Let Life Become the Ceremony: Remembering Ritual in a World That Forgot

A return to rhythm, reverence, and the sacred ordinary

Every morning, my mother and I shared a coffee.

Not a spiritual coffee. Not an “intentional cacao ceremony” with Spotify mantras and ethical ceramics. Just coffee. Cheap, hot, thick. Sometimes instant. Often too strong. Served with silence, routine, and that soft, invisible gravity that love creates when it’s too deep to explain and too ordinary to notice.

We didn’t talk about it. We just did it. Day after day, season after season. That tiny act, over years, became a thread that stitched time together. Through heartbreak, joy, job loss, birthdays, breakups, grief, peace. It was just coffee. But it was never just coffee. It was a ritual. A tether. A sacrament disguised in a cup. The sacred ordinary.

And now? I look back and realize: that small act held the universe of our relationship. Without it, maybe we would’ve become strangers with familiar DNA. With it, we remembered gently, daily, and deeply, that we belonged to each other.

And honestly this is so deep that just repeating this act five days ago when I arrived at my parents in France opened this deep sacred portal of writing about rituals.

This is how it often begins. A repeated act. A shared space. A sacred rhythm. Until something ancient wakes up in our bones and says, ah yes… this is how we remember who we are.

And truthfully? It’s what I’ve missed the most while living far abroad. Amid all the ceremonies I’ve held, the lands I’ve prayed on, and the fires I’ve tended, that morning coffee ritual with my mother remained one of the most soul-rooted I’ve ever known. Not because it was grandiose. But because it was true.

It’s what I cherish most when I return home to visit. And now, as I prepare to move back near my parents, it’s one of the things I look forward to reclaiming the most. Not just the coffee. But the rhythm. The silence. The soft voice of love that needs no explanation, only repetition.

And that same thread runs through my work. In the Sacred Purpose Blueprint, some of the most powerful transformations come not through lofty teachings, but through these so-called “small” rituals, though there’s really no such thing when they’re done with presence. A breath spoken aloud. A fire tended with reverence. A simple act, repeated with soul, can collapse decades of disconnection.

That truth has shaped everything I’m now creating in Sacred Business Mastery. As I prepare to open the doors this summer, I knew from the beginning: this couldn’t be another strategy-first, spirit-last kind of thing. The ritual can’t come later, it has to be the seed. The way we build, the way we price, the way we serve, the way we dream into form… it all has to carry breath, rhythm, and depth. Otherwise, we’re not building sacred business, we’re just rebranding the machine.

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And while that moment with my mother was quiet, ordinary, and deeply personal, it also speaks to something much larger.

And that’s what this essay is really about.
Not the coffee, not the programs, though they hold pieces of it.

It’s about how we humans are ritual-making creatures, how we long for rhythm, how we suffer without it, and how we've confused performance with presence. It’s about sacred repetition, the difference between ritual and ceremony, and why so many of us feel spiritually malnourished even while doing “spiritual things.”

In these pages, I want to walk you through the sacred, the psychological, the scientific, and the soul-level truths of ritual; what we’ve lost, what we can reclaim, and how we can begin again.

Because we live in a time where most people are starved of that remembering.

Modern life, especially in the West, has become a ritual desert. We have plenty of habits, plenty of routines, plenty of algorithms... but few real rituals. We scroll instead of bow. We hustle instead of harvest. We collapse into bed instead of closing the day with gratitude and release. We sprint from one achievement to the next, like ritual or rest would somehow make us... inefficient.

Even the spiritual world (yes, I’m going there), has become a marketplace of rituals-for-rent. Grids, smoke, chants, cacao, feathers, crystals, even whole “lineages” often lifted out of context and turned into Instagramable sequences of faux-sacred choreography. Many well-intentioned. Some beautiful. But often unrooted. Often un-listened for. Often rehearsed rather than revealed.

We’ve replaced belonging with branding. Replaced lineage with Google searches. Replaced elders with influencers. And somehow expect our souls to still feel held.

Ritual is not performance. Ritual is relationship.

It is not something you do to appear spiritual. It is something that arises from listening deeply to life again and again and again. Ritual doesn’t make you special. It makes you humble. It doesn’t make you powerful. It reminds you that power is already everywhere. Ritual doesn’t demand that you ascend. It insists you descend into the soil, the breath, the grief, the fire, the mess, the ordinary miracle of existence.

And we need it now. More than ever.

Because without it, we drift. We scroll. We numb. We feel something’s missing but can’t name it. We start collecting beliefs like trinkets, instead of building bone-deep wisdom. We start mimicking ceremonies with no context and wonder why we still feel hollow. We start saying things like “good vibes only” and “manifesting abundance” while our ancestors weep in the corner, wondering why we forgot to feed them.
And worse sometimes, in our hunger, we start stealing offerings from other altars. Not knowing the language, not knowing the cost, not knowing the Spirit we're invoking, just grasping at sacred things we haven’t earned, hoping they’ll fill the silence we won’t sit with.

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This essay is about remembering
(well, to be honest, I think all my essays are about that, because we, me included, forget too often).

About what ritual truly is and isn’t. About how it lives in both physics and prayer, in both psychology and poetry. About the difference between rituals of the heart and rituals of the machine. About why your nervous system is begging for ritual, and your community is starved without it. About how ceremony differs and sometimes deceives. About the rituals we inherit, the ones we rebel against, and the ones we must now create for a time such as this.

We’ll look at rituals in ancient wisdom traditions, neuroscience, animist cosmology, the workplace, parenting, and your coffee cup. We’ll talk about rituals that heal, and those that harm. We’ll go into the deep roots, and I’ll give you practices, not to follow me, but to follow you. Or better: to follow the rhythm of the world you are trying to remember how to belong to.

🌀 In this essay, I explore:
• The difference between ritual and ceremony
• The nervous system’s deep need for rhythm and safety
• Rituals that heal, and rituals that harm
• Corporate rituals, spiritual mimicry, and sacred performance
• The ritualistic nature of the cosmos, bees, land, and breath
• How to re-ritualize your life, gently, honestly, without performance
• Parenting, grief, boundaries, repetition, and everyday devotion

This is not a list of tools.
It’s a remembering.
A return to rhythm, reverence, and the sacred ordinary.

And yes, this part of the essay is paid. Not because the sacred should be gated. But because writing like this is my ritual. And sacred work asks for sacred reciprocity. Ayni. Exchange. Firewood for the flame. You can still go out into the forest and pray for free. But this essay? It’s taken days to write, decades to live, and lifetimes to remember.

If it calls to you, come sit by the fire and keep reading.