One of the rituals I like to do is called a Letting Go Ceremony. It is based on a South American ritual of burying the past. What I’d like to guide you through today is a shortened, more simplified ceremony based on a more complex indigenous ceremony. With the right intention, it cannot go wrong.
Here’s how you perform your own Letting Go ceremony:
- Choose an object or objects which represent that which you would like to let go of.
These objects should be objects which you do not mind parting with (or objects that you feel an intense need to part with), which will serve to represent the things that you want to let go from your life. You don’t have to get fancy— these objects can be a rock or a stick or pinecone or any found object that can be representative of what you would like to let go of. The object could also be photographs of a specific person, time, or event, or even jewelry, or small articles of clothing. Anything that you don’t want to have anymore that represents this past that you want to let go from your present.
- Get a bandana, spread it out, and place your objects onto it.
I recommend using a red bandana. The red cloth is protective. Spread the cloth or bandana out, and you can put the objects you’ve collected into it.
- Add sacred herbs to add further meaning to your ceremony.
Also, I recommend including sacred herbs like tobacco, sage, cedar and sweet grass. The more sacred you can make this process the better. That can create a sense of sacred service. Sacred service just adds more meaning to your ceremony. Once you’ve added everything you want to your bandana, wrap the bandana up so that everything is folded inside of it.
- Decide whether you’d like to do the ceremony alone or with others.
You can do the Letting Go ceremony alone or with people. Traditionally, it is performed by a shaman and done with a group, but you should tailor it to you, make it personal. You can also add other elements of ceremony, if that feels right. For instance, you can play music, sing, or dance. In any case, when you want to begin, you should take hold of your bandana packet and let yourself feel the emotions that come up, whatever they may be, anger, sadness, fear… feel them as deeply as possible.
- Literally bury the packet.
Choose a spot, maybe in your backyard, or even in the soil of an indoor plant—if neither of these options are available to you, choose an outdoor spot that seems significant to you, like a hiking trail. As you dig a hole and place the bandana into the dirt, visualize that you are also burying the emotions that accompany your objects, that you are offering these things to the earth.
- Close out the ceremony.
To close the ceremony, you might say a prayer or a saying that is meaningful to you. Speak directly to these things that you are letting go of and commit to let go of them. This is an exercise to help you let go and integrate into the present. The letting go is a step in the process of letting unpleasant parts of your past go so they will not overwhelm you in the present. Essentially, through life we move forward and anything that we are still attached to can hold us back from progress. This is an exercise to honor our past, including people that we have lost for whatever reason, divorce, death, or even from just losing contact with each other. As we are willing to detach or let go, we then can integrate any lessons that we have learned in life from what we have let go. In the indigenous traditions, it is important to understand that everything is a cycle.
One of the basic principles is that this reality that we live in is interrelated and interdependent. Due to that, letting go is the step before we truly integrate the lessons we have learned. There are many steps to this process that culminate into forgiveness and in the coming weeks, we will describe them.
- Mark the spot where you buried your objects.
I recommend placing a rock atop the place where you buried your objects. You could use several rocks instead, or even stack a cairn on top of it. You could write some type of epitaph—just a statement that represents your letting go and an encouragement of integrating the lessons learned from these people or situations if there are lessons that you recognize. Even with this ritual, sometimes it can take a long time to see a positive attribute about something that was negative in your life.
- After some time, excavate.
After 90 days, you can dig up the objects you have buried and return them to nature or donate them if they are clean and not broken.
If you need further instruction on your Letting Go ceremony, please contact me so that we can speak further about this process.
