Ritual is So Scary!
Being in the center of the ritual space giving liturgy for a lot of people seems to be very glamorous. Everyone is watching you, hanging on every word. The spot light is on you. If you take a breath, the seekers take a breath. If you close your eyes, then so do the seekers. For that moment you are leading ritual. It’s a lot of pressure and very rewarding. For some of us that is one of the most stressful and scary things in the entire world.
Before we perform ritual we need to be clear on why we are doing it. Is it a calling? Is someone asking us to do it? Are we doing it to be in front of people stroking our own ego? Actually, none of those reasons are necessarily good or bad. It is what it is. The outcome is what matters. When we perform ritual, are we causing transformation in each other? Is there change in consciousness and how we relate to the spirits and deity?
The hard part is getting in front of people and having the courage to speak those inspirational lines of liturgy. Our palms and foreheads sweat. Our heart is going a mile a minute and our tummies feel like the butterflies have mated, laid eggs and started a colony! Simply put, we are scared out of our minds! This is normal. There is a reason the term “stage fright” is a normal part of our vocabulary. It is because we all feel nervousness and anxiety over speaking in front of people from time to time. It takes time to get used to doing it. Sometimes we pick it up very quickly and other times it takes practice and practice and practice. Every person is different in terms of how they relate to each experience in the process of their development. Therefore, no one is more of a “natural” or has more “talent”. People deal with fear and stress differently than others.
Fear. We are biologically programmed to experience fear. It is uncomfortable and sometimes painful. The feeling of “fear” is what keeps us safe and out of danger. The person who experiences no fear at all will constantly put his life at risk. Sometimes, that same fear that keeps us safe will keep us from experiencing the joys and adventures of life. There are many reasons why have fears. Some of them are experience based and some of them are emotionally and psychologically based. No matter what the reason fear is there and we have to decide what we want to do about it, or not.
When we focus on fear, when it pertains to getting in front of people and delivering lines for a play, performing liturgy, or just letting people get to know us personally it is something that we can overcome with some practice. I hear all the time how “I’m not made for it” or “I’m not good enough”. When we allow ourselves to believe those things it is the same equivalent of putting handcuffs on our selves and wondering why we cant move. It does become a choice to do something or not. I wont say that facing your fear or doing something in spite of fear wont hurt. But that is what courage truly is.
I want to use my own experience to show you an example of facing the fear of speaking in front of people. As long as I can remember I have stuttered every time I spoke. When I was younger, it was a lot worse than it is now and it often took me several minutes just to say one sentence. Most of the time, adults and friends were patient with me, sometimes they were not. Speaking in general was the most painful and hard thing for me to do. In grade school I had to take speech pathology classes, which at the time, were designed for me to simply get through the sentence and not actually learn how to speak clearly. I never spoke in class and reading in front of the class was a fate worse than death.
In high school, I had watched several theatre performances and found such beauty and art in theatre that I longed to do those performances as well. However, I could not talk well to save my life. So how was I ever going to learn to be an actor! Well, I had already been humiliated in front of everyone I knew with my stutter, so it couldn’t get worse than that! Well it did!!! In theatre, there is no patience while someone gets through their lines. You just do it! My theatre coach, in my freshmen year of high school, suggested I take another class. I wasn’t going to hear of it!! Why should everyone else get the opportunity and not me….I was scared of going forward. But the alternative was giving up and never living the art was wanted to live!
My teacher agreed to let me practice. And I did. I ran through lines a thousand times, every time still stuttering at least once or twice. So, I ran through the lines a thousand more times. I got bit parts here and there. By my junior year, I was one of the lead actors in a state wide competition play called One Act. I still stuttered from time to time, but I had practiced so much I learned to get through it as gracefully as I could. I then majored in theatre in college and even got parts in Universities I didn’t belong to because the director couldn’t find anyone better in their own campus.
The whole time I felt fear. Fear of failing. Fear of rejection. Fear of wasting all those hours for nothing. But I made a choice to do it. The rewards were sometimes small. Sometimes I hit huge milestones. Every show I performed was little further a long my path as a performer. In the end, it taught me how to gracefully use those talents for public speaking, leadership, and ritual. Seekers are always telling me how they are thankful and moved by my performance in ritual.
So, is facing fear scary? Yes. Is ritual scary sometimes? Defiantly. But we do it to better ourselves, our community, and honor the gods. At the end of the day, if we fail, we can give ourselves the gratification of saying, “I did my best. I practiced as much as I could. I can do better next time!”
