describe, with all the detail that you can remember, a ritual you experienced in your life

Please describe, with all the detail that you can remember, a ritual you experienced in your life (with your family, at school, with your sports team, with friends, in border zones, with the police, etc.) – a ritual that was deeply empowering for you, or deeply disempowering. By the end of the term, you will have written about nine ritual experiences that have shaped you as a person, and your friends, your family, and your relation to the world. Please look deeply. Remember important details, or moments, that carried and still carry emotional, visceral, mental, and physical charge. Please use this writing experience as a way of thinking through and understanding the dynamics in your life. Please treat the recording of each experience with the care, weight, recognition, compassion, and insight that it deserves. And please treat each person who is involved with your experience with generosity and awareness. Every connection or disconnection in your life is maintained by ritual. Ritual creates relationships, strengthens them, damages them, or breaks them. Ritual is the substance, warp, and weave of the fabric of life. Ritual actions can be unconscious or extremely intentional. Once you begin to examine the rituals in your life, you recognize patterns and repetitions. Very few elements of your life are random. When you begin to understand and consciously refine your daily and lifelong rituals, both enacted and imagined, you create change. Gradually, your habit energies transform. There are new possibilities for “normal.”