May 9-11, 2008
Ritual is the daily practice of staying in touch with the spirit world, with the ancestors, with nature, and with the gods.
We need rituals to invite the spirit world to help us work through our pain. “A body in pain is a soul in longing.”
Western civilization is suffering a great sickness of the soul. We’re microcosms of the world we inhabit, so we find the marks of this dysfunctional culture in us, but we’re also infused with the divine. Malidoma eloquently, vividly, and compassionately describes the catastrophic results of the lack of ceremony and rituals in Western culture. In our bones, we all carry the deep memory of our tribal roots and need the life-giving process of experiencing a thriving community. The indigenous person within each of us yearns to be connected to a tribe and hungers for the transcendence that ritual offers.
Malidoma speaks of tribal experiences in down-to-earth Western terms that are nonetheless startling, original, and urgent. We can learn the art of designing and performing rituals appropriate to our own culture and begin to feel connected again. Drawing on the African Dagara cosmology as a spiritual compass, we will explore our inner and outer lives through ritual, teachings, dialogue, and ceremony. Rituals heal. Our separation is illusory and our reconnection to the healing forces of nature and of spirit is always possible. Young people aged 13 and up who want to come are welcome at half their elder’s fee.
Malidoma Somé is a fully initiated medicine man, shaman, and a diviner among his own people, the Dagara in Burkina Faso of West Africa. When he was four, he was taken to the seminary for 15 years. He then returned to the Dagara and underwent a harrowing month-long initiation ritual in the wilderness. His name translates loosely as “be friends with the stranger/enemy,” and his elders sent him to bring the wisdom of his people to the West. A gifted healer, lecturer, and teacher, he holds doctorates in political science from the Sorbonne and in literature from Brandeis, but he considers his traditional initiation into ancestral knowledge his true education. His widely acclaimed books include Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community, Of Water and the Spirit, and The Healing Wisdom of Africa. He’s currently writing books about Ancestors and Gatekeepers. Malidoma travels throughout the world bringing a message of hope, healing, and reconciliation through the powerful tools of ritual and community building.
“Ritual is the greatest and most detailed book on ritual that I have ever read.”
— Robert Bly