Celebrating nine years as a Celebrant!

This May marks nine years that I’ve been serving my community as a celebrant. Thank you to all of the people that I have worked with.  Thank you for trusting me with your stories. For inviting me into your lives. For co-creating touching and meaningful ceremonies. 
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Some of the types of ceremonies I’ve helped co-create:

• Mother Blessing 
• Adoption Ceremony
• Child Welcoming Ceremony
• Commitment Ceremony
• Wedding
• Vow Renewal 
• Relationship Transition
• Uncoupling Ceremony
• Solstice and Equinox Rituals
• Graveside service
• Celebration of Life

Some things I’ve learned doing ceremony:

• I do this work because I long for spiritual belonging. The religion I grew up in traumatized me, and I’ve longed ever since to create a set of seasonal, personal, and community rituals and spiritual practices that feel like home. 
• Woven Threads is a spiritual practice, not just a business. I am called to this work, I am spiritually guided by this practice. Hustle culture and capitalism are bullshit. I am here to help us remember the rituals that are our birthright. I do this work to heal myself, each other, and the earth. 
• Running a business brings you face to face with yourself! I’ve had ample opportunity to face my own demons of imposter syndrome, perfectionism, fear of failure, anxiety. It’s good, healing work to engage in!
• Ceremony is about story, it’s about authoring the meaning of our lives. It’s about how we make meaning of the transitions, phases, significant events we move through. Ceremony can be a bridge from one identity to another.
• Ceremony strengthens community. Often ceremony happens in community - we gather our nearest and dearest around us to affirm, witness, support and celebrate us. In this way, ceremony is a practice for strengthening community bonds, including the bonds we have with the earth, the elements. 
• Unseen forces are available to support our ceremony work. The ancestors, our spirit guides, the elemental spirits, Source, animals and plants are all participants in ceremony. I am slowly learning how to widen the circle of ceremony to work with these spirits and helpers. 
• Ritual still scares and intrigues me. Sometimes I struggle to create space in my personal life for my own ritual practices. And some of the time that resistance is based on fear–that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m going to get it wrong, that I’m gonna mess with the spirit world in an unskilled way. We’re not alone in relearning this path to ritual wholeness. 

In many ways I still feel like a beginner when it comes to creating ceremony. I want to sink further into spiritual, earth-honouring ceremony styles where our spiritual guides feel present and guiding the ceremony, where rituals happen using the wisdom of the elements (earth, air, fire and water), of the ancestors, of our spiritual helpers and guides.