Sometimes I’ll cry when I tell the story. And it teased everybody else. I’m going to tell that story and then you and I are going to do, everybody should know. I gave you no advanced warning, but you and I are going to do a real time ritual design class once I tell this story.

ELISE:

Oh my God.

BRUCE:

Amazing.

ELISE:

Okay.

BRUCE:

Okay. We’re going to find something in your life and we’re going to show absolutely how easy it is to create a ritual of connection. Okay? So you can think about this. I gave you whatever the length of this story is. To go back to the quote and to go back to the core issue that’s going on, a nounless, verbless, unable to be described in this sense of craving longing, but a frustration that what is the script that my longing fits into? That’s a core problem. If you go back to the kind of essence of the work that I’ve done since I’ve known you and that you and I are now having our third conversation about, it’s that we have linear expectations for our lives, but we have non-linear real lives. And that gap between the expectations of linearity and the reality of non-linearity produces this sense that my life is off schedule or off kilter or somehow the life I’m living is not the life I want to be living.

What’s going on now and that work in essence was about how individuals manage their lives. And this work that I’ve been on now is essentially how groups manage themselves. How do families, how do neighborhoods, how do teams, how do communities, what goes on? And so therefore we think that we know back to the script we were told, you’re supposed to have four big life rituals in order, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. And by the way, if you choose not to get married or have children or get married and have divorced, it’s like you’re off schedule and you could be decades before one of these pre-approved rituals is supposed to come your way. But now that people are decoupled and have permission to not follow them, they’re saying, “I want rituals when my life takes a swirl or a curve or a wallop or whatever it might be.

One of those people is a woman named Missy Holiday. She grows up in a small town in Ohio. Father’s the mayor and fire achieved mother teaches Presbyterian Sunday school. She grows up, becomes a nurse, gets married and moves to Indianapolis. She comes back home one weekend. Her younger sister whispers that she’s about to get engaged the next week, gets in her car, drives to work, slides on some ice and wraps her car around a tree. So suddenly we have a big wallop. We have a lifequake in the middle of this family. They’re trained, they get her to the hospital. They’re to brain tests, she’s not living, but her body is still functioning. At six in the morning, a doctor they never met walks in and say, “She’s an organ donor. We’re taking her away.” And boom, within minutes, she’s out the door. And Missy is just like, “I don’t want anybody to have this done in such a horrific way as I just experienced.” So she talks to her husband, she quits the nursing and she moves back home and she starts working in a donor support group and she finds incredible conflict between and among the three core groups, the family, the hospital, and the people who are trying to use the organs to save another life.

And she says, “You know what? “ And then she turns on the TV one day and she sees one of those incredibly beautiful rituals to honor a police officer, Slain, where they line the hallway. We all have that visual. And we remember, especially for those of us who remember nine eleven and she said, “You know what? I need a ritual. I’m not a ritual designer, but what I’m going to ... “ So she starts talking to everybody. She starts thinking, “What does this group need? What does that group need?” And she creates a ritual. And so what happens is, so she plans, it takes a long time. She plans it. The first time they do it, they put the living deceased person, if you will, into a gurney. She puts this phone with a Spotify account. The family picks Annie’s song. They push the body out into the hallway and the entire, and I mean the entire hospital staff lined in blue scrubs is aligned the hallway to pay respect with a flameless blue and yellow color that’s the colors of organ donation.

They push the body down. They get exactly five feet from the double doors where the body is going to go into the operating room where the organs can be harvested. The family says goodbye and she calls this an honor walk and one of her rules is no one can take a picture. She makes an exception for the woman who pushed the widow. The next morning, Missy, the woman I’m talking to, her phone blows up, “I want to do an honor walk. How do I solve this problem? What do I do there?” It turns out that woman posts the picture on Facebook. It gets two million likes. There are 50 donor support organizations in this country and dozens around the world. They all do honor walks. They have a quarter of a billion views on YouTube. There was one on the front page of my hometown paper in Savannah, Georgia within the last few weeks.

So this is a perfect hall of fame example of a new modern ritual. Well, then nobody knew what was coming. First of all, it wouldn’t have been in the ancient world because they didn’t or your beloved middle ages because there would be no organ donation, right? That’s a 75-year-old custom at all. It’s a pain no one realized that they have, but it’s a pain that can meaningfully be bombed by having a group ceremony. And I’ve got them for adoption ceremonies for adoption reunion ceremonies. And as you said, a lot of these are led by women, but there’s also a parallel thing going on in the men’s movement called Masogi, which is the medieval ritual of jumping into cold waterfalls in Japan that has been modernized for men athletes. And so there’s this Masogi movement where people want to do once a year, men mostly, but not all men, do one very hard thing that might take their life to give them confidence that they can do other hard things.

I’m talking about cutting two holes in a frozen lake and swimming from one to the other. Swimming with sharks, paddling in the Amazon with alligators, very extreme. In the NBA when this started, they had a boulder in the bottom of San Bernardino Harbor and it was like, you got to move the boulder a mile, but you got to go down 10 feet and everybody moves at about six inches and you have to do teamwork. And so this has been taken over by Joe Rogan and all these people of an example of kind of male bonding let’s use experience. Masogi has two rules. The first rule is you can have only a 50% chance of survival in what you do and the second is don’t die. So in the same way that women have rewritten and brought old things like placenta rituals and stillbirth ritual, my favorite chapter, I mean, Linda’s favorite chapter in the book is the Taylor Swift Divorce Party about this woman who creates a new ritual around divorce with shake it off cupcakes and we are never ever getting back together napkins.

And it’s like you can be sad that your marriage is over but you don’t want to be alone. My favorite is the one about the revival of new ways to honor deceased children because no organized religion had a way to mark stillbirth. In Judaism, Maimonide is the greatest thinker of all time. If you die before 31 days, it’s as if you never lived. The Catholic church, if you die without being baptized, you’re not going to heaven. In Ireland, people would take these dads, usually would take these stillborn babies, take them to the edge of town, bury them under abandoned churches so that water coming down from the roof would give them what are called Eavesdrop burials surreptitiously baptized them so they could go to heaven invented an entirely new ritual that was outside the mainstream and now women are bringing that with miscarriage rituals that are incredibly powerful.

So it’s all the same thing. As one person said to me, a millennial ritual designer, I need a ritual when I want it when I need it. And she talked about the double mastectomy ritual for her friend. So anything will work. Okay. So with that, I’m turning to you, my friend. We’re going to create a ritual now in real time to show people that these are the three or five things you knew to do a ritual. So give us something that you’re willing to share. Could be something personal, could be a milestone with a family member, could be a professional project. What is something that you’re going through now that we’re going to design you a ritual for? And it could be joyful like a graduation or a birthday or a milestone professional moment. It could be mournful like a loss of a loved one or a loss of a job or the death of a pet or whatever it might be.

ELISE:

All right. I mean, I am going through some stuff maybe without being specific. How about a ritual for a non-life-threatening health journey?

BRUCE:

Perfect. Okay. We’re going to go through a non-life-threatening health matter and everybody listening to us know someone who’s going through that. Okay, here’s what we need. You need five things to make a ritual successful. Okay. What is a ritual? A ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay. It’s an act because we’re doing something. We’re not talking, we’re doing something. It’s shared it’s going to connect us. It’s unnecessary because you don’t need to get down on one knee to get engaged or wear black to mourn or circle the bride six times to get married or put vermilion in your hair. These are unnecessities that become necessities because we give them collective meaning. And back to homesickness, we want to feel safe and secure in the ideal version of the home that we have. Okay? So first question is, first thing you do is you need boundaries.

Okay. We need to welcome, barring this phrase from the Catholic church, welcome with joy. We need to create a circle, open the circle. Okay. Where are we doing this? Let’s start with that. We doing this in your backyard, we doing it at your home, we’re doing the top of a mountain, we’re doing it on a beach. In

ELISE:

Nature. Somewhere, we’re

BRUCE:

Doing it in

ELISE:

Nature. Yes.

BRUCE:

We’re doing it in nature. Okay? Yes. And who are we inviting?

ELISE:

My husband and some close girlfriends who enjoyed the woo. Okay.

BRUCE:

Who enjoyed the woo. I’m going to give you a woo-free one, but that’s fine. Some people like the woo. So we’re going to have a group of six, eight, 10?

ELISE:

Six.

BRUCE:

Six. Okay, fine. We’re going to go to the wits. First thing, we’ve now traveled to nature. We’ve got to open the circle. Okay. We got to light a candle. We got to form flowers. So what are we going to do to set the boundary and the purpose of the boundary? Think about this. Circuses have rings, trials have courtrooms. Okay. Yogas have yoga thing. Wash your feet. I went to a cacao ceremony in Bali, like you wash your feet before you walk in. I will say that anything I’m doing here I’ve done before. So we didn’t say this, so I’ll just take a second. I then, after figuring out this is what I wanted to do, I went to rituals in 16 countries on six continents, group baptism at the Vatican, traditional bride price in South Africa adolescent tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, 10 funerals in a week in Ireland.

Everything I’m bringing, cold plunging, forest bathing, I’ve done it all. And we’re going to bring some of these ideas. So what’s the boundary? The boundary is supposed to say outside we were that, but inside we are this. How are we going to set the boundary at the start of this thing?

ELISE:

Everyone is going to bring a totem and we’re going to set a circle with each person placing a totemic item.

BRUCE:

Perfect. And they’re going to place it at their feet in the middle of the circle or?

ELISE:

At their back.

BRUCE:

At their back. Okay, fine. So it’d be perfect. It’s the boundary. It’s exactly what we’re looking for here. Okay. Number two, we need stakes. What we need to do is define the tension and direct our intention. So we need to somehow say, okay, we are here because one of us is experiencing some issues around their body or mind or general wellbeing. We can just focus on that or everybody could focus on their own. So you could open it up that way. So we need to set the stakes. How are we setting the stakes? We’re here to celebrate because they’re getting married. We’re here to celebrate they’re about to have a baby. Define the tension and identify the intention. That could be a song, that could be remarks, that could be lighting a candle. How are we going to define the stakes?

ELISE:

We’re going to breed together. There’s going to be a sort of short meditation to get everyone’s parasympathetic, to get us all into space.

BRUCE:

A lot of data that rituals. Yeah. They align us. Yep.

ELISE:

Yeah, yeah. Getting into alignment. I as someone who’s very uncomfortable with attention, always want everything to be a shared. So to me, it becomes a ritual where everyone is bringing some part of it or relating to it in some way in themselves.

BRUCE:

So you offer an invitation. Okay. I’m thinking about this. You’re welcome to think about me, but really I’d prefer for you to think about you. I wouldn’t advise making them, but you open it up inviting them to think about a similar moment of tension in their own lives. Could be health, could be personal, could be professional, whatever it might be. Okay, good. We’ve now defined the stakes here. Now we’re going to go to number three. What you need is you need the peace plan. You need compromise. The rituals inherently life has conflict. And back to like, oh, it’s woo-woo. They’re great rituals can be wonderful. And that’s a lot of the language. But the truth is that’s not one of their main functions. One of their main functions is to modulate the conflict.

You and I are getting married. You want a big wedding? I want a small wedding. Okay. You want your preacher. I want my sister. Okay. You want to have your sorority sisters by you. I want to be alone. There’s conflict. Okay. You’re not having a baby. You want to do this to the baby. You want to baptize the baby or circumcise the baby. I don’t want to do that. The ritual, this is like the truest and least romantic thing, but it’s about compromised rehearsal. Because if you don’t get the tensions out, I’m like, I’ll just tell you a quick story while you think about what are we going to do in the middle. But a quick story, when my dad died eight years after that suicide spree that I described, what kept him alive was I would send him an email every Monday morning and he would write it down until weeks before he died.

He finished a 65,000 word memoir, one story, one question, one week at a time. Wow. And when he died and I flew back from Brooklyn where I lived to Georgia where I’m from and we were talking with the rabbi and my mother says she doesn’t want dirt thrown on the casket. She finds it barbaric. She wants long stem yellow roses. My sister says the dirt’s my favorite part. It’s the only part that I like. Long stem yellow roses are too hallmark. And nobody was moving. And I was like, “Okay, Rabbi, I think I got to call you back.” And then I sort of middle childhood my way through a compromise by doing what I later learned ritual designers do all the time. What’s really after what you’re saying, mom? Is this about assimilation about appearances? What’s really about this to my sister? And so what do we do?

I was like to my sister, she lived with a guy for 62 years. She wants long stem yellow roses. Let’s get her some roses. So we ended up getting three dozen long stem yellow roses. This was sort of a COVID graveside funeral, so it was small. And then my mom didn’t like dirt. My dad loved nothing more than walking on the beach on Tyvee Island, Georgia. So we got little packets of sand and we gave everyone a choice. The ritual surfaced the conflict and then the ritual resolved the conflict. So what you want now in this middle part is a way to honor that everybody’s experiencing something different. I will give you an example. I was asked last week to lead a ritual at TED and so it was a ritual renewal. It ended up being standing room only and they asked me to do it again two days later and we had 50 people in the room and I went around and gave everybody a cube of bitter chocolate.

We divided into pears because in a group of 50, it’s too much to share. So we divided into pairs, gave everybody a piece of bitter chocolate, take a minute or two, tell your partner what is it that you’re struggling with right now and then your partner will share what they’re struggling with. And then we passed around little cubes sections of sweet chocolate and then resolve the tension on your tongue, eat the sweet chocolate and then tell your partner what would be a sweet outcome of this tension.

What is something we can do either to the group because they’re six or maybe even better pair people off so they can share with someone what it is that they’ve identified is their intention. So what can we do there?

ELISE:

I’d want it shared collectively. I think that ... That’s such a good question. I’m trying to think of the internal conflict. I mean, I think maybe in rituals when we have to go out on a journey by ourselves, even

BRUCE:

Though

ELISE:

Everyone’s impacted, the whole family system is impacted. That conflict to me is what’s the path of the mountain and-

BRUCE:

Oh, I like this. Go with this. Right. So how could people simulate their own path up the mountain? I mean, that would be interesting. You could send people off to reflect on what path they are on, go, “This is taken directly from forest bath work. Go find something in nature that calls you, reflect on what you’re finding. It could be a tree, a blade of grass, a bird, a flower, a tree that’s fallen over, a tree stump. Go take a walk, see something, find something that reflects the journey that you’re on and then come back and share with the group what it is, what path you’re going to be on. You could do kind of a mini forest bathing. This feels already like a forest bathing thing. And what’s interesting about forest bathing, which began, for those of you who don’t know, began in the 80s in Japan where 80% of Japan is forested, but only 20% is habitable.

So you got 160 million people living in an area the size of South Carolina and the forestry surface wanted to get them to go. And so they invented this thing called Shin Runyoku, which is forest bathing is the English term that stuck. And now this is done in 70 countries around the world and it’s different from a walk in the park. It’s different from taking your dog for a walk in the woods because you do it shared. You both have individual experiences and then come back and share. So I think there’s something here you could easily borrow from far. Go take a little walk, se what draws you and then come back with the group and share what you did.

ELISE:

I love that.

BRUCE:

Okay.

ELISE:

Yeah. Okay.

BRUCE:

Okay. Okay, let’s keep going. So we’ve got boundaries, we’ve got stakes. We now have this compromise. We want everybody to do their own thing and then share with the group. Now what you need is empathy. This is the hold space idea that comes up so often. We need to offer people support for whatever journey they are on. When we did this at TED, I had people when they first walked in say what was giving them joy at that moment, that was welcome with joy. We had this flameless candles and then they had the chocolate thing where they learned their partner’s struggle and what was their sweet dream. And then I had these empty bowls and then everyone put the flameless candle in the bowl and shared a wish for their partner. I wish you a healthy recovery, right? I wish you finding the work that you want.

I wish you release from the guilt you feel about that. I wish you to not hold yourself to such perfectionism and standards and to be forgiving to yourself. And then what happened was I asked people to do this one by one and over time they just naturally started going up in the same pairs that they were in holding hands as if giving a wedding vow and shared their wish directly into the eyes of the other person. And what was powerful about that, it’s a reminder, Elise, that all of these rituals have every other one in them. As you know, I’ve rebranded them in this book, not birth, coming of age, marriage, death, but welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning and renewing. I learned this from my kids because when we had this ritual before they went to college, they were sadder about the end of their childhood than they were about the insecurity of going into young adulthood.

I think we felt that as parents. I was sadder about the losing and missing the day-to-day dadding that I’m a very involved dad, as you might imagine, would do than I was about what turned out to be a different way of relating to young adults. So what can we do now that we’ve heard everyone else’s journey to offer them solace, comfort? I’m here to celebrate with you. I’m here to mourn with you. I’m here to laugh with you. I’m here to weep. It’s all there in Ecclesiastes. So what can we do now to honor the stories that other people have shared and say you’re not alone?

ELISE:

I mean, I think just the communion of it alone is an opportunity for that. As I’m listening, I’m sure everyone listening to actually relate to this too. It’s like I love doing this for other people. There’s nothing more joyful. I was talking about this with my friend Richard Christensen last night. He was talking about the role of hosting and service and how affirming and wonderful it is to take ... His dog just died and he was very sick at the end and Richard was talking about tending to this dog freeway and taking him outside to go to the bathroom, just lining up his pills. And now that freeway is gone, just the emptiness of not being able to serve. And I feel that. I love taking care of people and being there and supporting them in these moments. And yet I so struggle to let anyone do that for me.

It’s such a ... I have a reflexive ... I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it is, but I think what I’m going through right now is actually a direct confrontation with me about taking my own medicine. And as a person of faith, I have so much faith in everyone else’s lives or ability to ... I’m like, I can see the path, I can understand the lesson, et cetera. And then I don’t weirdly have faith and I don’t have it for myself. Does that make sense? And so-

BRUCE:

I appreciate that. Look, first of all, this reminds me when I was sick, when I got cancer at 43 with three-year-old identical twin daughters.

ELISE:

Bone cancer, right?

BRUCE:

Bone cancer in my left femur. So I was on crutches for two years. I was on chemo for a year. I was on a cane for a year after that. My leg was rebuilt. I had a surgery, had a cancer that only a hundred adults a year get and a surgery only two people before me had ever been lucky enough to have. And yeah, I remember sitting in the second floor window in our bedroom, which is one of the few places I could go for much of it, looking out the window and down and people walking like, “You don’t have cancer. You’re not worried about dying.” This sort of hostility that came out of my fear of being alone and being isolated and it totally upended the normal rules of the group. So suddenly now my mother and my mother, like the people above my generation were taking care of me and of course that meant I was treated like a kid because that’s how caregiving goes and then I’m supposed to be parenting my kids at the same time.

So this is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s the instability in the group and the group has to remake itself and reassign roles. And that’s a lot of what we’re talking, this beautiful death ritual described by a designer named Sarah Kerr. When she comes into a family when the dad’s about to die at the patriarch, there’s this murky grayness and she said everything was out of place and she puts their hands, have them anoint the body, put their hand on the body. She talks about there being an island of the living and an island of the dead. And our job is to push the living to go to the island of the dead. And you do that by calling out the people around Aunt Sarah, Uncle Bobby, the dog, this new person is calling to join you. And then she says there’s this moment of incredible pain and realization where you’re looking around and, “We’re the family now.” And then she has them take the same oil and anoint everybody of the living family and saying, “Okay, we’re beginning to realize that all the roles that the patriarch played, we now have to assume in some form or another the group has to remake itself.

That’s why we’re doing this. “ So since you say you’re not comfortable doing this, what I might recommend here is that you go first, you pick somebody else in the circle and say, “Here’s my wish for you for the future. This is what I will vow to do to hold you up to walk by your side to celebrate you if you need to be celebrated or mourn with you if you need to be mourned.” And then that person will pick somebody else and sooner or later there are not that many people in the circle someone’s going to have to come to you and hold space for you. Here’s how we’re going to close. We’re going to close with a moment of hope.

I talked to this designer, I mentioned her earlier, Faith is her name and she talked to young people, hundreds and hundreds of coffees with people saying things she didn’t imagine. I spent my whole life wanting to do this career. I got a major and then I got to graduate school. I started doing it three years in. I don’t like it. I want to find love, but I’m not ready. My body’s not ready for love. I love my parents, but I need some distance from my things that nobody would’ve ever imagined to create a ritual. And she’s the one who did this double mastectomy ritual and where she just invited people over, we’re not going to heal, we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to hold space. They bought gifts, they bought comfy clothing because we all know those cancer surgeries have drains and tubes and monitors.

And what faith said to me was, “What I’m listening for in the ritual is the deepest fear and the highest hope.”

ELISE:

Beautiful.

BRUCE:

And the purpose of the ritual is to turn the fear into hope. So we want to end with a moment of hope. What I’ve been doing in rituals is taking pebbles and giving people permanent, colorful markers and having them write their hope on this pebble. Got this idea from a ritual designer who when she had miscarriages, she went to the beach and she took stones and she threw them into the water. She said, people thought I was crazy, but I wrote out the names I had picked for my child, the dreams I had for that child, all those things that I had to let go. So what I asked people to do was to write stones, write their hope out in a word or a phrase, go to the middle of the circuit, put it upside down where it remains anonymous. And I went to an exquisite celebration of life for a man in his forties who died by suicide in Dublin.

It was in the crematorium and the woman, this incredible woman, Karen Dempsey is her name. She goes by the Instagram moniker, bald priestess. She has alopecia, baldhead, beautiful makeup. Remember I said that the rituals, they don’t avoid the conflict. They lean into the conflict. She said, “We’re here to honor Carl’s life and to deal with our own confusion of how Carl chose to end that life. And I have here a bowl of pebbles near where he died. I invite you to come take a pebble, take it home with you and keep it and remember Carl or give it back to nature to return it to Carl lived and where Carl died. And so then what we do is everybody then goes up, goes, picks up someone else’s stone, reads their hope out loud and then carries that home, that hope with them. So we now are now trying to fulfill not only our own hope but the hope of somebody else in our group.

We’ve created a kind of web of hope that will last going into the future. So what can we do to end this ritual, Elise, where everybody can have a moment of hope? And you know this, I’m sure you know this term, your best possible self, right? This is the world you live in.

You can’t achieve your best possible self if you don’t identify your best possible self, right? This is our best possible selves. What is this group in its greatest capacity? So how are we going to end your ritual?

ELISE:

I am going to borrow everyone’s totem for the journey. Oh my gosh.

BRUCE:

So you’re going to take home their totems.

ELISE:

I’m going to take home everyone’s totem. They’re going to give them to me first. Totems.

I’m going to take home with the totems for safekeeping stewardship and to take where I’m glowing and then I’ll be back and I’ll return them.

BRUCE:

Perfect. So in another ritual at the end of the journey, my recommendation would be that you consider, I’ll do it as an invitation, not as a wagging my finger, have them and view it with a hope.

ELISE:

Yeah, exactly. I’m going to have them ... Yeah, now I’m reconceiving. And so maybe I’m going to get a grid. I’m going to have everyone choose a crystal and then I’m going to have them charge it over the course of the ritual and give it back to me and I can grit it for myself. Little compass.

BRUCE:

So on the journey that you’re about to undertake, I just pulled for those of you who are not watching us on YouTube, I pulled the stone that I ended up with when I did this in TED and I’ll hold it up to the camera and it says fear into hope. I love that. So that was someone else’s hope and it’s now my hope. Good handwriting by the way.

That’s fine. That’s so funny. It was like the people losing hair and others with people with hair. And I went sauna and cold pledging in Copenhagen. And what I noticed was everybody was thinner, fitter, and more tattooed than mine. And there were three rounds. And then when the guy who was leading this sound of comb pledge ritual called Soundagoose, he said to me, yeah, everybody’s checking everybody out in the first one and the second they’re neutral. And by the end, they’re focused on their own journey. I was like, oh yeah, I fit that to the T. So yeah, the good handwriting, but that’s what back to the scene around the corners and what the thing that we feel to me is the craving for connection. And that’s the unifying idea now, but we don’t know how to connect, which is in effect what a time to gather my offering here is in effect, an invitation.

If you come on this journey, you’re going to, by the way, meet the most amazing people and we’ve just talked about some of them, go to these extraordinary things backstage, but generally feel empowered to do this for yourself. By the way, let’s say one more thing about this journey, about this ritual we just designed took us 15 minutes and doesn’t cost a dollar. You don’t need to do a lot. We’re not doing dishes after this is over. We don’t have to have elaborate invitation. You don’t have to have a degree. You can just say, “I’m in a place I need to connect with others.” And there is a blueprint of togetherness. There are simple things you can do today, tonight, tomorrow, this afternoon, this summer for a graduation, a birthday party, a shower, a pregnancy, or a loss of a loved one, a loss of a pet, a loss of a job, a loss of a stage of life.

Whatever you’re feeling, you can create a ritual, you will make yourself happier and you’ll make everybody in the group happier.

ELISE:

Thank you and thank you for this book and you’re just delightful. So a time to gather, everyone. It’s always a good time to gather. Bruce talked about this in the beginning, this idea that this feeling of homesickness and this longing, and I think that that’s something that almost to a one, just like a vast majority of us carry. I think it’s largely intergenerational and it gets into these questions of indigeneity and how cultural events both chosen and deeply not chosen have moved us around the globe across centuries. And it’s this, where did I come from? You could say in a spiritual sense that home is way beyond the earthly plane and that we all come from somewhere else. I do think some of us are aliens. That’s a whole nother conversation, friends. But anyway, the way that he positions rituals as bringing back into cohesiveness after you’ve been disconnected I think is such a helpful reframe, sort of bringing you back into the rhythm or the pulse of the group when you feel out of sync.

And then before I go, I just wanted to ... He writes about this guy, Ezra Bookman, who designs rituals, is a ritual designer and he talks about the difference and this was, I thought, just fun and illuminating. Rituals are intentional, symbolic, elevated actions. Routines are intentional repeated actions and habits are automatic repeated actions. I think that’s so clarifying. Habits, routines, rituals, and rituals, as Bruce said, are completely not necessary and yet they carry intense symbolic value. So let’s have more of them. I think we need that more than ever. Allright, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing.

It’s so helpful. Thank you.