The beginning

For nearly two years I have been professionally researching joy, play, fun and ecstasy for a company called the Fun Fed. The work has taken me deep into the corridors of the British Library, to Brazil, California, Scotland, New York, all over England, and my own back garden.

A strand of insight has emerged that I find utterly compelling.

According to historian Barbara Ehrenreich, western entertainment culture was previously, broadly speaking, 'festivities', and prior to becoming festivities, these activities were 'rituals.'

I currently define 'rituals' as activities which fuse entertainment, arts, community, meaning, healing and spirituality.

These activities were and are often somehow facilitated. Not necessarily in the ways we might expect, not by someone issuing instructions; they could be facilitated by tradition, by everyone knowing what to do and what should happen, by a bunch of local leaders stirring up activity in different parts.

Often rituals are facilitated by an individual and it seems that in many cultures this person is the 'shaman.' Facilitators, men and women who hold the singing, the dancing, the order of 'ceremonies', who are rooted in this world and also, perhaps, have an open connection with the non-material aliveness, and help mediate the community's relationship with this aliveness.

I defined it succinctly in an email recently:

Contemporary:  Culturally resonant
Social: Happening in groups
Shamanism: Serving wellbeing, in connection with spirit.

I don't know about medical shamanism. One of the big roles of the shaman is to heal illness by going through trance into the spirit world where he or she will learn the cause of the patient's pain and, then come back to the ordinary plane of consciousness to remedy the problem.

"Plane of consciousness." It sounds terribly out there doesn't it.

It feels quite clear to me. I've been in 'ecstatic' states, states of being dissolved, three or four times in my life and it's clear that these are states in which I am not asleep, I am not dreaming, I am not awake in the normal sense, and I am not dead. I am conscious, but in an altogether different way to the everyday.

These states are rare but they are sometimes part of our human experience and they're recognised by a variety of languages and cultures. And who knows how many different shades of this state there are, or indeed other states. I don't.

So. Medical shamanism aside, I don't know about that, I have no instinct for it. I'm interested in social shamanism, social ritual. Events that bring us together and lift us up and enrich life somehow. And the contemporary version, the kind that works for you and me and everyday people, the kind that is not draped in purple velvet and crystals, or myths that we find no resonance with, but is just kind of of us and with us.

So I presented this thinking to the team and got cautious permission to continue my research in this avenue, but separating it off for now from the main business of the organisation.

So I'm creating a new blog for it where I'll post my notes and document my explorations.

I'm going to start by writing up everything I've been involved with so far that might be called a 'ritual'.