Ritual Healing

Rituals both preserve, and change, and indeed healing, in a way, preserves as well as changes, or more accurately maybe, both preserves and transforms. Typically rituals can be represented as healing social relationships (with people, spirits, gods, or from oppression, violence or feud). To connect with the healing that is always available to us in ritual, four typologies are useful:

1) Understand the afflicting forces

Underlying all ritual healing are beliefs regarding what it is to be ill and the causes of that illness - be they natural, supernatural, external, internal, cosmic or personal. Explanations for illness may include:

- unhealthy living;

- succumbing to physical, emotional, humeral or energetic imbalance;

- suppressed emotion;

- anti-social feeling;

- inability to manage stress;

- sin;

- lack of faith;

- ritual impurity

- inattention to ancestors or ghosts.

Illness may be the manifestation of individual punishment or collective failing or a natural outcome of imbalances. Illness can also be attributed to others:

-the sins of the fathers visited upon the children;

- other-inflicted trauma;

- curses or the 'evil eye';

- sorcery or witchcraft.

2) Typology of Ritual Healing

Ritual objects across cultures tend to be similar - crystals, holy water, six pointed stars and crosses tend to feature heavily. Interestingly, the pursuit of healing will often lead a person out of their culturally identified background into exotic social contact - interreligious dialogue in some ways begins right here.

Simpler clusters of healing technique centre on the laws of contagion and similarity in the manipulation of sacred objects. Amulets, scapulars, and milagros all feature here.

Prayer and meditation form a second cluster - formulaic, spontaneous, silent, chanted - a divine response is sought and elicited.

The third cluster involves removing the problematic object or experience - 'casting out spirits' via confession, exorcism, purification public or private, physical or spiritual.

The fourth is the opposite - imbibing for example herbal tea or inserting acupuncture needles or ingesting homeopathic remedy.

The fifth is the laying on of hands - from massage to Reiki.

The sixth is the introduction of trance. Spirit possessions, hypnotic chant, glossolalia and invocation of imagery can induce altered states of consciousness. Typically a ritualised social interaction is part of a healing setting - usually the intent of reconciliation is a key. Embodied spirits may be invoked or symbolic representation of energies may be included.

The final typology is cognitive restructuring. The work of a Christian Science healer, for example is to help the patient realise that their suffering is not real.

3) Procedures, Settings and Roles

Which ritual, conducted by who and under what terms is a distinction point for healing work - domestic settings and grandmothers and mothers are typically the first-line expert healers across cultures, so different from the Western medical centre. The 'cult of affliction' (people suffering similar symptoms banding together) is another evident healing structure. Religious groups may also gather with the expressed intent of helping the congregation to heal.

In some situations, the power role of the healer is maximal, with special clothing, insignia or honorific title to deign the hierarchy.

In the mid range, Reiki practitioners for example channel the healing force, but are not the healing agent.

The minor role range includes the work of hospital chaplains and congregational nurses, for example, who accompany the person through the healing process but are in no way carrying out the healing.

Group healing models include the Twelve Step programs, where community is essential to the healing process. There are also (an old fave) self-help rituals.

Across any of these, theologies enter the picture, articulating the nature of the sacred and it's relationship to the affliction. Healing occurs at one end of the spectrum where the God/s are the healer, and ritual functions to invite that sacred presence, or in the middle of the spectrum where the sacred expresses comfort, courage and guidance, or at the very other end where a biomedical 'ritual' is conducted in a clinical environment.

d) The Process of Ritual Healing

In part the process of ritual healing opens new transformative possibilities, although little research has been conducted into individual's actual experiences during the ritual. A new narrative relationship is available through reframing - a 'rhetorical action' that persuades the supplicant to approach his/her experiences from a new perspective. Two distinct processes need to occur - one is a shift to a felt possibility of transformation, the other is a n enactment of a global psychological mechanism such as regression, catharsis (!) or placebo effect. The symbolic repertoire that is engaged through ritual healing not only communicates cultural meanings, but also has it's meaning reworked during performance by the collective. Healing is therefore re-defined, to a certain extent, for every situation within which it is enacted.

Source: Sered, S.S., & Barnes. L.L. (2007). Ch 13 'Teaching Healing Rituals/ Ritual Healing' in Teaching Ritual, Ed. Catherine Bell, Oxford University Press, 195-208.

Collective social realities. Surely we are custom-built to be able to leverage off their structure in these times of media-distributed (nearly global) cultural norms? Hmmm.