S5 E2 Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 2 - The Event)

March 1, 2024

Episode Summary

So it’s the big day. The day of the Techno Cosmic Wedding. With your virtual invitation in hand, you walk into the venue. Prayer flags hang from the ceiling above you. A set of handmade neon signs rests neatly in the window ledge, spelling out “Marry Me Colleen” The neon question mark at the end is no longer working, but that’s okay because she said yes.

Episode Resources

→ Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 1 - The Plan): https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s5-e1-techno-cosmic-wedding-1

→ Matthew Fox: https://www.matthewfox.org/

→ Michelle Jordan: https://www.facebook.com/michelle.jordan.9461

→ "I Am Not Afraid" Song: https://www.daraackerman.com/new-album-skyland

→ A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/07/31/joyful-wedding-can-still-make-room-grief/

→ “We Have Come to be Danced” Poem: https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2019/10/hard-times-require-furious-dancing-we-have-come-to-be-danced-jewel-mathieson/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Thomas: Keep an eye out for trains.

Torres: Oh. Really?

Thomas: Yes.

Torres: Okay. Why? What are you gonna do…

Thomas: Stop.

Torres: …have them stop them?

Thomas: No. We stop and we wait.

Torres: Oh, we stop.

Thomas: We wait for trains to go by. It's part of the process.

Torres: Oh. I see. Okay. [LAUGHS] Choo-choo.

Thomas: Shhhh. Not now. [LAUGHES]

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. So welcome back to our discussion about the Techno Cosmic Wedding. On last month’s episode, we told you about how this unusual ceremony came to be, why it was modeled on an event called the Techno Cosmic Mass, and how it welcomed something you don’t normally see at a wedding - grief. Today my husband Rodrigo and I are going to walk you through the day itself, starting a few weeks before the day itself when things started to go off the rails.

Torres: So a couple things that happened before the actual wedding day were that couple of unexpected events happened. One was that… you were in a car accident. And you're healthy and whole.

Thomas: Yes. But I was a little bit sore.

Torres: But you were, yes. Very sore.

Thomas: And I couldn’t dance. Which was terrible, because I was having a dancing wedding and I couldn't dance.

Torres: So sorry.

Thomas: And what was much bigger than that was a week later… was that your father passed away very suddenly.

Torres: Right. Yeah, it was a big deal and he was in Mexico City. So it meant a trip down right before our wedding basically and with my mom who was also an officiant at our wedding. So we basically, just a few days before the wedding… so I ended up going down and coming back and then having a wedding. So it was… it was a lot.

Thomas: Yeah. You had a friend who said that he would fill in for you if you didn't get back. [LAUGHS] That was funny.

Torres: That was funny.

Thomas: Yeah, but that was such a really bumpy ride into the day. Yeah, it was like so much confusion and heartbreak going into... I feel like we kind of went into the day, the transition, the wedding, the ceremony - we went into a kind of broken wide open in different ways, you know? And I think more than we even expected to, we had to give in and give over and trust our team. And then, on the wedding day itself the house was… our house which is normally so quiet was full of family and… We had grandchildren on the back porch making signs and people were cooking… Your daughter was making the wedding cake, and you guys are all in the front room doing the tech. And I was probably lying down for my back.

Torres: Yeah. The speakers and the…

Thomas: And then at some point we sent them all away. Everybody was gone and we got the afternoon or a few hours before the wedding to just be alone and we sent them all… They all were done at the facility, the site getting ready and that's when I handed out drawings of the altars, like sketches. You know, “This is what I want it to look like and here's all the material you need for it.” They took, like all the stuff and the plans and they went and we just were like, “Well we're going to put it together and…” We had our time to connect and, you know, prepare.

After spending our time together, we went to the venue with our open hearts and my healing body. We were excited to see what our team had built.

Torres: For me, walking in was really cool because we hadn’t been there for it all being set up. We were kind of like guests walking in because it was like, “Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool.” And yeah, and kind of seeing how, like… the care that our friends had put into setting everything up how we wanted it, and how… To me it just felt like everything was right on. Like the altars and the Moon Tent and the… you know, having the screens and the and the videos, it just felt, like, really immersive and it felt really good.

So we spent those initial few minutes looking around, kind of in awe really, at what a year of living and breathing the Techno Cosmic Mass had helped us manifest: The world’s first Techno Cosmic Wedding. There were five big altars, dedicated to the relationship in all its forms, relationship with self, friendships, romance, family and the Earth. There were two huge video screens, a sound system, and lighting.

It was important for us to attend the event as bride and groom and leave the work of holding the space and moving everyone through the event to our event managers, our officiants, and our Weaver of Context Michelle Jordan. Michelle had worked for many years with the Mass team, so we knew she would do a great job and she was awesome.

Torres: There was the calling of the directions, which I thought was really cool. And then somewhere between there and the next thing, there was this sort of tech problem.

Thomas: Oh, yeah.

Torres: That was also really interesting, because I'm usually the tech guy, and usually my instinct is to go fix it. And so I was like, “Okay, I'm not gonna go fix it.” You know, I think it was like, a couple of minutes that it took to resolve but those minutes seemed like really long. So it's just like, “Okay, I'm just gonna just kind of let it be.” But then it was resolved and people were… responded well to it being resolved, and everybody's happy that it was resolved and then we didn't have any problem, any tech problems after that. So that was really nice.

Thomas: I think our Weaver of Context made a little song up about it because she was wonderful in the moment. She did a really good job of explaining what was happening and really holding everybody's like, you know, hands and hearts throughout the whole day.

[MUSIC]

If you joined us for last month’s episode, you learned a lot about The Techno Cosmic Mass, which is the event we based our wedding on. Here’s the Cliff Notes version: The spiritual tradition underlying the Techno Cosmic Mass is called Creation Spirituality. It was started by Theologian Matthew Fox. The Mass is built on the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality which are the Via Positiva, celebrating joy, awe, and wonder; the Via Negativa, honoring darkness, loss, and grief; the Via Creativa, celebrating ourselves as divinely creative beings, and lastly the Via Transformativa, honoring our role as spiritual warriors. Like the Mass, the wedding had four distinct parts, beginning with the Via Positiva.

Thomas: Like we had mentioned before, our friend Dara sang often throughout the ceremony. And one of the first things we did during the Via Positiva section was we did a circle dance. [MUSIC] It was a very simple dance, we had everybody in a big circle and it really loosened everybody up, got everybody singing, got everybody… got their bodies more present in the space, which was part of that, you know, “Come join us. We're here together in this community event. You know, you're not just going to be sitting in a chair watching a wedding.”

Torres: …watching what’s happening. Yeah.

Thomas: And then after that, our wonderful friend Shanti read the “We Have Come To Be Danced” poem and then we segued into the trance dance.

Poem Being Read at Event: (We Have Come to Be Danced by Jewel Mathieson)

The mother may I?

Yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance

The olly olly oxen free free free dance

The everyone can come to our heaven dance.

We have come to be danced

Where the kingdoms collide

In the cathedral of flesh

To burn back into the light

To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray

To root in skin sanctuary

We have come to be danced.

WE HAVE COME

[MUSIC]

Thomas: And the trance dance was wonderful. I remember I fought for it to be 20 minutes. People were like, “That's too long, that’s too long.” And I'm like, “No, no, no! 20 minute dance!” And it was wonderful. I loved it even though I couldn't dance. I loved it. It was a dance to sweat your prayers. It was a dance to wake up your body and, you know…

Torres: And it was… it had techno music and lights, like techno lights so it had that rave sort of feature of the Techno Cosmic Mass. Which was really cool.

Thomas: Yes. That was really good. And then we transitioned into the Via Negativa. What do you remember about that?

Torres: Well, for me personally it was really powerful because my dad had died and so I… that was like a grieving time for me and you… you know, grieving for you not being able to dance. And yeah so it felt good to be able to like be my whole self in the space and not have to kind of set that apart from like, “Oh I'm just supposed to be happy and have a smiley face and not feel my feelings.”

Thomas: Yeah, I really explored on season one of Shame Piñata with a lot of guests about… that a wedding… a wedding is a transition and with every transition, there's loss as well as something new. And we don't usually create room for that loss - for ourselves and then for our loved ones, you know, who maybe like they're losing a sister or they're losing a daughter or son or… With a wedding supposed to be a certain happy way there's not room for those feelings. So it was really special to have… to have room… I feel like the Via Negativa is such a jewel and as a concept and such a wonderful addition to any ceremony to have a time dedicated to whatever's there that’s sad, that wants to be expressed. Because then, in addition to getting to express it and be our whole selves, we can come out with that like you know going through, like after the rain, you know that like fresh feeling after the… Like during the… we did a passing of the peace right after the Via Negativa and most of us had like red noses and we were… our faces were all wet and crying and it was just had a really hard opening very beautiful soft authentic quality.

Torres: Yeah, totally. And like good way to connect with people and that space

Thomas: Yeah, that's very beautiful.

Thomas: And then we went on to the Via Creativa celebrating the cosmos, celebrating our role as creators in creation. And our good friend Sean was our officiant for that section and we actually watched a little bit of a Neil deGrasse Tyson video….

Torres: Right.

Thomas: …which was wonderful.

Torres: About the cosmos, the cosmos in how we're connected to it.

Thomas: And then I believe there was the flower-pelting ceremony which was designed to get everybody back up off the floor and moving, moving, moving again before the actual ceremony where they'd be sitting for a while.

[MUSIC]

So we’ve reached the Via Transformativa, the final path of the four paths. And in our case, the time when the wedding ceremony would be happening. Rodrigo put on his wedding jacket and I grabbed my veil. Our mothers took up their positions and everyone found their chair.

Torres: After having used the room as a dance floor, then it was set up with chairs… several rows of chairs in concentric circles with two aisle ways through.

Thomas: Yeah, I remember we started. Like, if it's a clock, you started at twelve o'clock, and I started at six o'clock. So then you would have walked twelve to six. And I would walk from six to twelve alone around the outside of the circle. And then when we got to the opposite point, the 180 degrees from where we started, we met our mom, our moms. And then we walked in, me with my mom, you with your mom, to the middle. And our moms were holding our rings, like my mom was holding my ring and your mom is holding your ring. And when we got to the center, the moms exchanged rings, as like a token of you know, blending the families.

So we walked in, our mothers exchanged rings, and then our mother sat down leaving us standing alone in the middle of the circle, in the round waiting for what was next. The plan was for our good friend Dara Ackerman to come out and sing a song about honoring fear, like the fear we were swimming in at that moment, and then to get married. But what happened really surprised me.

Thomas: Dara came in singing this beautiful song this “I am not afraid song.” And everybody was so into it. Everybody just loved it. And I remember my mom had been, like so horrified when I told her we wanted to use that song. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're just you're wrong, you're wrong!” But, she was so into it. Everybody was so into it. And much later, I realized that she married us and I hadn't seen that coming. I thought, oh Dara will sing a song and then we will get our blessings and then we will be married. I didn't realize that Dara would be marrying us. It was so beautiful.

Torres: Yeah.

Thomas: All of the heart-opening work we had been doing with everybody who was there throughout the night - that was just so evident, because everybody's hearts were so open during that song and people were so present. And then they were… they were very kind and patient and waited through the three plus… three sets of blessings plus the actual, you know, official wedding ceremony.

Torres: Yeah, it's interesting, cause, I mean, we weren't planning to have Dara be kind of the officiant, but she kind of became kind of like the emotional sort of officiant with that song. And the way she sort of… like the first verses of it, she kind of gets everybody singing with her. And then she kind of sings the last one on her own, and it was kind of this shift. And it was her singing to us, basically, and singing kind of like words that we would sort of be expressing to each other about like, “I'm not afraid. I'm so afraid.” And it was… was emotional and funny and real.

Thomas: After we had the blessing because we had what we had a Native American blessing and we had a New Age blessing and we had a Christian blessing and then our main officiant our final officiant she said, ‘“You've had the world’s religions to have blessed you. You have been planning this wedding longer than some of the world's religions have been around.”

Torres: Totally.

Thomas: And your wonderful friend made us a beautiful wedding quilt with gifts… panels from all our friends and presented that around us and pronounced us a couple. And somebody dumped a big basket of flowers on top of us and we did a really slow rotation being sort of presented to the community. That was really magical.

Torres: It was.

In producing these two episodes, Rodrigo and I had the chance to relive the day in our own hearts and reflect on some of the moments that have stayed with us over the years.

Torres: A surprising thing for me that I wasn't expecting was the… kind of how big of presence that children that came were. They were very present for the entire thing. They were, you know, in the middle of the room a lot of the time. And we were just like, we didn’t like, shush them out, or, you know, which I thought was really precious: that, you know, we were just like, “Yeah, if you want to be in the middle of the circle, you know, come in and be in the middle of the circle.” And so yeah, that sort of energy of like, their youth, and they're just being themselves. And during the Negativa, there was a girl that like, came up to us… because she could tell that we were like, you know, crying and she wanted to, like comfort us and it was just really sweet to have that sort of... And that was not something, you know, that was planned in any sort of way or anything like that. And even afterwards, I… somebody said that they had asked, “Oh, is this how all the weddings are?” Because that was the first wedding they had been to. And we were like, “Oh my goodness. They’re gonna be in for a surprise when they go to another wedding.”

Thomas: Yeah totally. Yeah, I remember this… when we are getting ready for the trance dance and we were…our friend was reading the poem about “We've Come to Be Danced”, one of the little boys was just running around, just like… he was so exuberant, he was just feeling the energy. He was jumping, and he could just… he was like, he was just totally present with the energy. And like you said, when we were both sitting on the floor, crying, you know, and she came up to us, and she was just kind of like, just watching us like, “Wow. Huh.” You know, they were just like, curious and around and… yeah. They were such a blessing. And we heard from some of their families that they weren't normally like that, and they just felt really free and really able to express themselves and it was really beautiful.

Torres: Yeah. And I liked the idea that, you know, maybe we created something that could shift how they thought of weddings. You know… what the possibility of a wedding can be.

Thomas: Yeah. I think we did that for everybody, including ourselves.

Torres: Yeah.

As you can hear from the way we describe it, Rodrigo and I were successfully able to create a wedding ceremony that expressed the uniqueness of us. It didn’t matter that people were a little unsure of what we were about or what they were expected to do. We took their hands and welcomed them in, encouraging them to participate at whatever level felt right.

If you are in the midst of the wedding planning journey, remember you can do it your way! Don’t be shy. Lean into the things that make your relationship unique and special. Dare to be unconventional. And if you have friends planning a wedding, share these two episodes with them. Thank you so much for coming to my wedding. Don’t forget to grab a piece of cake on the way out.

Learn more about Creation Spirituality at matthewfox.org. Find Michelle Jordan on FB at michelle.jordan.9461. Hear the entire “I Am Not Afraid” song at daraackerman.com.

And get a look into the Via Negativa section of our ceremony in the Washington Post article, “A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief” written by friend of the podcast, Tria Wen. Find links for all of these in the show notes. Special thanks to Carol Ann Fusco who called the directions.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG, and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

P.S. You can get up to 2 months of free podcasting service with Libsyn. Check out the show notes for your promo code to get started podcasting today.

S5 E1 Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 1 - The Plan)

February 2, 2024

Episode Summary

What would you think if you received an invitation to attend to something called a Techno Cosmic Wedding? Would you be curious? Avoidant? Undecided? What if it was framed as a post-modern, rave-inspired event where your whole self was welcome. How would you feel then?

Episode Resources

→ Techno Cosmic Wedding (Pt 2 - The Event): https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s5-e2-techno-cosmic-wedding-2

→ Matthew Fox: https://www.matthewfox.org/

→ The Cosmic Mass: https://www.thecosmicmass.com/

→ A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/07/31/joyful-wedding-can-still-make-room-grief/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Thomas: Can you hear?

Torres: Oh, now I can. Yeah, now I can.

Thomas: Good. Alright. I’m going to turn this light off because it makes a hum.

Torres: [HUMMING]

Thomas: Okay, say something.

Torres: That makes it hum too…

Thomas & Torres: [HUMMING]

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. So you’re invited. You are retroactively invited to attend my wedding. And joining us today to help me bring you into the scene, into the moment, is my amazing husband, Rodrigo. We’re going to tell you about how this unusual ceremony came to be, why it was modeled on an event called the Techno Cosmic Mass, and how it welcomed something you don’t normally see at a wedding - grief.

We’re going to share the story in two parts. Today we will fill you in on the who, how and why and take you through the planning phase - which as you know is really the richest part of any intentional event. Then, next time, you’ll hear how it all turned out, including the bumpy ride that led to the actual wedding day.

So, here’s the story. A long time ago, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend graduate school in spirituality. The school I attended was called The University of Creation Spirituality and it was run by theologian Matthew Fox. You may know of Matthew through his many books. He has actually authored 40 books over the past 50 years. Some titles that might sound familiar are “Original Blessing”, “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ”, and “One River, Many Wells”. Like several other students at the school, I felt that the universe had somehow called me out to complete that very program. And one of the pieces that spoke to me the most was an event Matthew and his team regularly hosted called the Techno Cosmic Mass. Now, unknown to me, Rodrigo was also attending the Cosmic Mass which at that time was held in the historic Sweets Ballroom in downtown Oakland. This was before we met, like way before we met. Here he is helping me describe it.

Torres: And the Techno Cosmic Mass was kind of a multimedia Mass held in a huge ballroom in Oakland, when I went to it. And you'd walk in, there was a lot of screens showing a lot of different spiritual designs and images and music. Very low lights. It was kind of like a rave, almost, the atmosphere… Not that I've really been to a rave, but what I imagine one to be like. And then there were altars in the big ballroom you could walk around to. And then when it would start, they would go through a whole sort of ceremony and kind of a four… four movements. Some of them were very upbeat and, and had like dancing, and were kind of like a rave, and some were very introspective and dark. It was pretty unique. It was pretty cool.

Thomas: And we were going at the same time and we didn't know each other then.

Torres: Right

Thomas: And I was volunteering at a lot of them. In fact, when I first came out to check out the University of Creation Spirituality, I just spent a weekend here in Oakland, and I just wanted to hang out at the school as much as I could to see what it was about and what the people were like, and if it was a place I wanted to study. And so I helped with… helped with the Mass, because that was going on over the weekend and I built this beautiful altar. I had, like, the whole day to build it. And all this big room of stuff. It was like multi-layered, different heights. I found a big bowl, a big silver kitchen-type bowl that had a glass, a really tall, clear glass, glued into it. I don't know why it was glued into it, but I put a candle like a taper candle inside there. And then it filled the bowl of water and then the candle was inside the glass and it burned down throughout the night. So it eventually was under the water. You know, it was just really… it was really meaningful to me and it was a signal that this was a place I definitely wanted to come and study.

And so I did. And I loved the school and loved my classmates and loved my teachers and had an amazing time. And then over the years everything kind of faded away. I’m sad to say that the school actually closed shortly after I left. The Masses continued for a while but then they stopped too. And then, many years later, I met Rodrigo through a completely different community. And we did all the things. We dated and moved in together and were not going to get married. And then changed our minds. But when it came to wedding planning, it was a little bit difficult.

Torres: Well, our spiritualities are different and I'm… I think I was pretty sure that wasn't something very conventional and I think you didn't either, that’s my guess… I’m not sure… or did you?

Thomas: We did a lot of thinking and talking about that about traditions. Like what are the wedding traditions? What… Why are they there? What do we want about them? Because I think it's always fine to pull them in if…

Torres: If they make sense.

Thomas: If they're meaningful, right? If it's not just, “Oh well we should….”

Torres: I think we were trying to find… something that was meaningful to both of us.

Thomas: Yeah, and we couldn't. We hadn't. We were in limbo as I recall and then we went that night to… well, as luck would have it, or as synchronicity would have it, they started doing the Masses again - right then. Because they had stopped.

Torres: They hadn’t done them in a long time.

Thomas: Yeah, just out of the blue they started and I… I saw the flier that with that old art they used to use with the… you know, the event flier. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!” It's like I mean, Oakland, not at Sweets Ballroom but in Oakland, right. And we went and Matt was there and he was welcoming people from all the different faiths, which was one of my favorite parts. Getting to represent for my underdog faith, and then getting to be welcomed in and then the dancing and... I just remember, we were dancing. It might have been the Via Creativa dance, the Via Transformative dance - I think it was toward the end of the night - and just looking over at you and being like, “I want this for our wedding!” And you were like, “Yeah”. And I was like “Oh my gosh, we finally found something!” And we were both a big yes to it.

Torres: Totally. And that was good to find the big yes.

Thomas: Yeah. And looking back at it from now, what was the yes to you?

Torres: It just felt right. It just felt aligned. And it felt like it wasn't… it wasn't even a very conscious thing, it was just “Yes”. Just like from my gut. How about you?

Thomas: Yeah, it definitely had that perfectly right…. and really excited to hear that it felt that way to you, too, because sometimes we're not on the same page. So I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, definitely. We're on the same page!” And for me, it had always been like, you know, I'm super into bringing the body into worship into ritual and remembering we have bodies and coming into the bodies and dancing with the body and you know, all of the… bringing the chakras and the colors and the lights and the celebration and the grieving that's in the body too like, the whole way that it's so embodied and so fun. Yeah.

Torres: Yeah. And it had, like elements of what felt like a wedding, like bringing a whole bunch of people together and doing ritual and ceremony and… But it was like, a different way of doing it.

Thomas: And we… It felt sort of divinely guided because like we said they came up with a Technic Cosmic… they started doing the Cosmic Mass again out of the blue from our perspective. And then we jumped in and started volunteering with a Cosmic Mass crew for about six months to learn how to do it. And then pretty much right after we had our wedding, they stopped again, they stopped doing the Masses again. So we got in this tiny little we know, which was like maybe nine months or a year or something?

Torres: Yeah.

Thomas: I think they're still doing the Mass, but they do them only at events now. So they… it's an on-the-road thing. But we were perfectly aligned and and doing the volunteering with them was great.

Torres: Yeah. Yeah, we got to see kind of behind the scenes.

Thomas: Yeah

[MUSIC]

So at this point you might be wondering what actually happens at a Techno Cosmic Mass and why we would want to use it as the foundation of our wedding. Bear with us as we take you into a bit of the spiritual framework behind the event.

Thomas: So in Creation Spirituality, there are four “tivas”, as we call them affectionately. There are Four Paths of Creation Spirituality. There is the Via Positiva, which is joy, awe, and wonder. And the Via Negativa, which is about darkness and letting go, grieving. The Via Creativa, which is about… we are creative beings, creative as the… divinely creative as the Creator is divine, right? And then Via Transformativa, which is where we ready ourselves to return to the world as spiritual warriors - that's how I always think about it.

Torres: Transform.

Thomas: Transform. Yeah. And in the Mass, traditionally, my experience was that they did a trance dance, a joy dance, during the Via Positiva, and some kind of group grieving during the Negativa. And then they did the Eucharist during the Creativa…

Torres: Right.

Thomas: …the actual taking of the bread and the body of Christ. And then the Transformativa was another trance dance. Yeah, to prepare yourself to go out into the world and be a warrior for social justice. So I remember when we were planning the wedding, I was really enamored with the idea of having a dance for the Positiva, cause I really loved having the trance dance. And then grieving for Negativa. But then instead of the Eucharist, we wanted to come up with something non-Eucharist-y to do there. So we came up with honoring the cosmos. It kind of feels to me like at the Mass, the Techno Cosmic Mass, the focus… a big part of the focus was on the Eucharist, since it's a Mass, right? So… But yet for us, we realized that the Transformativa might be a really good place for the wedding ceremony itself.

Torres: Yeah. I mean, that was what I thought was our sort of more… our focus in terms of the wedding itself was the transformation of being two people that weren't wedded to two people that were wedded.

Thomas: Correct. Exactly.

Torres: And so… I mean, for me the Transformativa was kind of a no brainer, because it's like, yeah, it's a transformation. So we have to have the wedding in the Transformativa. And the dancing is interesting, because in a lot of weddings, the dancing is… comes like afterwards, and it’s like the reception, it's not part of the wedding. So, I liked it that we had it as part of the part of the wedding ceremony that people were dancing.

Thomas: Yeah, me too. I loved that.

Torres: Yeah. I think we really liked that about that. And then we… I think the Negativa was kind of… we sort of knew that that was kind of going to be like the most unusual thing to have in a wedding.

Thomas: Yes. My mom was not happy, to say the least.

Torres: What did she… Do you remember what she said?

Thomas: Oh… No, I don’t. I remember talking to her more about the song that we had our really good friend Dara sing before… because she had that wonderful album, and we wanted to incorporate her music into the day and we listened to it and she had a song called “I am Not Afraid” that I think you were like “Oh, I think…” Of I forget which one of us was like, “We need this right before we get married!”

Torres: Yeah, I think it was me.

Thomas: Because it’s this song about, “I’m not afraid. I am so afraid. I am not afraid, but I am so afraid…” It was just.. it was such a beautiful song and I remember playing that for… or telling my mom about it. I think I didn't play it for her. And she was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” She was like trying not to put her foot down about anything I think throughout the, you know, year I was telling he plans for the wedding and then she had to with that. She was like, “That is a bad idea.”

Torres: For some reason I had the story flipped in my head that she was saying that about the Negativa, about having the Negativa. I think she was pretty much also against having the Negativa from what I remember.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, she's pretty traditional. And it sounds like a weird thing to have people crying at a wedding… on purpose.

A communal grieving ceremony in general might be something you’re not used to experiencing - but imagine it at a wedding. We actually had a mix of folks at the event, some of whom were more traditional and weren’t really sure what to do but kind of went with it, and others who actually had a lot of experience in holding space for deep emotions in a group setting. And a lot of this latter group were from Rodrigo’s work community at a non-profit called Challenge Day.

Torres: It's interesting because I think part of the… part of the reason that I felt more sort of comfortable with that was because I had gone through a lot of Challenge Day stuff, so, which is kind of an emotional workshop that I did and then I worked at for many years. And there was kind of a lot of that sort of going into your feelings and being okay with that and doing it in kind of like a group setting. So I felt a lot more comfortable with that then much more than I would have had I… had I not gone through that sort of experience. And kind of like seeing… not as not seeing it as a kind of a negative thing is a kind of a healing thing.

Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. And you'd been to the Masses to where that was also part of like, you know, really, really presencing the destruction of the planet or the destruction of the rain forests or whatever the focus was that night at the Mass. Like really, all the stuff that we know is happening in the world but we don't want to think about, becoming really focused on it and aware of it and allowing the pain of it to really become present and allowing ourselves to grieve. Grieve the things that we try to not look at - in community. I mean, that's not a… that's not a normal experience, a day-to-day experience in the US so like getting our… getting comfortable with that learning what that is and that it might be weird, it might feel weird. But yet going through it, especially in community can be very healing.

Torres: Totally. Yeah.

Thomas: It was a very NorCal wedding.

Torres: Absolutely.

Thomas: California wedding. [LAUGHS]

[MUSIC]

Torres: Oh and the… also the altars were important. Creating the altars…

Thomas: You didn't really want the altars though. You didn't really care about the altars.

Torres: Yeah. I guess. I don’t remember.

Thomas: You were like, “That’s your thing.”

Torres: Was… really?

Thomas: Yeah, but that was okay because I was excited. Yeah, so at the Mass there… If you walked into the Techno Cosmic Mass, you would see two or maybe three really big projection screens and then four… at least four really big altars at the four directions. And sometimes they would be set up to honor the Four Directions, you know, earth, air, fire and water, the elements. And sometimes they were themed in some way, depending on the theme of the Mass. But we decided that we wanted to honor relationship in its various forms and so we decided to have five altars. So we had a self altar like love of self, and then a friendship altar, love of friendship and romance altar for romantic love, and a family altar for family love, and then an earth altar for honoring the Earth. And we also had a moon lodge because that was my thing. And I was really excited about the altars because I wanted them to be very interactive. So they were kind of like little sets, almost like, like at a play. So we wanted the self altar to have a beautiful mirror where people could sit in front of the mirror and look at themselves. [LAUGHS] And the friendship altar was meant to look like a front porch where the checkers set and rocking chairs. And then the romance altar we set up at a fireplace which was in the… in the venue. Yeah, at the venue, there was a fireplace and so we set the romance altar up in front of the fireplace with chocolate boxes and..

Torres: Pillows. Like throw pillows.

Thomas: Pillows. And the family altar was the richest, it was beautiful. It was all of these beautiful Ancestor items and your father's paintings were… ended up there. And we had some Day of the Dead coloring books. It was very… it was the most, I think, interactive one. People really liked it. They really gravitated toward it. And then the Earth altar was sort of just a very big houseplant with the globe or something. [LAUGHS] It wasn't very impressive, but it was… They were all meant to be very interactive and very… and so that people could be at the event and they could also kind of wander by and interact with the altars.

Torres: Like at the Mass.

Thomas: Like at the Mass - but even more interactive than at the Mass. At the Mass it's kind of like you look at them they’re really pretty and they’re interesting but you don't really do anything at them.

Torres: Yeah, you really wanted to sort of have it there as sort of something that people that came to the wedding sort of interacted with and participated in.

Thomas: Yeah.

Torres: Yeah. I think I was thinking it was your thing because I… there was so much to organize and I just felt overwhelmed. I was like, I can’t do altars on top of everything else, I'm sorry. It’s like… if you want it, you’re welcome to do it. So, sorry about that, but I just didn’t have the bandwidth.

Thomas: That’s okay.

Torres: I mean, we had… along with all of the regular sort of wedding things, we also had kind of to put on this sort of multimedia presentation of like, big screens and provide our own sound system…

Yeah, so suffice to say, we were planning a big event. It was multimedia, it had trance dancing, it had interactive altars, and it was a wedding… So we took our time and were intentional about it.

Thomas: What was your experience of the planning time which was a huge part of it.

Torres: Yeah. I think we went into wanting to be very comprehensive and very careful about every detail. And I think we were. So that was really nice. And very conscious and sort of wanting the wedding to be part of sort of creating community and the planning to be creating community. And it felt like very much like us doing something together. And, you know, we also had, like, our spreadsheet with like, 25 tabs or something like that.

Thomas: Totally.

Torres: We were very organized.

Thomas: And then toward the end. I remember you found some way to draw the room. You created diagrams of exactly… because at the end of it at the end of the planning, we sort of reached the point of needing to turn it over to our…

Torres: Our team.

Thomas: To our team. And so there was this like process of like, making sure they really got it, and we really got all our thoughts and… We were really sure. And how do we convey this to them? And so that's where you were doing that diagrams of like, “Hey, this is how we want the chairs at this point, and then we're gonna change to this. And then then it's gonna be like this…” Because it was… it was an event.

Torres: It was.

Thomas: It was a whole production.

Torres: And we had to like, move chairs in and move chairs out. And because it was just one big room, and we did everything in that room from just having it way open for all the dancing to having the ceremony with chairs in there and everything had to sort of be coordinated. And we were very clear from, I think, very near the beginning that we wanted to be just present for the wedding. And so we didn't want to be the person sort of like worried about directing things and moving things around and making sure things went right. So I think we sort of made it... I think it was a great decision to “Okay, we're gonna organize everything, we're gonna explain it to our team as clearly as possible and then we're gonna just let go.” And if it happens, it happens. And if it doesn't, and something goes totally different, then that's just the way it's gonna be because we just want to be present for it.

Thinking back now, I’m not even sure where we got that sage wisdom to let go of the details on the wedding day but it turned out to be great advice. Join us again next time to hear how the big day went. I really hope you can make it back because I’m excited to tell you how it all unfolded and, as I mentioned, the bumps that came up along the way.

If you’d like to know more about Creation Spirituality, check out matthewfox.org. For a sneak peek into the Negativa section of our wedding, see Tria Wen’s Washington Post article. Find links in the show notes.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

P.S. You can get up to 2 months of free podcasting service with Libsyn. Check out the show notes for your promo code to get started podcasting today.

S4 E3 There Must Be Something Wrong (Sheryl Paul) [Remastered]

March 31, 2023

Episode Summary

Today we revisit one of our most popular episodes, an early interview with Sheryl Paul, author of "The Conscious Bride". Sheryl's work allows us to reflect on how the pain, grief, discomfort, and vulnerability that can arise throughout the wedding process can actually be doorways into joy if we are willing to let them in.

Episode Resources

→ Sheryl Paul: https://conscious-transitions.com/

→ The Conscious Bride: https://conscious-transitions.com/books/

→ Shelter in Place Podcast: https://shelterinplacepodcast.org/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on iTunes | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Paul: I'm always interested in what's not being talked about what people are experiencing, but are trying to stuff away, trying to sequester, trying to sweep into the corner under the rug... when all that does is create shame and all that does is create anxiety.

Sheryl Paul has a unique ability to see the invisible, to see what has been silenced. Her book "The Conscious Bride" has been helping couples prepare for marriage for 20 years - and prepare in a very specific way. Her work helps couples create room for all of the emotions that come with transition, not just the picture perfect ones. Funny thing is, that allows for even more joy. Join me for a conversation with Sheryl Paul.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. When I got engaged six years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a book called "The Conscious Bride". Now, I'm not a reader, as my husband will tell you, but I devoured this book. I loved it because it touched on the shadow, the stuff we don't talk about, the stuff that gets in our way when we want to feel one way but actually feel a myriad of other ways all at the same time. It named the shadow that hovers over the wedding: the attachment, the fear, the uncertainty, the hidden power-struggles and the grief that lies beneath them, and that a big part of stepping into a new life is letting go of the old one - and not just for the couple. The Conscious Bride gave me permission to feel all the ways, and it helped me create room for everyone else to feel all the ways too, so ultimately, we could all process the transition without getting into weird fights about random things. I was so happy to have a chance to speak with Sheryl Paul.

Thomas: So what led you to write this book?

Paul: So, I was in a master's program around that time. I was at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it has a very strong Jungian focus. And I had always been interested in rites of passages and I had a deep sense that there was a lot that was not being talked about around the wedding. And I started to interview women and I did a lot of interviews, especially when it came time to write the book, which came from my master's thesis. So it started out as as a thesis and then evolve into a book. And I started to see that there was a big gap in the cultural conversation around around transitions in general. All transitions are bypassed and overlooked, but particularly the wedding and then in particular, how much focus there is on the joy and the perfection and everything has to be blissful and ecstatic from the moment of the proposal into the first year of the wedding, and there was just no conversation happening about the shadow, about the death experience, about what women (and men) are actually experiencing quite a bit of a time. And, you know, the more I researched and the more I looked and the more I spoke, the more it became quite clear to me that just that again, that there was a real gap in the conversation around this pivotal rite of passage, one of our few ceremonies that we still invoke in the culture. And yet it's done in such a way where we really gloss over the element of a transition, of the reality that when you are in transition, you are in a death experience, you are in a liminal zone, you are between identities, you are letting go, you are grieving. And we only expect people to feel joyful. It creates a lot of anxiety and it creates even more chaos than there naturally would be around an event like this. Because I'm feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I'm not over-the-moon ecstatic... something must be wrong with me, or with my partner, or with the decision to get married - something's wrong. And it's an incredibly deep sigh of relief to the soul to know that nothing is wrong. In fact, the more you let those difficult feelings in, the more you will open to the joy; that the pain and the grief and the discomfort and vulnerability are the doorways into the joy, into what we are expected to see all and into what we hope to feel. And what I started to say earlier was that that the wedding more than any other transition, I think, has (probably being pregnant becoming a mother comes close) carries a very strong cultural expectation of unilateral joy and it is supported in a big way by the wedding industry that sells perfection and sells joy. So it's a it's very big money behind selling us the bill of goods by selling us this message that you are supposed to be joyful and the way to do that is to create a perfect event.

Thomas: How do you work with someone if they're just starting to realize that they don't have to only feel joyful?

Paul: So, I tell them to read my book. And, you know, it's really the first part it's about re educating people to understand all of the normal and necessary feelings that accompany this transition. And once they understand that everything they're feeling is normal and necessary, they can start to let it in and and feel it, feel the grief, feel the loss, feel the vulnerability, feel the loneliness. These are all normal feelings that accompany transitions. So once we give ourselves permission to feel without that overlay of "because I'm feeling this it means there's something wrong" everything changes from there. We don't then have to misassign meaning to the feelings and to think, "Because I'm feeling sad, it means I'm making mistake." No, it has nothing to do with that. You're feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You're feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity as single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life, a new identity. And there is no way to go through that without feeling grief.

Thomas: You spend a good portion of the book talking about how the bride is separating from the father/father figure and the mother/mother figure and the friends. Can you say more about that process?

Paul: Yes, so it can go a few different ways. If the bride is very close to her father, that's one set of emotions and experiences where there is tends to be a lot of grief, a lot of crying, really good, medicinal, necessary crying to make that separation process... and to make it more effective to make it more complete to make it more conscious. Again, in the naming, to say, I am separating from my dad, I am no longer going to be... Yes, I'm his daughter, but not in the same way, not as my primary identity. That my new partner is going to be number one and I'm transferring allegiance. So, that's one example of one way that it can go if if someone's very close to their father. If somebody doesn't have a close relationship with their father or there is no father figure in their life, that's a different kind of grief of the loss of not having had that or never having had that. The same as somebody has passed away. If somebody who's getting married and their mother's no longer alive. You know, that's, that's one way that grief can come through, as opposed to a mother who is very much alive and very much involved. And then there's a separation. There's… there's a loosening of cords that is required.

Thomas: I'm curious as you're speaking how this applies, I'm sure it's very different, but how it applies to folks who were older when they get married, or maybe a second marriage.

Paul: It can be different, it can be similar. It depends. It depends on a lot of factors. But regardless of the age, especially if it's a first marriage and you're getting married at 40, you're still letting go of a massive identity. And in some ways, it's even more of a letting go because of all of those years that you spent as a non-married person. And so there's a lot of grieving, a lot of shedding of the independence, the separateness, all of the control that you have when you are a non-married person, that every inch of your life is your own: your home, your space, how you spend your time, how you organize your weekend, it's all yours. And so that is its own massive death experience for somebody who marries later, you know, and who has had that many more years than someone who's 22 if you're 42, that's a lot of years of being the sole architect of your life.

Thomas: So you work with people around transitions, all kinds of transitions now, and I'm curious if ceremony plays a part in that with them.

Paul: I'm a big fan of ceremony. Because my work is largely over the internet. I'm not the one doing the ceremony with them. I would love to be that person, but I'm not. But I always encourage people to create ceremony and create rituals. And so, you know, if it's somebody getting married... and I've had a lot more men come my way, by the way, since I wrote The Conscious Bride. And I'm thinking of some right now who are in one of my small coaching groups. And he's getting married on Saturday, and I won't, I won't share the specifics, but it's... because it's his story. But it's really beautiful to witness men in their transitional process and the rituals that they come up with because I encourage people to find their own rituals that are meaningful to them. Ways to acknowledge the end of you know, in his sake, his bachelorhood that that time in his life is over. And so he has been sharing these incredibly potent rituals that have come to him for ways of recognizing that that time in his life is over. And what ritual does is, as you know, is it, it concretizes, it makes it and embodies what's happening, so that it brings it out of just that realm of talking about it and it sends it into a realm that we can't see with our five senses, but very much exists and yet calls on the five senses to help transmute the experience into another form. And so rituals help us cross over that sometimes very scary divide that just looks like a big, cavernous, empty space, crossing from one identity to a new identity, from one stage of life to the next. And without the rituals we are... we're pretty lost and so, you know, again, as I, as I said earlier, the wedding is one of the few ceremonies that we have, which comes with ritual. A lot of people tend to minimize or diminish the ceremonial aspect because they're so focused on the party and the reception, you know, that's where all of the energy goes. When really, it's the ceremony that has so much power to carry us over the divide between one stage and the next.

Thomas: And that's something I'm trying to encourage and put seeds out in the world for as well, that people take that the ritual, the ceremony of the marriage, the wedding and they, they feel free to do it their way so that it's powerful and is as powerful and meaningful for the couple as possible.

Paul: Yes, yes! And I think we are at this extraordinary time in our world where we have freedom to do that, where we are breaking out of the traditions that have gone stale and revitalizing them with personal meaning of what is meaningful for you. And there may be long-standing time-honored traditions that are still meaningful. And I'm by no means one to throw everything out that we've come from, because many of those rituals are gorgeous and meaningful - but only if they're meaningful for the individual, right? Only if they land in a place where something inside of you says yes, right? That helps me, that bolsters me, that comforts me. Right? So, you know, whether it's at a Jewish wedding standing under the Chuppah, you know, it's just this beautiful symbol of, of our new home and and this, you know, long standing tradition... if that's meaningful to somebody great. If it's not, then it really.. it's not going to do anything for you on a spiritual level.

I shared with Sheryl that before my wedding, I created a self-commitment ceremony for myself. And in that ceremony I presenced all of my Ancestral grandmothers with the acknowledgement of how important marriage might have been for them, how much of a survival tool. I did this because women’s standing in society has evolved so much even since my mother's generation, but yet we are still connected to our Ancestral legacy and felt like a really important thing to me.

Paul: That's incredibly beautiful that you did that and so powerful and it's probably the number one fear that comes up for women that I'm working with in their pre-wedding time in their engagement, is the fear of what does marriage mean? And does it mean that I am beholden to this person now and I lose all sense of self and I become boring and frumpy and... This is the legacy. This is what we've been handed, right? This is what it has meant for thousands and thousands of years is that for women, marriage has meant really the death of self: I exist, to take care of the man and to take care of the children and that's it. And so there's this very deep ancestral legacy that we have to consciously break with and recognize that we are so lucky and we are so blessed to be on this new threshold, that we get to redefine what marriage means for us. And we only can really know that after we've taken the leap, because on the other side, on the first side, on the engagement side, it just all looks and sounds so scary to most women. And you know, that's why I have so many exercises in The Conscious Bride, more-so I think in The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner, on what does it mean to be a wife? What does that mean to you? What does the word wife connote? When you think of wife, what is the connotation for you? And it's very rare that someone's going to say, "Oh, I see this rad, sexy woman, you know, like, doing like, the dance on the rooftops." Like, no, that's not usually what we think of when we hear the word wife. But it could be. More and more we are redefining that. And we are seeing that. And so I tell people, but look out into the world today and find those those models of marriage where you see a woman who is doing her life fully, you know, and yes, maybe she's also a mother and she's, you know, loves being married and she's fully committed to her path and and making her offerings, and doing her work in the world. Right? Separate from wife and mother. So, yeah, I love, I love that I love what you share. I love what you did. I think that is not only powerful, but essential on that ceremonial ritual level to recognize what we've come from.

Thomas: I'm just so happy and honored to have the chance to talk to you after, after all this time of really, really, really appreciating your book and your wisdom.

Paul: Yeah, thank you, Colleen.

It means a great deal to me to have the opportunity to share Sheryl's wisdom with you. I hope that you are able to use it or pass it along to a friend. Here's one final bit of wisdom, a quote from The Conscious Bride. "A marriage is a rite of passage no matter when it occurs, and the woman must still pass through the phases of her transformation. She must die, she must sit in the unknown, and then she will be reborn."

Sheryl Paul is the author of The Conscious Bride and The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner. Her website contains a plethora of resources for addressing life transitions. Learn more about Sheryl and her work at https://conscious-transitions.com. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S3 E1 The Mother Son Dance (Jeanne & Astro)

February 3, 2022

Episode Summary

She saw him as a free spirit who was never going to get married. She didn't know how to let go of him because maybe there would never be a wedding and a dance. How one mother and son completely transformed their relationship with a ceremony in the middle of a lake.

Episode Resources

→ HealStory Podcast: https://www.healstory.com

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on iTunes | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Astro: I've personally never heard of, of a mother and son, or even a father and a son, one-on-one ritual to mend and heal any unconscious issues that they may have had. I just hadn't heard of it. I think it's awesome.

So much of life is based on expectations. We anticipate our traditions to be there. The Father Daughter or Mother Son dance at the wedding can be a way of saying I love you and I’m moving on now. But what happens when there’s no wedding?

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.

It’s season 3 already - I’m not even sure how that happened. I’m so happy to have you with us as we continue exploring the wide variety of rituals and ceremonies we can build to address life’s challenges. My hope is that as you navigate what life brings you, you might consider using ritual as a tool to honor yourself for something, or release something you no longer need, or honor in a relationship that’s changed and grown over time. Today we will be exploring this last one: what it can look like to honor a relationship that’s changed and grown over time.

I’m going to invite you into a conversation I had with my friend Astro and his mom Jeanne about a ritual they created together. It started when Astro noticed that his mom seemed to be getting a little triggered whenever he had a serious relationship. There seemed to be some feelings coming up that felt a little codependent or enmeshed. Now, Astro and his mom are really close, so he was able to just go to Jeanne and talk with her about what he was noticing and together they realized that Jeanne might be grieving the loss of her son as she watched him interacting as a grown man with a partner. I invite you to listen in on their story, the delightful way they relate, and how they intuitively turned to ritual to work through the tensions he’d noticed. One quick note - Astro’s given name is Patrick, and you’ll hear Jeanne refer to him by that name throughout the interview.

Colleen: Give me a sense of what your relationships like between the two of you.

Jeanne: [LAUGHS]

Astro: Hmmm.

Jeanne: I think it's fantastic.

Astro: Yeah, it's pretty good.

Jeanne: But I’ll let you speak for yourself.

Astro: You go first, then I'll go.

Jeanne: Well, I'm aware that… what do I need to say? He's just been a fantastic young man to journey with since he was an infant.

Astro: I’m not so young anymore…

Jeanne: Huh?

Astro: I’m not so young anymore.

Jeanne: Well, no, you're not young anymore, but you're full of wisdom and it's just delightful to see how you are operating in life and… So… I happen to be a spiritual director and have done counseling and psychotherapy stuff and all that. So it's not, it's not what do I need to say? So I could go with the flow a lot easier, maybe than some parents.

Colleen: Got it.

Jeanne: …and that my job was simply to know that he's a gift to the universe and my job was to unwrap him.

Colleen: That's beautiful.

Astro: Yes, that’s nicely said.

Jeanne: And so… then there was some times I found out that my wrapping was too tight.

Astro: We kind of realized that in kind of rehashing the story, that we had probably the same outcomes, but we had come to the ritual from different places which is really interesting, but that'll come up later.

Colleen: And what was going on in your relationship at the time that you had the ritual that led you to the ritual?

Astro: So I was at school at Naropa Institute at the University of Creation Spirituality and I was kind of learning initiation and working in ritual and the value of that for rites of passage. And I had just started to like, kind of recognize some dynamics that I'd never seen before, in the dynamic of our story, in our life, in our you know... So when my partner was interacting with my mom and I, there were just some things I was noticing that I hadn't seen in my mom before. So then I just kind of brought up my mom and I was like, “You know, is there something going on?” And she, you know, to her credit, like, it took a little time because these things are kind of unconscious motivations. But it came up and I think she recognized that - this is my memory of it at that time - was that she recognized that there was some stuff and through the work that I had done, ritual work, I was like, “Well, hey, let's dive in and let's figure something out just to address that stuff.”

Jeanne: And then, of course, I think I was… I was unconscious. I mean, I wasn't aware. So his bringing that up, made me… enabled me to look at it, and realizing that he's a free spirit, he's a seven in the Enneagram and they're… they don't usually make commitments. And so I figured that he'd probably have many partners, his life and maybe not a long-term committed. But I also was aware of that if there is something that's still tying an umbilical cord of me to Patrick and not setting him free, that perhaps a ritual would be helpful in my letting go, what I wasn't fully conscious of.

Astro: What I would, what I was noticing those unconscious things, and I think mom kind of just said it a little bit was just this idea of needing to let go and that's just that's, I think, a natural rite of passage in the story of parents and kids. And that happens through different stages throughout the life and one of those stages is when they are of an age where they, if they so choose to have a kind of a partner and then leave and create a family and life of their own. And I think, because Mom saw me as such a free spirit and world traveler and this kind of person that maybe wasn't going to have a traditional rite of passage, which she would be more used to in her tradition… and she grew up with, you know, much more traditional religious ceremony, AKA marriage, right? So since I probably wasn't going to get married, I think she was feeling a loss of the opportunity to have clarity of my transition from this family into my own. Does that make sense?

Jeanne: Yes. Because as I say to him, one of the transitions are the ritual is at a wedding festivity, where oftentimes the bride dances with the father, and there's a letting go… it's a… it's letting go of that bond in celebration of a new relationship. So it's… I didn't realize how meaningful it is for mothers to dance with their sons, because there again is the closeness, the journey, and letting go. So I didn't see that that was going to happen and didn't necessarily constantly have a sense of we that needed to be replaced or or held. It was really, if there is still ties, what is the traditional way in which those ties are released?

Astro: Right. Yeah. To summarize, as you stated, we had both recognized there was a need for letting go.

Jeanne: Yeah.

Colleen: Right. Right. And I think it's amazing that you both had the consciousness… and that you're both on the same page with that. You're both open to that.

Astro: Yeah, it took some time. But yeah, we got there.

[MUSIC]

So they knew what the problem was and they chose to come up with something fun to deal with it. How cool is that, especially between a mother and son? I didn’t hear any pointing fingers or blaming. When I hear this story, I see two people coming together to walk around a problem as a team. And I see two people who have seen the power and adaptability of ceremony to move them through an event.

Colleen: So, take me through the planning process when you're planning the ritual.

Astro: So we live on this beautiful lake and this is… this is already kind of a ceremonial place for us like… it's very spiritual and profound place for our family. We've been… our family's been here for a couple generations, at least Mom's side. So…

Jeanne: Oh, on the lake? Yeah. I'd started out in a basket as a baby on Seneca Lake and went other places and came back.

Astro: Seneca Lake in the state of New York, in the finger lakes. It’s a really special place.

Jeanne: It is.

Astro: So we knew this would be the ritual spot, the lake. And it was like a beautiful summer time and we just hopped in a small fishing boat and we went out to the middle of the lake.

Jeanne: And Patrick had been a tennis player so he had a lot of trophies and I was trying to figure out where to put these trophies. So when he talked about it'd be nice if we had some object or something to release, I thought - ha, ha!

Astro: That’s so funny because I feel like I I had the same idea at that same time. She thinks it was her idea to do that.

[TALKING OVER EACH OTHER]

Jeanne: But it was your idea. Anyways, it was a mutual idea. Here’s the synchronicity between the two of us.

Astro: It was mutual, whoever was there first.

Jeanne: So we went through… we went through the trophies deciding which ones were…

Astro: …the ugliest.

Jeanne: Right. The ugliest or didn’t have… necessarily have the…

Astro: …we found like two second place ones or something like that.

Jeanne: Right. We kept the first place and the ones that really stood out and then decided, okay, these really are just going to take up dust and so, but they are something that was part of my watching him and his being in that sport. And so we decided I'm not sure how many… we…probably at least three…

Astro: We took four…

Jeanne: …three or four we took out with us in the boat. And then we decided, “Well we're in the boat, how would we work this? Well how about we pick one up and then we talk about starting early on in life.” And I don't remember what we said, but it was segments of our life and celebrate…

Astro: I think it was pretty much you doing it like you just kind of took it and you held it and you were present with it and just sort of spoke to like my like… being like a baby and a toddler and what that was like for you and you know…

Jeanne: Yeah. Probably so.

Astro: And I remember like, some… lot of tears like there was emotion. And I felt like I was kind of holding space.

Jeanne: I didn't remember the tears, it was so long ago there. But I thought, you know, it was great to be letting go and letting the memories be cherished and off into the waters. So…

Astro: I'm sure we started with some intentional prayer and breathing.

Jeanne: I don't know about the breathing at that point.

Astro: Well, something centering.

Jeanne: But we were… Sure.

Astro: It was totally calm, like, the lake’s pretty big. It's almost two miles across. We live… we were literally in the middle of the lake. Like we took a time… a while to get out there in a small fishing boat and so we were intentional and…

Jeanne: It was a sacred moment.

Astro: …and it's like 600 feet deep at that point…

Jeanne: …so we knew they'd never come back. [LAUGHS]

Astro: [LAUGHS] Yeah, unless they floated! But we got the heavier ones, like the ones with the marble base. Not like the wooden ones…

[LAUGHING]

Astro: That’d be funny.

Colleen: Yeah, I always wonder what that means when I make an offering and it comes back. I’m always like, “Hmmm…”

Astro: Yeah, there’s a whole nother meaning. Oh, maybe you're not supposed to let go of me. Maybe we’re supposed to be enmeshed the rest of our lives.

Jeanne: There's a lot of stuff in this lake… people buried… put their ashes in there…

Astro: Yeah, we've had friends who’ve put their ashes…

Jeanne: …ashes in the lake. I mean, had a ceremonial ritual with him in the boat. So… and that was before. Yeah, that was before this… our having the ritual. So that wasn't the first time we'd gone out of the boat to recall life and to celebrate life, and to let it go.

Colleen: And yet, this was a different, this was a different kind of letting go. This is letting go of a “past life”, of somebody who's still alive who's transitioning and letting go of the past relationship. It was kind of a rebirthing of your relationship.

Astro: Totally, totally. And I think that's kind of what it felt like to me is she's announcing,...she's like, to me it's like she's saying, you know, “This trophy is Patrick as a toddler” and letting it go. It's like kind of like a death. And the same thing with like, whatever the next trophy represented and like the adolescence, and letting go of that. And, you know, so that was kind of like a death and a rebirth. When all that was let go, it was definitely a rebirth it felt like and, and you know what we can get into and what to me it felt like a genuine shift, a genuine transformation in our relationship.

Jeanne: Which was nice to have that occur. And you know, asking to be sharing this with you then we did a little talking to recall just what did we recall? This was about 18-20 years ago. And so it had for me, I was surprised that it had such an impact on Patrick.

Colleen: I'm curious what felt different to you after the ceremony, Astro.

Astro: I mean, one of my main motivations, as I said before, was to, like have a pretty copacetic relationship in the family with my partner at the time. And I don't know, I just noticed, a like, sort of this kind of sharpness that I had discovered, like I thought I'd seen in mom when my partner came in, or just certain situations arose that were bringing up this unconscious sort of triggers that were gone, like completely gone. Like she was at ease and I didn't see any of that, that sharpness. That edge had seemed to, like dissipate. It was almost like we had like a sort of, like an unspoken contract, like a secret contract that like, between us that that energy was just dissolved. And it was completely dealt with and didn't exist anymore. And it… to a big extent, and I think our relationship became less around the dependencies and co-dependencies around childrens and parents and it became more about peers and spiritual friends and coworkers on planet Earth. And I think, we're we never lose the fact that we're mother and son, but it became… it was just another phase in us being more, you know, mutual in our lives together as opposed to the dynamic of like, “This is your identity and this is my identity and this is how we relate.” And now there seemed to be much more freedom,and openness and respect. Like I don't know, a lot of people who live live with their parents as regular as I have since I came back, like I do a lot of world traveling. Those years, I wasn't living at home, and then the last few years, I spent a lot of time with my family, with my parents, and we get along like, like gangbusters, we're like friends. You know, some people can't live can't spend more than three days with their parents, you know, without all these codependent dynamics like blowing up in their face. And we literally like… we enjoy each other's company, we have fun together, you know.

Jeanne: Right.

Colleen: I haven't heard of it either. And the whole first season of the podcast was focused on weddings because I thought it was something that people would be very familiar with the concept of a wedding and talked a lot about how to do a wedding on your own terms and make your own, make it very unique to what you need as a couple, or as more than a couple of it's more than two people that are that are uniting. There was a big theme about unconscious, you know, things coming up mothers of the bride and the groom, you know, “freaking out”, you know, or “bridezillas” or whatever… And all of that, because of not taking the time to, or not having space in our teaching and our learning to allow space for the feelings which are being changed… you know, the reaction to the change of the relationship.

Astro: Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's huge. Well, and this is kind of a spin off of that, I think, the marriage theme.

Jeanne: My seeing it not happening, because he’s a free spirit and if there was ever a ceremony, it'd be quite different, not knowing it. So just realizing that gee that's not going to probably happen. And how…

Astro: So this was our dance.

Jeanne: This is our dance. This is our dance.

Astro: Letting go.

Jeanne: I’ve had my dance. You can do whatever you want. [LAUGHS]

Colleen: Oh, my goodness. Thank you so much for telling that story.

Jeanne: I have no idea how you’re going to put this together in a podcast.

Astro: Oh, she’s a professional.

Jeanne: She’s a professional. Thank you, Colleen.

And thank you for joining us today for this beautiful story. I love it because it’s a clear and simple example of noticing a disconnect within a relationship, acknowledging it, and finding a way to come together again. How much easier could life be if we could openly acknowledge when we’re not feeling comfortable about something? If we could say things like, “I’m noticing I’m a little sad that you’re getting married,” or “I’m kind of freaked out you’re having a baby because I’m afraid I’ll never see you again. How can we work with this? How can we stay connected?” It’s all about taking care of ourselves, being human, and asking for what we need. Then, finding a fun ceremony to build together!

Jeanne Judson is a world traveler with a Masters in Education. She's an elder, spiritual director, Enneagram instructor, Reiki Master and lover of life. Astro is a conscious activist producing music and media to promote healthy evolution personally, socially, and environmentally. After returning from the protests at Standing Rock he started co-producing a podcast called HealStory aimed at ancestral healing through personal storytelling. You can learn more at www.healstory.com or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would like to support his work you can do so at www.patreon.com/healstory.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. You can follow us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata. You can reach us through the contact page at our website, shamepinata.com. And you can subscribe to the podcast on Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite player. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S2 E3 A Queer Pagan Handfasting (Nick Venegoni)

March 26, 2021

Episode Summary

Nick and Thom were married in a big, open field in Oakland California. This was right after same-sex marriage was legalized in the US and it was a huge celebration. Join us for a glimpse of their special day.

Episode Resources

→ Queer Spirit Podcast: https://queerhealingjourneys.com/podcast/

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Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

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Full Transcript

Thom: And it was funny when we were in - was it Nevada City?

Venegoni: Nevada City.

Thom: I was... went to this cafe and there's this woman we know from another witchcraft tradition and I hadn't seen her for years and I'm sitting there writing this ritual that we have been in ritual space creating and then she walks in. And she's like, "What are you doing," and it was actually somebody who I could tell her what I was actually doing, not just like, "Oh, I'm writing my wedding ceremony." And, but she really supported my flow at that moment. It was great. So random...

It’s the little moments in our lives that can be so rich. Little moments when synchronicity pops and we are seen at a deep level. These moments can and will happen at random, and they can also be thoughtfully cultivated with patience and care through ceremony or ritual design. And it’s truly wonderful to go through that design process as part of a team.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you’ve listened to any of our episodes from season one, you know that we mostly focused stories about weddings. This season we will branch out to share stories of people using ritual to honor a myriad of life transitions. But we will still keep talking about weddings from time to time - including today! Today we will hear the story of the handfasting of my guest Nick Venegoni and his husband Thom. It happened in a big open field in Oakland California and we’d like to take you along and give you a glimpse into the day. Handfasting is an ancient Celtic ceremony in which the folks getting married or committing to each other have their hands tied together as a symbol of their connection. It is commonly associated with the Wiccan or Pagan traditions, however it is working its way into ceremonies in other traditions and even secular ceremonies. Here’s Thom.

Thom: You can create any ceremony you want to make that handfasting happen. You know, there's a sort of a template for marriages in our society that everybody is very mapped to and a handfasting gave us the opportunity to step outside of that pre-scripted experience to make something that was more meaningful and important and reflective of who we are.

Thomas: So what was the setting for your handfasting?

Venegoni: Well, we actually spent a lot of time trying to find a place that we wanted to hold it at because we wanted to have it in a space where we could be... have the ceremony outside and then depending on, you know, the weather possibly go inside if we needed to. But we had it in early May and so we were fairly lucky with weather and we ultimately landed at a park up in Oakland Hills called Joaquin Miller Park, which is a large park and there's lots of areas to it and this is a particular area. It's sort of you go up the hill and as you're driving in, you can actually look west and see all of the Bay Area and San Francisco from there. But then once you go in, it feels very secluded and like you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods in this big sort of field where we had it. So that's where it was.

Thom: Yeah, we basically rented a giant field in the park from the city of Oakland for the day.

Thomas: And they were 200 people at your ceremony?

Venegoni: At least, yeah.

Thomas: Yeah. I'm curious what the process was... that planning process, which is such a rich time for couples. Was it like a spark of idea for one of you and the other one was like, "Oh, yeah!" or would like... and what was the process you went through between, like the beginning and like getting to that day?

Thom: The beginning, middle and end that led us to the beginning?

Thomas: Right!

Thom: Act One, no... Well first, we used ceremony to create the ceremony. So there was actually more to it. We had created sacred space in a way that we do, and we invoked the Muse, you know, just the spirit of inspiration. And then we went into our own experience and just tapped into spirit and let that information flow through as like, what are you being drawn to? What feels important? What's gonna... you know... and we weren't judging or questioning anything that came up just like any good brainstorming session. But this was like spiritual brainstorming. So it was really about what is moving our energy and making us feel connected to the magic of this ceremony. So we... and then we wrote all that down and we use that as our blueprint to start to craft the ritual and incorporate those elements. Like, how do we get there? We now know where we kind of want to go, but then how do we get there?

Venegoni: And then, a few weeks later, I think we ended up going to... we went out of town to go visit a friend of mine and in this little town up in the foothills. And I was hanging out with my friend, and Thom just took all those notes and went and sat in a cafe one day and sort of came up with the first draft I think...

Thom: Well, not sort of. I did. Then I put all of those... that vision together into the beginning of a cohesive whole. You know, things were coming through, like we wanted song and community and we wanted people... everyone to be able to participate. And we didn't want like a... one person who stood in front of us and we really wanted, like a collaborative ceremony. And then we just like... ideas for, you know, like colors and props and ways to communicate with people and...

Venegoni: And even elements like water, like we both got an impression of water. We're like, well, we don't know how we're going to bring water into it. We're not going to be near a body of water but we'll figure that out. And then I think there was something else about dancing, we wanted to have dancing be part of it.

Thom: Mmm hmmm.

Venegoni: And then we asked a friend of ours who we've known for a number of years to, not necessarily be the officiant, but we were calling her the priestess of ceremonies, to sort of be the ringleader. And so then we met with her I think, at least one or two times and got her feedback about what might need to be changed or adjusted from her perspective in terms of being the one who's going to be running the show most of the time.

Thom: Yeah, the whole “how is this actually gonna work/boots on the ground?” So, yeah, there were a lot of phases to it, it was like a two hours ceremony that was just kind of non-stop.

What came through very clearly for Nick and Thom was that they wanted to have a ceremony that was about not only them but also about their community. They wanted to create a magical, transformative experience for everybody to be in a Love Spell together and for each person to weave their own love magic, for themselves, for Nick and Thom, and for the world.

Thom: It had a lot of layers, but we needed the, you know, sort of to “cast”, you know, put the right people in place, who would be able to, you know, hold it properly, witness it properly. Because we had a lot of, you know, in the lingo "unrehearsed participants". So there are people who we knew were familiar with various forms of this form of ritual... this type of ritual... like in general. And then we had, you know, people from like our family or friends of friends who this might have been the first time they've done something like this. So we couldn't let it be totally technical. But we had to move this... move the ceremony in a way to let people naturally invoke and fall into and create the energy as the spell was continually shaped until we kind of sort of sent it off as a prayer to the universe at the culmination of the spiral dance.

Nick and Thom put most of their wedding gifts toward bringing in an art photographer they knew and loved to fully document the day in his own artistic style. As we talked, Nick and Thom looked through their wedding album and reflected on the day.

Thomas: Can you describe one or two of those pictures for us?

Thom: Sure. Well, on the cover is the actual... our hands fasted. You know, a lot of people even like gay men, we see a lot of like gay men's weddings and they look just like sort of straight people's weddings, but the gay version and two guys wearing tuxedos or whatever. But even like our clothes, we had somebody, like hand-make us these sort of like loose linen clothes so that we could be comfortable and I wore all yellow and Nick wore all red. So kind of like the Queen of England, you would know exactly where we were, right? Like we... Because it was a big crowd and a big space and so that was one way we drew attention to ourselves. So it's our hands and over the bowl of water. So water came into it because we had this blessing. We had a big bowl of water and we didn't want one officiant... we had to explain what we had our mistress of ceremony... priestess of ceremonies explained that at some point in the ritual everybody was going to become our officiant. So we had this bowl of water and then like everybody lined up and we didn't want to sit there and have to talk to everybody like, "Oh, this is so beautiful, thank you," you know, blah, blah, blah... We didn't have time or space or energy for that. So we had somebody else come up with a simple song and we were like, "Everybody just sing this simple chant song while you're in line and when you while you come up to us..." Because it was also just part of the energy... And then they put their hands in the bowl and then they sort of said their silent blessing for us and then like poured... like sprinkled that water on our hands. So our hands were over the bowl of water and that was what was on the cover of the book is us with our hands fasted over the bowl of water during the part where everybody was coming up to us singing this lovely song about, "All life comes from the sea. Everything returns to the sea." And anyway, so that's the front cover of the book. You just see, like our hand... the hands fasted over the blessing bowl, which was actually the moment when in sort of a traditional ceremony they're like, "I now pronounce you," but like everybody was doing it. But we didn't want them to... they're not making our relationship, we're making our relationship, but we want their blessing. And also, it was very important for us and for the spell for the Love Spell and for the magic to have our community, like acknowledge, like two men making this, you know, commitment, this romantic commitment. Because we're creating like this energetic template of something that, you know, exists in the world in... like ambivalent, and sometimes controversial, and lots of times, invisible way. And we were, like, part of the magic was putting it right out there - not like once but you know, 200 times.

Vengoni: And that part of the ceremony was actually for me one of the most magical things because this thing happened. And at one point, I'm like, why is this happening? So, Thom's cord was red, my card was green, and then they were sort of tied together over our hands. And about halfway through, I looked down and the water in the bowl is turning blue. And I'm like, "What is going on here? This is like... we are transforming water with the magic!" And it wasn't until about we almost got all the way through that my mind, because I was so in the moment, started thinking more analytically, "Oh, it's probably dye from the green cord was leaking from the water into the bowl, turning it blue."

Thom: I could see that people really wanted that, that moment with us, and that we weren't going to be able to have that and so we had to like engineer that. We weren't going to have, like a reception line, you know that that whole thing. So um... So that was amazing to basically be married by every single person we invited.

We’re so glad you are here! If you enjoy the show, you can become part of the Shame Piñata community by sharing your story about how you marked an important life transition, either the kind they do or don't make party decorations for. Visit the contact page at shamepinata.com to get in touch. And if you have a friend who is in wedding planning mode, please share this episode with them.

I shared that a big focus of the Shame Piñata podcast is to encourage people do whatever they might want to do for their wedding instead of what might be expected of them and our conversation turned to the wedding industry and the pressure it can create for couples.

Thom: Well, that's commercialism and capitalism and you know... they want you to believe that the only way you're gonna get that meaningful experience is if your budget is at a certain level and you consume these things. And then your ceremony just becomes about whether... how good you feel about how close you came to that ideal, rather than that you just were witnessed by the people who love you making a commitment to somebody that you want to spend your life with.

Venegoni: Well, I also think that's the the blessing of being queer, you know, not just around your wedding, but around anything is that, you know, there's a challenge that comes with it, because you have to create something new because it hasn't really existed before. Although we're getting far enough along now where things have existed before for younger queer people. But, you know, so the challenge is you have to create it. But the gift is that you get to create whatever you want. You don't have to do some predetermined thing. I mean, some people feel like they have to try to fit into this box that other straight people, things that other straight people have done before, but you have the chance to create something new that's going to be right for you, whether that's your wedding, or your relationship, or your job, or the way that you run your household, or who your family are, you know, any of those things...

Thom: Yeah, and the rest of it is just pictures of, you know, various moments like drumming and spiral dance and...

Thomas: Were the two of you in the center of the spiral dance, or were you n the spiral?

Venegoni: Yeah, we ended up in the center. Yeah.

Thom: And our friend Urania, who's a Reclaiming Tradition teacher and priestess, she's really good at leading spiral dances. So we had her... because there was no way we were going to be able to think at that point. We needed somebody who just knew... had done it so much, it was just in her body, you know. And so she was in the front and then it was Nick and then it was me. And so we wound in, we just ended up in the middle. So instead of like winding in, and then normally wind back out again. We just wound in and then stayed there. So then we were like in the center. So then when everybody was... let go of each other's hands, we were like in the center of this big onion, you know, of just love and power and getting to just take it all in. There was actually a funny part during the ritual. This is actually one of my favorite things. Right after we had our hands fasted, the priestess of ceremonies, Jenya, she had found like four plants in the group that she went to beforehand and was like, "Okay, there's a part of the ritual when this happens, I'm going to you and you need to do this." So they were going to call to us, and we had to then... but they were calling to us from like four different parts of the circle at one time. So obviously, if we're tied together, we can't just tear off willy-nilly. We have to figure out: What are we doing? What's our priority? Who... what direction are we going to go together? And it was like a challenge for us, like a spiritual challenge in the midst of the ceremony that was like an energetic template for what it's like to be married, you know, where it's like, "Oh, if we're going to... we're tied together, we have to kind of figure out like, when do we go in your direction? And when do we go my direction when there's not agreement" you know? So it was this funny moment. We were both like, like... a cartoonish moment where we just sort of took off, like, like... "I'm going this way," "I'm going that way," like, "Oh, wait, we're like, tied together. What are you going to do, tear my arm off?" You know, like, like a rubber band kind of thing where we sort of like popped away from each other and then sort of snapped back and kind of bonked heads. And you know... And then we had to sit and have a conversation in front of everybody... a quiet... they couldn't really hear what we were saying. We're like, "What do we... what do we do? Which way do we go?"

Venegoni: "Where do you wanna go? Where do I wanna go?"

Thom: ...you want to go? Yeah, I want to go... And so then we just made a decision and walked towards somebody. And everybody was like, "Yay, they figured out their first challenge as a married couple!" Because we've been together for like, 12 years already, you know?

Venegoni: No, it was... [COUNTS] nine years.

Thom: Nine years. So that was like, another way that the... our community was witnessing us behaving as a married couple and we were like normalizing. Like, yes. See, we're married. And this is what married people do. We're just, it's just like every other marriage where you have to figure it out. And this is not any different. And we just got, like, 200 people in one moment to go, "That's a marriage!" So it was just great. We were just built in a lot of that affirmation felt really, really important. Because, you know, the legal, the Supreme Court decision had only come down that July of 2013. And we actually got legally married at a courthouse with a friend of ours in August of 2013. Because we knew we were ready and we just did it. And then we then had this other ceremony in May, that was more of, like the public. Because, you know, legally we needed to just get the paper signed. You know, we already... everything else was in place, but then we had to have like, the big celebration.

Venegoni: Yeah, we actually used our photo that we took of us the day we got legally married as our wedding announcement.

Thom: Yeah. But we didn't tell people, "We got married at the courthouse and now we're gonna... we're getting really married." We know it was all it was all... You know, we had been denied that we couldn't have gotten married any sooner, you know. We could do domestic partnership. We could do all these legal things. So um, so again, it was so new that we really wanted to like... There was a political element, a little bit of political theater involved, also, where we really were like, let's not just sort of like, hide and be quiet about this. Let's go, “ Okay, you know, like, no take backs. This is it. We're done. We're moving forward now.” This is the new beginning point for all of us. And of course there are still people who are resistant to that, but we're not... there's no... we're not going back.

I am so grateful to Nick and Thom for sharing their planning and ritual process for such a large-scale event, and grateful to have had a peek into their special day. I want to encourage and remind you that if you ever find yourself in wedding planning mode, know that the sky is the limit in terms of your choices for ceremony creation. Of course there are financial realities and familial traditions will be part of the story, but your imagination and ability to step outside the box will always be there for you.

Nick Venegoni & his husband Thom live in San Francisco, California and have been together for 15 years. Nick is the host of The Queer Spirit podcast and is a sound healer practitioner, who enjoys making home made pickles. Thom is a mystic and ritualist in the school of Natural and Ancestral Witchcraft and co-creator of the Trees and Stars open coven for the exploration of the Hidden Mysteries of Spirit, Nature, Self, and Cosmos.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to make sure you're notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E16 Inviting Grief to the Wedding (Tria Wen)

November 6, 2020

Episode Summary

It's the big day and there's a lot going on. Relationships are being redefined. Power dynamics are actively shifting and yet, in the words of wedding planner Tria Wen, "It's taboo to acknowledge or to express anything but joy." What would it look like to make room for some of the more complex emotions? To let everyone acknowledge the effect a wedding has on their unique relationship to the couple?

Episode Resources:

Tria Wen: https://triawen.com/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

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Full Transcript

Chang: I was actually talking to a young woman the other day who is thinking about becoming a wedding planner. And she had one hesitation, she asked me, “I heard that people act irrational and crazy on wedding days, is that true?” And I had to be honest with her and tell her it's partly true. People behave in ways that seem bizarre and irrational on wedding days, but if you really strip away what's happening, to me it makes perfect sense the ways that they're acting out.

So it's the big day and there's a lot going on. Relationships are being redefined. Power dynamics are actively shifting and yet it’s taboo to feel anything but joy. What would it look like to make room for some of the more complex emotions? To acknowledge the effect a wedding has on their unique relationship everyone has with the couple? This is Shame Piñata. I'm Colleen Thomas.

I'm so happy to welcome Tria Chang and her wisdom back on today’s show. Tria and I met last year when she was in the process of planning her second wedding. She was working through a rich and complicated experience of weddings, being a former wedding planner who had participated in over 100 ceremonies and who had gone through a divorce during those years. As she looked ahead to her second wedding, she wanted to create a unique ceremony that was a perfect fit for herself and her partner.

At the time we met, I shared with Tria some of the details of my own wedding, specifically how it was designed to make room for all of the feelings, both happy and other. Weddings bring up a myriad of feelings and yet we're taught that there is only room for joy on the day. There's no above-board acknowledgement of how the new union will shift the family dynamics or sometimes push friendships to the back seat. We are not encouraged to sit down and have meaningful conversations about these things with our friends and family, about how the new union will change things for everyone. And when something is not brought into the light or given room for expression, it can take on a life of its own. Think people behaving irrationally at weddings. Think Bridezillas.

Shortly after that first interview, Tria and I sat down again to explore what all is happening at a wedding - the many people, the many perspectives, the many feelings. The big mash up of everything happening at once and the things that may not get acknowledged.

We typically think about the couple when we think of a wedding, but there are so many more people involved and each person brings their own perspective, expectations, and life experiences to that day. There's the couple, their parents and siblings and maybe even children, their friends and family who make up the wedding party, and the guests. In addition to people we could look around the room and see, there are also invisible forces that can influence the day. There's that phenomenon I call the female legacy, which women can be acutely attuned to by the mere fact that marriage has been a survival tool for women historically. I'm not sure how else to describe it other than to say weddings can be heavier for women. There also may be some acute losses going on, such as the loss of a father to give the bride away or the loss of a close friend missed by the entire community. And there's often this idea that it all happens in one moment, there's this wedding, and it happens in a day and boom, you're married and it's all transitions are finished.

Chang: To add the behind the scenes perspective even for the vendors, for most of the weddings that I planned, there were at least 8-12 different vendors working on things. And each of those vendors come in with their own goals and agendas. So for example, the makeup artist will of course be wanting to make the bride look beautiful because it's her day, but she also has her portfolio to think about. So she'll be wanting the photographer to get certain shots of the hair and makeup, be sending that to her or be recording it for herself for her own social media or website. The photographer's obviously working on a portfolio as well and they want to get a certain type of shot that can help them get on wedding blogs or gain the trust of other clients. And the planner or stylist has a certain look that they're trying to achieve so that they can also show their best work in their portfolio and attract future clients too. So there are a lot of desires going on on a wedding day, not just the personal, also the professional. And then there is that feeling of transition, as you said, and transitions don't happen in one moment that you're not a completely different person right after you have the ring on or right after you kiss. It's just part of the process. So there is a lot going on in the wedding day, and that you're supposed to pack all of these things in, and you're supposed to be thrilled about it the whole time. So everyone is really supposed to be on their best behavior, and it doesn't usually turn out that way.

Thomas: Right. And we've had quite a few conversations about the other feelings, the feelings that are harder maybe, the feelings that don't fit in the pretty package, the feelings that we're not allowed to have at a wedding, they get discouraged, and maybe the even the unconscious losses that folks aren't even aware that they're feeling. What tensions have you seen come up at weddings?

Chang: Yeah, there have been a lot of tensions that come up, I think the most common one I've seen is usually between the couple and their parents. So sometimes there are mothers of the bride who are feeling protective, or like they don't really want to let go. So they start trying to control small things like the way the bride is getting her makeup done, or trying to change menu items last minute. It can really come out in ways that seem unrelated, but are just things that catch their attention and show them a way of having more control in that moment. I also had a client who… they were a slightly older couple and so they didn't have their parents involved in the planning at all. And when the mother of the groom showed up to the ceremony site, which was an art gallery, she was furious. She just hated the venue. She thought it was so ugly and she told me, “These pictures on the wall, they're awful. They have to go. There aren't enough flowers!” And, you know, in an art gallery you can't change the display. It's off limits. We did end up moving some flowers around for her. And she didn't like the concrete floor which was part of the modernist look. But I talked to the bride and groom and told them I think it would really help her if she could have some say. And so they were comfortable with us putting down an aisle runner, so at least having something cloth for them to walk down - f or whatever reason that became important to her in that moment.

Thomas: Right. And would you say that with a lot of these people, that these attempts to regain a little bit of control, feeling uncomfortable, that it was unconscious?

Chang: Yes, I definitely think it was unconscious, I think they were really focused on that tangible thing. Because that seemed rational to them that seemed like something they could handle. Whereas going within and taking those steps inside and recognizing I'm losing my son or my daughter in these small ways. That's a really daunting thing to look at. And you don't really want to look at that on a wedding day, because what if it breaks you? What if you break down and end up inconsolable? You don't want to be that person at a wedding. You want to be supportive and joyful. So yes, I definitely saw a lot of unconscious outbursts at things that were probably not the real problem. But after those outbursts, people did seem to be able to feel a little bit better or maybe they felt a little embarrassed about how they acted and were able to let go and get into the joy of it more.

Thomas: How do you think it would have been different for those in those situations, if the couple had said, "We don't want you to hold it together. We want you to just be here and have all your feelings."

Chang: I like that idea a lot. But I've also seen the dynamics between parents and their children can be so hard to change that even if their children tell them, “Be yourself, let go,” if that's not their personality, I'm not sure they would be able to do that. But maybe even just having that permission would have felt good. It's hard to say.

Thomas: Right.

Tria wrote an article for the Washington Post about the wedding my husband and I created, specifically how we worked in a section for grieving. To explain how our wedding came about, I need to take you back 20 years. In the year 2000, I moved to California to attend Matthew Fox's graduate program in Creation Spirituality. Fox is often described as a renegade theologian and it was his unique event called the Techno Cosmic Mass that drew me to his school. The Techno Cosmic Mass, or Cosmic Mass as it is now called, is a multimedia rave-like community worship experience that brings prayer and devotion off the pages of the hymnal and into the soles of the feet. During my years in school I attended almost every mass.

One thing I didn't know was that my future husband was also attending those events. But we wouldn't even meet each other for another 5 years when the masses were no longer being produced. So we met. And then 10 years later, we decided to get married and began considering what kind of ceremony might be a good fit for us. We were actually kind of stuck because we come from different traditions and nothing seemed to come organically. But as synchronicity would have it, Matthew Fox and his team began producing the Cosmic Mass again right around that time. And on a Sunday night, in a room full of people sweating their prayers under flashing dance lights we realized we found it - we'd found the way we wanted to get married. We were going to create the first ever Techno Cosmic Wedding.

The structure of the Cosmic Mass follows the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality. To give you some context, the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality are: The Via Positiva, a time of joy, awe and wonder; the Via Negativa, a time of darkness, letting go, and grieving; the Via Creativa, honoring ourselves as divinely creative beings; and lastly the Via Transformativa, a time of preparing ourselves to go forward as spiritual warriors. While we structured the entire wedding on these four paths, it was the Via Negativa that was most unusual to have in a wedding. Matthew Fox defines the Via Negativa as "a time of communal grieving for the suffering of the planet and all beings."

Here's how Tria described the Via Negativa section of our wedding ceremony in her article: "The room was dimly lit. Wedding guests were seated on the floor, eyes closed, some crying, some reaching out in comfort. Bodies swayed gently to a melancholic chorus, and a woman’s voice crescendoed with emotion... The speaker invited guests to summon feelings of loss - whether those be for the loss of loved ones, of faith, of youth, of passion - and to embrace feelings of fear, for the world or for themselves." It was important for us to include time for these harder emotions in our wedding ceremony because we wanted to make room for our full selves to show up both at the wedding in the marriage.

Thomas: And we've spent some time too talking about the idea of the Via Negativa which comes from the wedding that my husband and I had where we actually had a section of the wedding dedicated to grieving and we've talked about how that was very unusual.

Chang: Yes, and wonderful, I think.

Thomas: And you and your fiancé are planning something a little bit like that for your second wedding.

Chang: Yes, so we have such a small wedding and I think our guests tend to be on the more conventional side. So instead of having it at the actual wedding and having an orchestrated section of going through Via Negativa like you did, we've been spreading it out over the months leading up to the wedding, and we plan to continue making space for it after the wedding even in the years to come. Because I think it's important to realize that negative feelings, especially grief, they don't go away after one session. They can't be addressed very quickly. But if you make space for them in an ongoing way, I think it makes it easier to make joy the forefront of a certain day, in this case the wedding day. So what we've been doing is having conversations with people close to us and asking them what kind of fears they might have about how our relationship going forward might be or any fears for us as a couple, or just anything on their mind really that may be different from the regular congratulations. And then inspired by you and Rodrigo, my fiancé and I did our own kind of private Via Negativa with the two of us. We did it last week and we lit candles and turned off the lights and played some music and then I asked us to write down in a notebook all the things that we were scared about or nervous about for the wedding day. And then all of the things that made us have those fear feelings for marriage in general. And so we wrote for a little while and then we took turns sharing things and it lasted about two hours actually. We really got to talk about a lot of things. Anything from just where would we spend Christmases, like which family gets us at which time of year, to how will the dynamic change when we have children, and what will happen if, you know, one of our parents passes away, how will we take care of the other one? So we really covered a lot of ground and I think felt a lot better afterwards. But we also recognize it's a conversation that will continue. And then we had a special song to us and did the eye contact for a while to kind of let it all settle in.

Thomas: That's wonderful. That's so wonderful.

Chang: Yeah.

Thomas: So you've really laid the groundwork, then for yourself, each of you individually plus you as a couple plus the people in your life, to have space to share any fears, any, any worries...

Chang: Yes, yeah. Because we are both at a point in our lives where we recognize marriage is difficult, because life is difficult and you're attaching yourself to someone else's life. So you will get all their difficulties plus all your difficulties. And that is something to celebrate, because you'll have someone with you, but it's also something to be a little bit nervous about and having space for all of that really feels a lot better. And I do have you to thank for that because it kind of didn't click for me until I saw your wedding ceremony from the video you showed me. And seeing that Via Negativa and seeing the space you made made me realize that was what was missing in my wedding planning. Because I had been going to a bit of therapy and trying to deal with my own feelings of worry because I was married before and it didn't work out. And so I knew I had to do this second wedding and marriage differently. But I wasn't quite sure how. So seeing your experience really helped me.

I asked Tria how she worked with couples around the loss of a loved one at the wedding.

Chang: With acute losses, or grief in general, that can be a really difficult thing to handle at a wedding because, as we talked about, a wedding is supposed to be all joy and it feels scary to invite something in that will bring you grief and sadness. But sometimes people are important to us and when they're not there, to kind of brush it under the rug, it doesn't really feel real. So I think, in some ways, it could be interesting to expand what happens at a wedding to include some of the things that happen at a memorial or a grief ritual. So we can look to other cultures, for example, like the Day of the Dead. You know, they have these beautiful altars and flowers and favorite foods of that loved one, and they really presence them. And at most weddings I've been to where they've lost a loved one, they either have a line about them in the program or a picture or two kind of on a shelf in a corner that you can easily bypass if you want to. And they are honoring them, but they're making it really kind of optional and something that's easy to ignore if you're not comfortable with that. But it could be really lovely to actually invite that deceased loved one in and really have them there with a favorite food or some tradition that they loved. At my little wedding ceremony, we are having our... instead of place cards with people's names, we're writing cards to everyone with our heartfelt sentiments to them and we're writing them on watercolor painted envelopes and cards. And my mom was a watercolor artist and a lot of weekends, we would spend painting big sheets of watercolor together and then cutting out envelopes. And in those days, people used to mail each other letters often. So we would use those envelopes. So I had my fiancé make these envelopes with me and I really felt her there with me. And he's never met my mom so it was a great way for me to introduce her to him and show him this is how I would spend my weekends with my mom. And I know that having those envelopes there on the day, it's small, it's not going to be very distracting for people who didn't know her. But I will make a mention of the meaning that they have to me. And I think I'll feel her there more in that way.

Thomas: Hmm, that's a really beautiful way of including her.

As the interview came to a close, Tria and I touched on inclusivity at the wedding, how to include everyone even in a small ceremony.

Chang: We are actually having a very casual meetup at a cafe, the week after our wedding ceremony for all of those friends of ours who we didn't feel like we could accommodate at the ceremony because it's so small, but who we still wanted to celebrate with in some way. So we're just having some snacks at a cafe and a tarot card reader and a watercolor portrait artist. And that’s pretty much it we're just gonna hang out. For me, I'm so... I think I have a caregiving aspect to my personality that I have not been able to shake. So when I think about holding an event for people, I literally think of it from every single person's perspective and think of how to make it comfortable for them. So we're having 25 people at our wedding. And that's, you know, me thinking through the day 25 times and that seemed like my limit. I feel like I don't want to think through this in 125 ways, just 25. That's all I can manage.

Thomas: Is that something that you ever recommended to your clients when you were a wedding planner.

Chang: Oh, no. That's just a problem that I have. I don't recommend it at all. Yeah, I've even tried to imagine for my two year old niece, like, okay, she's gonna get bored around this time. So I'm like... put Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes on our playlist for the wedding. Like, make sure to have something for everybody.

Thomas: Oh, wow. That is super personalized.

Chang: A little kid playlist just for the cute little ones.

Thomas: That’s so wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your inspiration and for sharing your story of your, your second wedding, and all that you're learning and doing and experiencing and all that you bring from everything you've done before.

Chang: Thank you as well and, to use your term, for holding space for all of these conversations. And I think that there is such an automatic track that people get on when they wedding plan so I hope that hearing stories on your podcast will help people realize they don't have to follow an automatic track. They can do it as they want to. They can have a Via Negativa if they want to.

Thomas: They can!

Thank you so much for joining us today for this conversation about making room for all of the emotions on the wedding day. To hear more in Tria's wonderful written words, check out her piece entitled, “A Joyful Wedding Can Still Make Room for Grief” listfed in the show notes. While you're there, check out some footage of the Cosmic Mass on the Cosmic Mass website.

Tria Chang is a writer and organizer. Follow her on Instagram @tria_chang. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you got something out of this episode, please share it with a friend. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E12 Why Weddings Push Our Buttons (Jocelyn Charnas)

August 14, 2020

Episode Summary

Transitions are our friends. Transitions bring us new things. Transitions can also bring discomfort, but that discomfort offers us a chance to grow - if we are willing to let it have a seat at the table. What would happen if we embraced the discomfort, embraced the difficulty, embraced the challenge? What would it be like if all parts of us were offered a place at the table?

Episode Resources

→ Dr. Jocelyn Charnas: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/jocelyn-w-charnas-new-york-ny/256726

→ Why Stress When You Can See a Wedding Therapist?: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/fashion/weddings/why-stress-when-you-can-see-a-wedding-therapist.html

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on iTunes | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Charnas: I often use the analogy of a shopping cart. You know, when one wheel is off, the shopping cart doesn't move right, right? You're swinging to the left and you're swinging to the right... So you know, I see that as sort of a good analogy for transition. One of the wheels has shifted around. And in order to keep going in a positive direction, sometimes we've got to shift those other wheels around. Sometimes we have to change as a whole, or adapt as a whole, or adjust to get back on track.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.

Before we get started today, I want to invite you to take our listener survey. It doesn’t matter how long you've been a listener or how frequently you listen. We need your feedback to grow and improve. So please take a few minutes and visit shamepinata.com. You'll find the listener survey link right on that page. And if you like, we’ll send you a 5 minute centering meditation to thank you for your time.

Our guest today is Dr. Joceyn Charnas, a psychologist based in New York City who works with couples navigating transitions, especially the wedding transition. She explains why weddings can be so crazy-making, not only for the couple, but also for those around them. And she also shares some of the tools she offers her clients to help them stay sane and healthy during life changes.

Thomas: Can you tell me a little bit about your work, sort of in broad strokes and how you touch on transition in your work?

Charnas: Sure, sure. Well, I'm a clinical psychologist in private practice. I've been in practice on my own for about 10 years now. I see individual clients and I also see couples. And I have a little bit of a niche in premarital therapy. So I see a lot of clients who are engaged to be married and come to me to help them navigate and manage that transition. And, you know, being a psychologist in general, I see a lot of people in transition. In fact, that's often a sort of inflection point in terms of when people decide to come into therapy. You know, for the most part, people don't come to therapy when they're comfortable and everything's great - even though that would be wonderful and everyone could benefit from it and la la la… Most people, most… you know, typical people come in when they're when they're in distress or in discomfort. And so often distress and discomfort come around transitions, you know, life is... when life changes, that's when we struggle. So, both in my work with individuals and in my work with couples, we're spending a lot of time talking about transitions and managing those transitions, and particularly doing a lot of work around trying to reframe those transitions as opportunities for growth and for self knowledge and for evolution of the self, you know, as opposed to seeing them as roadblocks. We really try to reframe them and see them as opportunities for growth and that's a lot of the work I do.

Thomas: I love it. Because I've been thinking about transitions and how... why ritual can be useful in the time of transitions and it's almost like we're programmed to be the same and when we have to change... it just throws everything out of whack and brings up all this extra stuff that we don't want.

Charnas: I think that's absolutely right. The idea, as I try to help people to see, is to try to embrace that discomfort, embrace that difficulty, embrace that challenge rather than push those feelings under the rug… and because they're uncomfortable, push them underground and disavow them. I really try to work with my patients to do the best they can to embrace the changes and embrace the discomfort because I think from... in my experience, positive growth only comes from discomfort, right? We have to be in a position that's difficult for us or challenging or uncomfortable in order to change and grow. I mean, this whole concept of growing pains, I think is a true... is a truism. So, you know, to me, it's really about even though it's difficult, even though it's scary, even though it's uncertainty unknown, I really try to help people to embrace those difficult feelings because this is how we grow and this is also how we learn about ourselves. So you know, it's almost like okay, how do we take advantage of the situation instead of looking at it as a negative?

Thomas: And are there tools that you share with your clients around those issues?

Charnas: Yeah, there are. I mean, mostly it's about... You know, this word mindfulness is thrown around a lot and I think it's sort of become a little bit of an umbrella term. But I really honed in on the idea of mindfulness around our emotions. So I think that one really important tool that I encourage clients to try to make use of is to embrace the whole range of emotions and be mindful, be aware of what you're feeling, whether it's positive, negative, whatever it is. If we can really tune into what our emotions are, particularly in those moments of transition, those times of change or on milestones in life, whether it's having a child or getting married or graduate... college graduation is a huge one, work with a lot of clients around all of these milestones usually generate both positive and negative emotions and we're taught to really pay attention to the positive and tune out the negative. And so I really try to encourage couples and individuals to pay attention to the full spectrum and really get in there with those negative emotions because we can learn about ourselves from them and they're useful and they're as valid as the positive ones. So that that's a big one that I use, particularly with couples. Because you know, negative emotions in a couple, especially when you're preparing to get married, can be very uncomfortable. Nobody likes to feel doubt. No one wants to feel uncertain. No one wants to feel scared, but you know what? Everybody does. I haven't met anybody that's planning to get married that doesn't have, on some level, those kinds of feelings. So the idea of bringing them out, normalizing them, validating them, I found goes a really, really long way to help people.

Yes! Making room for all of it. Making room for all of us. Even when transitions bring up big feelings we might not know what to do with or how to handle, we can make room for them. So then at least we just have the feelings and not an additional layer on top of the feelings telling us we shouldn't have them. I love that Jocelyn brought us to this topic, so I asked her to take us a little deeper.

Thomas: Why are the negative emotions so scary?

Charnas: I mean, I think nobody likes to not feel good, right? I mean, we all want to feel good. And as I said, I think there is this sort of push in this, you know… Wellness movement and positive psychology and things… You know, 100 ways to be happy and find happiness every day… And again, there’s… Those things are wonderful, okay? But they're just one side of the coin. And I think generally we're socialized away from you know… Don't cry... All the things that are connected... Don't be afraid.. All those all these things that we sort of take for granted that are sort of so much you know, like baked into the ether in terms of our emotional lives. I think that we become… You know, I call it affect-phobic. We can become afraid of our feelings, particularly the negative feelings because we are worried that they’re signals that we're making a mistake or this is wrong, or we're somehow bad or not good enough… All those things. I think those negative emotions can be signals of those sort of myths we tell ourselves. And I really again, I'm really, really… Try to work with, with individuals and with couples to be able to sit with those negative emotions, allow them to the surface, talk about them, explore them as a way to detoxify them. You know, I think so many people are afraid of anger. People are afraid of being sad. But as I said, those are on the healthy and normal range of human emotions and so we are allowed to, and should feel all of it. Well, and you know, in particular, as I said, when it comes to, to weddings, in this period of engagement, people get really frightened of uncertainty and doubt, you know, this myth that we're supposed to be sure and, you know, so many of these myths around weddings... Happiest day of our life myth, all of these things They really push us into a corner of the way we're supposed to feel. And if we don't feel that way, then we again go back to the broken record of what's wrong with me? You know, is this a mistake? What's wrong with my partner? And that, you know, rarely does that. Take us good place. Right?

Thomas: Right.

Charnas: Right? I mean, that's, that's that's rarely a good thing.

Thomas: And all of that is, is amplified by the people around us, you know, our mother, our sister, our aunt… often the women, you know, who have their own stuff.

Charnas: I think that's right. You know, as I said, I think that I think those messages are typically well-meaning and I don't think there's negative intention behind those messages that people that love us want us to be sure and want us to be happy and want us to make good decisions. But I think it's more complicated than that. And it's less black and white than that. As I said, I really... I don't know any couple that has ever stood on the precipice of marriage, which is supposed to be, we hope, a lifetime commitment, and not felt some uncertainty and not had moments of doubt. I mean, those things are healthy and normal in a thinking, functional brain.

Weddings have been fascinating me this year in terms of their potency. I mean, there's so much happening on so many levels, but at the same time, it's just a wedding. I took this opportunity to ask Jocelyn what is actually happening at a wedding.

Charnas: Weddings are amazing, right? They're... they're this very interesting amalgam of all of the things that are complicated and challenging and evocative and emotionally loaded, right? They have this amazing ability to tap into, kick up, stir up some really intense dynamics, right? Because think about, think about all that a wedding and a marriage entails. It's love, its money, it's family, its identity, it's transition, it's appearance, its expectations... It's all of these things sort of wrapped up into one intense moment. And I think that as a result of that, people react very strongly to those things… And look, understandably so. Right? Those are the things in life that do kick up the most emotion. So I think that the wedding is sort of at the crossroads of all of these things. And as such, they really have an ability to sort of shine a very bright hot… white hot spotlight on the things in life that we kind of struggle with as humans anyway. You know, I sort of came to this work because of my own experiences and also sort of observing and witnessing people in my life around this time... a lot of friends getting married... and colleagues and all of that, and sort of starting to see that, oh, this makes everybody crazy. And yes, it makes everybody crazy in their own special, unique way. But this seems to make a sane person crazy. And so what is going on here? So I started to think about this as something that needs to be addressed and needs to be normalized and validated in a way that I really didn't find it was being talked about. I mean, when I was preparing to get married myself, I remember looking through, you know, a stack of wedding magazines. And I remember just sort of flipping through them. And there was no reference at all in probably 800 pages of bridal magazines about the emotional impact of getting married. There was, you know, 800 pages on flowers, but not a blurb on, “Oh, do you feel crazy? Are you nervous? You know, you're normal or you're not alone.” There was none of that. And I thought, gee, this is a real sort of hole in the market here real gap where people are given guidance on everything from what, you know, what color pale pink your nail should be, but nobody was talking about how you feel. So I really sort of threw myself into working with couples and to put myself out there as a touchstone to help couples try to navigate this, this time that's both difficult and also a tremendous opportunity to work on the foundation, to build tools for marriage... because a wedding is not the end the wedding as some people see it as the end. It's just the beginning. It's just it's just the beginning of the whole relationship of the marriage. Getting couples in my office for this period of time when they're sort of embarking on this transition, helping them to see it as normal and healthy that this is... this is a difficult time and to start working on the skills that make for a good marriage.

Thomas: Hmm, yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah, I can, I can totally relate to that, that it's like, “Hey, we're done. We got through this big thing!”

Charnas: Everybody's planning that you do nothing for a year plan for this party, right? And then the party comes and goes and that's lovely. But then what, right? And that's something I really that's sort of one of my basic tenets of the work I do is okay. The wedding is important, and it's and it's a symbol and it's a ceremony and it's meaningful and all of that, absolutely. But we cannot only focus on this, we have to be able to pay attention to the marriage, what the wedding symbolizes which is the beginning of a marriage and the relationship and the partnership. And so I really, really work with couples to try to shift their focus to the wedding as the beginning to the wedding as a symbol and then get into what are our expectations of marriage? What our expectations of family life and lifestyle and you know, partnership and... because that's really that's the meat of it, that's the important stuff. The wedding is just it's just a symbol. And look, at and... it's everything is easy, it's easy to get lost in it right I mean, I it was easy for me to it's easy to to to focus on the details, you know, get very, very caught up in the details of the wedding. We all do and I think we all fall victim to that. But if we lose sight of the bigger picture, I think we lose... an opportunity is lost.

Thomas: Yeah, definitely.

Touching more on the idea of the big picture, I asked Jocelyn how the other family members come into play. What might they be feeling? Because by creating a new family unit, the couple are separating from their family of origin and that brings up stuff for everybody.

Charnas: That's a huge, huge, huge part of it, in my experience and working with couples. And it's not just weddings, it's, it's... with any real significant transition in life, it often entails a redefining of the relationships in our lives, right? We grow up, we graduate from school, and that might change our relationship a little bit with our parents. We have children, we get married, all these things, they require a little bit of a redefining of the existing relationships in our lives. And again, that is not always easy, but it's an opportunity to sort of embrace that transition and maybe let your parents know that you need to be treated as an adult now, just as an example, or that you're going to be making decisions that maybe are different from the decisions that they might have made. So dealing with the sort of family around us, you know, I think of... I think often use the sort of analogy of the couples that if this is an atom, the couple is the nucleus and and the people in their lives are the protons and neutrons, whatever it is… Don't quote me on the science of that… But you know what I mean… the surrounding, you know, the sun versus the rest of the planets. So, I think that we first have to focus on the strength of the relationship and the couple is the nucleus. The couple of the most important thing. But we do have to take into account the other people in our lives that we love, because this is happening to them too, right? For the mother of the bride, her daughter is getting married, that's a meaningful moment. Or for our best friend or brother or father… You know...or for a child sometime watching their parents get remarried. I mean, these are life changing situations, not just for us, but for the people around us. And I think to find that line where we are not being completely driven by the desire to please those people around us because that's not good either. But where we can see our partnership as the center but also pay attention and be sensitive to the people... to the needs and the desires of the people around us and recognizing that this is change and transition for them too. I think that's really important and it's sort of a balance to strike.

Thomas: When I was recording the trailer for the series, I had a story popped back in my head, which I shared atthe beginning of that... which is that my mother's a very forceful person, but she's always also very gentle. She's just like, forceful underneath. You know, you don't normally see that… like unless she really...

Charnas: Unless she has to pull it out?

Thomas: Yeah, exactly! And so we literally got married and then walked out of the room and we're in the, like, the hallway outside for like... I don't know, maybe three minutes with, you know... hugging and kissing. Like, as like now we're married, and we're bonding for like three minutes. And my friend kept knocking on the door. And we were like, “Wow, what, dude, like three minutes, you know?” And he was like, “Your mom wants to see you.” And I was like, I was like, “No, I'm sorry. But no, not for three minutes. Just no, no right now!” And then... and then he came back and he's like, “She really wants to see you.” And he told me later that he said something like, you know, “Hey, do you need anything?” And she's like, “Yeah, I need Colleen.” And then... and then he like went back over and he's like, “Sorry, she's... she's not available.” Right? And she's like, “No, I need Colleen.” And I'm just like, “Oh, God!” And I asked her later... I said, “Gosh, what did you need?” You know, she's like, “Oh, I don't know.”

Charnas: And there you go, right. I mean, everybody's gonna, everybody's gonna be themselves. I'm laughing because my mother... the same thing happened to me basically. We were up in the hotel room for the two minutes between the ceremony and the party, and my mother came into touch with her makeup. I was like “Really, really? There wasn't anywhere else you could come to touch up your makeup, really?” So... so I can... I can empathize with that. And I'm sure everyone in these stories is well intended, but the thing is, it's something to navigate, it's not easy. And you know, in those moments, maybe both of our mothers, whether they were conscious of it or not, were experiencing that... those pangs of loss, or those fears of loss. In our better moments, our best selves can be both firm and setting boundaries but also sensitive to that, which is not always easy.

Thomas: Yeah. I'm so glad that you're here and you're doing your work and, and everybody gets to benefit from it including people like me who just get to talk to you for 20 minutes.

Charnas: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Dr. Jocelyn Charnas is a clinical psychologist based in New York City. She works with individuals and couples in all phases of relationship. She was featured in Newsday and New York Weddings for her work with engaged couples - work that has earned her the title, "The Wedding Doctor."

Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to be notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E10 My Self Marriage Story

July 3, 2020

Episode Summary

What if you could find the most amazing partner in the world, someone who loves you unconditionally, who respects you, admires you, and has your back through thick and thin? What if that person was you?

Episode Resources:

→ Tria Wen: https://triawen.com/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
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Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Thomas: It's the transition of me from little girl who wants to get married and wants to be the bride in the big white wedding dress to me as the grown woman who stands in her power, who knows who she is, who knows that she's complete with or without a partner, and is connected most deeply with the sacred inside of herself.

What if I told you that you could find the most amazing partner in the world, someone who loves you unconditionally, who respects you, admires you, and has your back through thick and thin. A person who really understands you and gets it. In fact, a person that knows you so well, being with them is just like being home. Where could you find this person? Just look in the mirror. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we're going to switch things up a little bit. My good friend Tria Chang is going to interview me about a ceremony from my life, a ceremony I held about 5 years ago in which I married myself. If self-marriage is new to you, I invite you to give it a listen.

Chang: So hello, Colleen.

Thomas: Hi Tria.

Chang: It's so nice to talk to you about your ceremony because it is the reason that we met in the first place or not, actually the reason we met with Shame Piñata, but I think what made me feel really connected to you was hearing about your own ritual and how you have created something that I think a lot of people could take into their own lives. So I'm excited to talk to you about that today. And as we mentioned, there's a lot going on in the world right now and it's... it can be hard to be centered and present. So if you don't mind, I thought we could do a little exercise to start off before I start asking you questions and that is just to kind of put yourself in the place of your self-commitment ceremony. And I'm going to ask you questions in the present tense as if we're there. And if you don't mind answering the questions in the present tense as well just to like, help bring us there and I might go ahead and close my eyes while we do this, just so I can really be there with you. So, it's the day yourself commitment ceremony. And you wake up in the morning. How are you feeling?

Thomas: Nervous about the details coming together because there's a lot of details and really excited that the day is finally here.

Chang: And what time of the day did the ceremony begin?

Thomas: It begins... I think... I forget... I think it begins around noon or two in the afternoon.

Chang: Okay, perfect. So let's put ourselves in that space in the afternoon. And how are you opening the ceremony? What do you hear and who is there? What do you see?

Thomas: Well, it takes a while for us to get ready and it takes a while for everybody to arrive. And we have I think we have 13 women in person attending... we have 13 women in person attending and we have three additional women attend on Skype. They think it's cute and fun that I'm wearing a big old wedding dress that I got to Goodwill. It doesn't fit me and it's pinned closed in the back because it's way too big.

Chang: And how do you open the ceremony?

Thomas: I brought in an officiant so that I wouldn't have to officiate it myself. So how we open it is that she does a welcome and an introduction. She introduces everybody, everybody to themselves and to each other. And then she leads us in a meditation, a short meditation just to arrive. And then I chose to cast a circle because that's the tradition that I come from to create sacred space, to open it into a ceremonial space. And then we invited in Spirit and we began doing... I think we had one reading in the beginning... oh, yes, a friend of mine read the Charge of the Goddess and then we went into check-ins...

The ceremony began with casting the circle, calling the directions and inviting in Spirit and then moved into readings, check-in and a circle dance. After the circle dance, we went into a performance art piece that I created especially for the ceremony, which was kind of the heart of the ritual. It symbolized my transition from the little girl who wanted the fairytale wedding to the grown woman standing in her power. The performance art piece was comprised of many elements woven together, visual, auditory and movement. But at its heart, it was basically me taking off the froofy wedding dress and stepping into a more earthy, Goddess dress while a modern rendition of Woodie Guthrie's 1944 song "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" playing in the background. The lyrics of that song are:
Who's gonna shoe your pretty little foot?
Who's gonna glove your hand?
Who's gonna kiss your red ruby lips?
Who's gonna be your man?
Tria asked me about the significance of that song in the context of a self-commitment ceremony.

Thomas: For me, I chose to do the self-commitment ceremony when I was just about to get married to a person... to a man. And I had always wanted to do a self-commitment ceremony and had done some small things, but it felt really important to me before marrying somebody else to marry myself first, because I've had a tendency to give myself away and to sort of run roughshod over myself and not pay attention to what I needed, but to become what I thought I was supposed to be for somebody else... which maybe sounds like a good idea, but really, ultimately, it ends up with me being kind of a shell person for that other person and not somebody they can really rely on and trust in, because I'm not being authentic to myself. So I took the opportunity of using the self-commitment ceremony as a time to shed a little bit more of that because I knew that I could say, "Oh, I'm going to be my full self, I'm going to marry you, I'm going to be my full self." But yet there was going to be some residue of the old ways and the old beliefs in me. So the performance art piece was a chance to enact taking off the dress, setting it aside, honoring it, and just being like, yeah, and I'm me. And this is who I'm connecting with and this is who I'm going to walk out of the ceremony being so that I can walk into the next ceremony as that person.

Chang: Yes, that really resonates with me. Yeah.

Thomas: And having it witnessed was extremely powerful.

Chang: That's beautiful. Yeah, that resonates with me and I think so many other people, and perhaps women especially feel a great sense of loss during a relationship or a marriage especially. And I think that's so powerful to commit to yourself before doing that.

So, my particular self-marriage ceremony was focused heavily on the concept of the Chakras, which are energy centers in the body. As you’ll hear in the next section of the interview, the chakras are important to me, so I wove them into my ceremony. For reference, if you’re not already familiar with them, the chakras run in a line near the spine beginning with the 1st chakra at the base of the spine and extending up to the 7th chakra at the crown of the head, with a few additional chakras above that. Each chakra is correlated to a particular energy such as safety, love or intuition.

Chang: What was the importance of the chakras in your ceremony and how did you represent each?

Thomas: My spiritual practice at that time was slowly going through each chakra. So, I had a daily meditation practice where I was working on whichever one. I started with the first chakra and I worked through them all. And I worked through them... I spend about three months on each or longer... So I would... every morning I would have a meditation where I would just sit with like the concept of the first chakra, say, and I would just sort of notice if I could feel it in my body, and I would just sort of sense into it. And I had lots of different things that I did around staying focused on the chakra. So I was... basically over a long period of time, I was learning myself deeply at each level, and each chakra level. So I thought a rainbow in the ring would be perfectly aligned to my spiritual practice and it would bring me home to me, which is what I wanted the ring to ultimately do is when I look at it, "Oh yeah, that's me. I got this." And the ring I ended up with does have rainbow sapphires in it and I wrote several vows for each chakra that I took in the ceremony, but I have sort of one master vow for each chakra. And it's a very nice meditation. When I look at the ring, I can actually just go through and I can look at the red stone and say the first chakra vow, and look at the orange stone and say, the second chakra vow and I can just do them really quickly... and I just remember boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. "Okay, those are my eight ways that I am me now," and then I can go back to what I'm doing.

Chang: Wonderful. And can you tell me a little bit about how you represented that in your ceremony?

Thomas: Mostly through the ring and through the vows. And as prep work for the ceremony, once I finished my... I was calling it a self-guided tour of my chakras, which took about two years... once I was finished, once I had finished that process, that was about the time I was beginning to plan the self-commitment ceremony and I reached out and found one woman each in my life, who could be a guide at the level of the chakra. So for example, I thought, "Who's my most grounded friend who's just grounded, it's effortless. She's just there," "Who's my friend who's just in her heart It's, you know, it's simple for her. That's just how she, how she is." And so I found these eight women, and I asked them each to meet with me twice, once just to have a conversation about like, "Wow, you really are amazing at this level and I want to get amazing at that level and how do you do it? And you know, what does it feel like to you and here's my issues... and help me..." You know, and, and so, the first meeting gave us a chance to talk and plan a little they gave me like an assignment. So my first chakra goddess had me map out some things about being grounded and finances and safety and I did some writing on that and some graphing and we came back and we visited it together. My third chakra goddess, which is all about being bold and brave, she sent me to a Bikram yoga class, which was really intense. And my heart chakra Goddess talked a lot about fears, the way our fears come up and get in our way. So I started doing a video journal for her about whenever I noticed fears were really getting in my way during the day, I was moving into noticing those a lot more clearly. So, each woman met with me twice and helped me kind of deepen into myself at that level. And then each one of those women attended the ceremony either in person or on Skype and they were the ones who asked me, you know, "Do you take yourself with this? Do you this? Do you do that?" with my vows. And I said, "Yes, I this, I that," with my vows. So my first chakra goddess let me take my first chakra vows and then put a red ribbon around my neck... and... around my shoulders. And my second chakra goddess, same thing... second chakra vows. And it was interesting that it turned out that the upper chakra vow goddesses were on Skype - those were all on Skype and the eighth chakra one, the highest one, she was on a video. She didn't even show up on Skype. So it's kind of got more ethereal as you went up, which is funny.

Chang: That's great. I also love hearing how you incorporated the women into your life in the process leading up to it because it sounds like it was so fortifying for you and also probably felt really nice for them to feel recognized for that quality that you saw in them. Are you standing in front of everyone for the vows or maybe just take me through where you are in the room and how you were feeling at each vow.

Thomas: I was standing with sort of the women in sort of… I'm sorry, I am standing in a... against the wall with the altar behind me and the sort of a horseshoe shape of women in front of me. And the officiant calls each chakra one by one and then each chakra goddess comes up to have me take the vows and the chakra goddesses are wearing stoles that I made for them in the color that they're representing of the chakra, and I made them on my grandmother's sewing machine while I was visiting my mom, which was really nice. And so there's somebody in each of the colors and the goddesses who couldn't be there for the ceremony, I mailed them their stoles, so they were on Skype wearing their stoles. And the officiant... I was just looking at the pictures this morning of the stoles and the officiant had a white stole that had rainbow... it had a little piece of the fabric from each of the other stoles so had like rainbows on either side on her stole. And yeah, one by one the chakra goddesses came up and they said, "Do you promise to this or that" and then I responded and then they had a cord that they put over my shoulders to signify that I had taken the vows. And my friend who was the first darker goddess did the physical filling in for the people who were on Skype who couldn't physically put a cord around my neck.

Chang: Wonderful. So by the end of the vow piece of the ceremony, you have all these cords to symbolize the vows that you've taken on.

Thomas: Yes.

After I took my vows, the ring was passed around for all of the women to bless. It was in a little pouch and I hadn't seen it yet. When it came to me, the officiant removed it from the pouch and handed it to me. I shared with Tria the words I said as I put it on my finger.

Thomas: I said, "As a sign of love and respect for myself, I give myself this ring. I wear it as a reminder of my enoughness. In flowing times and in moments of stillness, in fullness and an emptiness, in fear and in courage with all that I am and all that I will become, and so it is." And then I put the ring on.

Chang: That's lovely. Did you write that?

Thomas: I think I did. Yeah, I think so.

Chang: So you're putting the ring on? What shifts in you or what do you feel?

Thomas: Just just crazy gratitude to be manifesting it because it's something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. And I just feel really excited and happy to have the ring on and that everything went really well and that I'm finally at this moment. And then she says to me, "With a sense of abundant joy that you have found your way to this moment. I now pronounce you married to yourself."

Chang: And then did everyone cheer?

Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of cheering and I was jumping around and we're super happy, just super happy. I think the next thing we do is we have some sharing, and there's another poem, and then we have just, you know, the closing and releasing of the directions and opening of a circle and then we had rainbow cupcakes.

Chang: Delicious. Do you feel like years later that you pick the right vows?

Thomas: Yes I do. I do. I really love my vows still. I have them on my wall and I recite them when I look at my ring and they're very much... I probably had too many for each chakra really, but I tried to narrow it down and there were just so many aspects of each chakra that felt important. So I think in the end, they were perfect.

Chang: And just to go back a little bit, we talked about the importance of the chakras and then I heard you mentioning your grandmothers and mothers and friends and it sounds like it was all women that were part of the ceremony. Is that right?

Thomas: That's right.

Chang: And what was the significance of that for you?

Thomas: Well, it feels to me that there's a thing about being a woman where we're expected to, I suppose if we're straight, we're expected to give up our, you know, our autonomy to a man and to marriage at a certain point in our lives. And that if we don't do that, it means that we couldn't get it together or we failed, or, you know, we didn't do it right or whatever. And I did a lot of thinking and feeling into how much the institution of marriage was a survival tool for women. And for me, it really wasn't so much because my partner and I were happy together, we didn't need to get married, I would have been fine... I could be fine as a woman in this society without a partner because things have evolved so much for women. But, I mean, in my mom's era, you know, it would have been a lot different and my grandmother's, way different. And so, looking back through my ancestry, it just feels like so many women maybe relied on it as a survival tool. And that felt very heavy to me. So with this ceremony, as with a lot of things that I do, I kind of dedicated my work to shift an old paradigm in me to go back as possible, right, through time to heal my Ancestors, to help heal my line. So, so that, you know, as I liberate myself from these old beliefs that are limiting, it helps to liberate them. So that was a big part for me... and in fact, when I started in the very beginning of the performance art piece, during the musical beginning, before the lyrics started, I had a picture come up on the screen because there was a visual piece to it as well, each one of my grandmother's, and I think there were about maybe 13 or 14 of them that I have pictures of who were on there who showed up one after another. And while I was sitting there watching that during the beginning of the performance art piece, I just felt the power of each... it was like... because we were in ritual space... and it was just like... Boom, there's that grandmother. Boom, there's that grandmother. Boom... and it was like they were showing up. They were walking in the door. They were coming into the space.

Chang: Wow. really powerful. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, that there's even more depth and power in that answer than I was expecting. So thank you for sharing that. How are you feeling after the ceremony compared to before?

Thomas: I felt so different inside me. I felt like a lot more grounded in myself and who I was and a lot more sure of myself and just like something really important and momentous that happened in me and I shifted, I just felt like I shifted, a different person.

Chang: Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me. And I'm sure the listeners will love hearing about self-commitment ceremonies through your eyes because it's certainly something that I never really considered or thought about before meeting you. So I'm grateful for the introduction through you.

I hope that after hearing this story, you feel inspired to create something for yourself. I chose to go pretty much all out, but there are many ways to do self marriage, even down to simply choosing a special ring that you know is YOUR ring. If you create your own ceremony, let us know. We’re available at shamepinata.com.

Tria Chang is a writer based in San Francisco whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the NYT Now app, and Narratively. When not writing, she co-runs Make America Dinner Again, and has spoken on NPR, BBC, and at SXSW to discuss and model how to build understanding across political lines. She is working on her first book. Learn more at http://triachang.com/

Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E4 I Want to Have a Ceremony with You (Betsy Weiss)

March 13, 2020

Episode Summary

What happens when our values and choices don't match the expectations of our family? When we grow into different people than those who are closest to us? How can we still keep them close and nurture those important relationships while also finding ways to be true to ourselves? Today we will meet Betsy and Brandon who wanted to do their commitment a bit differently than their families expected. Join me to learn how they did it, and kept their families close.

Episode Resources

→ The Things She Left Me: http://thethingssheleftme.com/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on iTunes | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Weiss: You know, both of our families are actually religious, Christian, and have a different sense of, you know, that you should get married if you're in this committed relationship but we don't feel that way. And so there's sort of this tension, but reality in life of while we feel differently, but that's okay.

What happens when our values and choices don't match the expectations of our family? When we grow into different people than those who are closest to us? How can we still keep them close and nurture those important relationships while also finding ways to be true to ourselves? Today we will meet Betsy and Brandon who wanted to do their commitment a bit differently than their families expected. Join me to learn how they did it, and kept their families close.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. I'm going to share a very special story with you today. Or, rather, our guest is. Betsy Weiss knew she didn't want to get married. She became clear on that shortly after college, in her early 20's. She had very clear and thought-out reasons for making this decision. When she met someone and started a relationship that meant a lot to her, that didn't change. In fact it never changed. What did change is that her mom got sick, and then better, and then sick again. And Betsy was faced with the thought of losing her mother without having had the chance to mark the importance of her relationship with her mother there. She wanted to share the love she and her partner had with her mom. She also wanted to honor her mom for being the cornerstone of the family she had always been. So Betsy and her partner planned a ceremony, a non-wedding. They called it a celebration of life and family.

Weiss: I guess my story actually really starts like how I grew up. I grew up in a pretty conservative Christian family, school, church where I was taught that you shouldn't have sex until you're married, that you, as a woman, will serve your husband that he'll be the head of the household. And, you know, a lot of my friends that I knew when were was young got married when they were 21-22. And I always knew... I was always an independent person, I always know that I was going to wait till I was 26. That was like my, well, I'm not gonna get married at 22 or 23 but I'm gonna wait until I'm a little bit older. Because that felt important to me and that was when my mama got married. She was actually 27. And then when I was in college, I really changed my perspective, my mindset, and actually left the faith that I had grown up in. And it felt like there's a lot of toxic things, especially some of the things I was taught as a woman about my self-worth about like that I was told that I was causing men to sin and I was a problem because I was a female and an attractive person. And so I decided after college kind of in my early 20s, I wasn't really interested in getting married anymore, that I might want to have a connection to someone, but that I never wanted to be... to feel like I had to serve someone else like I was lesser. I didn't want to feel like a religion had power over me in that way and didn't feel like I needed the government's approval either. I also really didn't like the sense of property that used to be attached, and in some ways, maybe still is attached to women and marriage. And so I sort of felt like, you know, that's just not something I want. But then I met someone. I met someone named Brandon and we became really close. It was the first really healthy relationship I'd had. When I was in college actually, my mom had gotten sick. She had stage one breast cancer but had gotten better. And then a couple years later, it came back a stage four breast cancer and she had really good results through chemo, but in a moment when she was actually doing a lot better, I was in the car with Brandon, we were on the way to see his family. And I was sitting there and thinking, I want to have a ceremony with you. I want to do something with my mom, before she dies, like if something were to happen. And at the time, we're thinking she had 10-20 years. We thought, you know, she was recovering really well. But I just said, like, I want to do this. I want to recognize our relationship with my mom. And he said, yeah, okay.

Betsy and Brandon didn't really talk about it again for months, maybe up to a year. But in the summer of 2014, Betsy went home to help her mom because she was going through chemo again.

Weiss: And actually the day I got home, she told me that she had just learned from her doctor that they didn't think that chemo was really going to work anymore, and she probably had about six months left in her life. And so in that moment, and as like a week or two went by, I called Brandon and said, I want to do something. I want to like have a ceremony with my mom. And, you know, he needed to think about it. Because what did that mean to him? What did that mean to our relationship? We'd been together for two years, which wasn't actually that long. I actually was 27, which is funny that that's sort of the age I had put in my mind when I was a kid that I wanted to get married. So as we started to think well, okay, this isn't going to be wedding or marriage, what is it going to be?

This is the part of the story where we get to learn about the magic of Betsy's mom, Carol. Despite having cancer, Carol found unique and creative ways to stay connected to joy and she brought those around her with her on that journey.

Weiss: We actually took, or I took lessons from my mom, who every time she had chemotherapy, she would throw a party. So she did this so that she could encourage herself and encourage people she saw in the hospital. She had told me that she would go in and it just seemed so depressing and sad and everyone was down because chemo is hard. And, you know, and a lot of people are facing the end of their life there. But she thought, well, I don't want to be depressed and sad, I want to have fun and enjoy, and have this joy. Her name's Carol and that like singing songs of joy sort of like what she would do with her whole life. So she would have theme parties. She had a twins party because we love the baseball team Twins because we're from Minnesota. We had like a caterpillar theme, she would have a fourth of July theme and she would always make a little candy goodie basket. The caterpillar one I think she had like, made a line of little cupcakes that looked like a caterpillar. And the hospital would start to know like, oh Carol is going to come in today! And everyone would stop by and see these decorations and themes in the little chemo room. And you know, they would laugh and have this kind of party. And people will come in all dressed up for whatever the theme was, and you know, it'd be a really special thing to go to win a Carol's chemo parties. And so I wanted to, you know, to keep that going that my mother was dying but, but instead of mourning together, why don't we celebrate and have this party together of life and love that we've had? So we decided to call this ceremony a celebration of love and family.

The celebration of love and family took about a month to plan. As Betsy and Brandon began telling other people about it, it became clear that not everyone understood where they were going with the idea.

Weiss: Especially my aunts all were like, "Well, but so are you getting married? Or are you engaged? Like, I don't understand." We're like, "No, we're not. We're just going to have a party and we want you to be there. And we're going to talk about how we love each other. And we're going to celebrate our families."

I love this part of the story because we begin to see how the members of Betsy's family, while they didn't necessarily understand the vision for the ceremony, or understand why Betsy and Brandon were not getting married, were still supportive and loving.

Weiss: So we did need to figure out sort of what the day would look like. And we decided that we wanted to have sort of this simple ceremony in a park close to my house called Trefoil Park by the Red River in Fargo. This really beautiful spot that we put a canopy up and my immediate family, my dad and mom and brother and then Brandon's family, his parents and his brother and sister-in-law came and we just told them to prepare some words if they wanted to share about how they love our families. And we were going to share about our love for each other too. We hired a photographer, which is something I'm so grateful for it because now as I look back, and remember my mother, I have these really wonderful pictures from our celebration. You know, Brandon spoke words to me and I spoke to him and there's a lot of tears and laughter and, and one of the things I really remember that I said, that's been with me and helped me stay strong as I know and my mom is gone, like you Brandon will be what helps hold me together. You know, she was like my best friend. We were really, really close. And when she did pass that was really true and, and saying those words and having that moment together, I think did bring us closer in a way I didn't expect. To me, it was when I was planning the party, although it was about Brandon and I's relationship, I was doing it for my mom and to share with her. But in doing the ceremony, and the celebration, I did feel much closer to Brandon. And I think it did kind of solidify our relationship in a way that surprised me. And then after we all spoke and shared words of love with each other, we went to my favorite Mexican restaurant called Mango's and ate with my extended family. So my cousins and aunts and uncles were there. And then we... although you know, it wasn't really anything that felt like we needed to follow tradition, I do really, really love wedding dances and my family loves wedding dances, and we all love to have a good time. So we had bought a hall, a space, and we invited extended friends family to that area. So we had about 60-70 people all come together and we had little, you know, desserts and d'oeuvres. And in the planning phase it was funny that one of my aunts was just like... it was so hard for her not to plan a wedding and so she was like, "Okay, well, we need centerpieces. So I'm going to create these centerpieces and we need a theme." And they kept trying to ask me these questions. And I was... at the time I was trying to help my mother who was really sick and I'm like, "I don't care. I don't want a wedding. Please don't make it like a wedding. But if you want to make a centerpiece..." Like, it actually was really thoughtful at the same time that they were... Although they didn't understand maybe what we were doing, they wanted to be a part of it and and share. And so we had these really lovely, sort of like beachy-themed centerpieces on the tables. That was really fun. And then we danced. My mom was in her wheelchair, so we kind of wheeled her around and she even stood up a little bit with her oxygen tank and had a dance with my dad. And there's these lovely pictures of her dancing with my dad and Brandon and myself. And it was a beautiful night that so many people got to share with us. And then it was actually two weeks later that my mom passed away. And so, I think, you know, she actually also got really excited planning the party just like she had for her chemo parties. And I think it really gave her some of the energy to make it a little bit longer in life. And then when she, after the party, I think she... She shared with us, she just was done. She was done with the chemotherapy that made her feel really terrible. She was tired. And although she wanted to live longer, it was like, you know, I'm okay with letting go. Which was a lot harder for the rest of us, but something beautiful I get to... we got to share and be a part of with her. So that's really that's the story of what the celebration was, how it connected, and sort of the story of losing my mother, you know, it's all wrapped up in and tied in together too.

Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that's... that's such a beautiful story, just so much love and so much acceptance of the situation, all the different parts of the situation all together and allowing everybody to be who they are including the aunts who need to make centerpieces because it's a wedding in their mind and that's what you do.

Weiss: Well, and that was... it was interesting. It wasn't just them too. A lot of people when we talked to them that were older and we'd say something about how we weren't getting married. You know, some of them I think were happy we were doing something but also a bit concerned because a lot of people they were like, "Oh, well, aren't you gonna get married?" and don't understand when we say like, "No, we did. We did what we wanted to do. We had our ceremony like, that was it. That was great. We threw the party." But you know, it also was a moment even when people didn't understand or had a different sense of what relationships should be, they still came together with us and celebrated and had a wonderful time.

Thomas: I love what you shared about it being... it sounded kind of tiered in my head that you had different people at different parts of the ceremony. So you had like, you brought them in where you wanted them.

Weiss: Yeah. So we wanted... and actually Brandon was more concerned and protective of having some intimate moments. I was a little more like "Let's invite everybody!" And he was like, "Well, I don't know if I want that..." Like, he didn't want it to become a wedding. He wanted it to be something different. And I was a little less concerned about... I knew for myself, it wasn't gonna be. Like, well, we weren't getting married. So, you know, that wasn't as much a concern. But for him it was important that people know like, no, this isn't a wedding, it's different. So like he didn't want every... everyone in our lives to come to celebrate us. And I think some of that protected the intimate moment that we got to have as two families coming together to celebrate us, like Brandon and I wanting to be together and also sharing appreciate this wonderful legacy and cornerstone of family that my mother had been. And they're actually... Right after the ceremony and a little bit as we processed, both of us had some moments of regret that we didn't share it with more people, not the ceremony, the moment of celebration, with... The intimate moment in the park, I think we're really glad that was just our immediate family. But knowing afterwards that it would be my mother's last couple weeks, and that the ceremony became even more meaningful than we had initially thought. You know, we did regret a bit that we hadn't just invited everyone. We had friends from Philadelphia saying, "We want to come, we want to come to Fargo!" And I saying like, "No, like, we... it might be too much" or, you know, "No, this isn't our wedding, you don't need to come." But afterwards, we thought, you know, it would have been great to celebrate with them. It was a really meaningful moment, though, you know. We in some ways, didn't know what we were creating. But the one thing that we've talked about is, well, you know, we did it differently before. So if we want to, again, like we can throw another party and just celebrate something different in life. It doesn't have to be the fact that we're like committing to be together in my be you know if we have a baby or we might adopt, and maybe like, we'll have a really big party with family then. And that can be a time when people come together in our lives that are important. And we can have a dance because we love to have dances! And just do it do it differently because who says it has to be just weddings when people get together and celebrate and dance and have time together?

Thomas: Absolutely. That is what the whole show is about that I'm doing so...

Weiss: Great!

Thomas: That's perfect.

Weiss: Well, I'll be listening! And I'll be like yeah! I'm gonna do... I'm gonna steal all the ideas.

Thomas: And I was also curious what rite of passage do you wish you'd had?

Weiss: It's interesting, I think with women there's so much tied up in our sexuality actually. But I think like women there's this sense of like purity, right? And that this is their rite of passage is like, are they still pure? And then, you know, they were this like white gown to show that they've never had any sexual experiences, and then they can finally, with their father's permission, have sex, you know. And so a rite of passage that I wish I'd had was like teaching me healthy sexuality when I was young, instead of... Like, I had a purity ring and I was told that I needed to... I couldn't even like, kiss someone until I was married. Those things really were unhealthy I think. And I just wish that people would have said, "You're a person. A part of who you are is this sexuality. You can experience that. It's nothing to be ashamed of." And that we could have like, celebrated our humanity kind of maybe, you know, in my early teens, not in a hyper-sexualized way, but in something that recognizes like, "It's okay for you to like other women. It's okay for you to feel sexual thoughts. It's okay for you to not." You know, like those things are okay. And I would love if there was some magical rite of passage that we could do for for young men and women to say like, "It's okay for you to become a sexual being." Like that's a good thing.

Thomas: I love that. That is not traditional ritual that I know of. But should be!

Weiss: Yeah, what we had was, you know, a lot of the keep your purity. Here's your purity ring. And, you know, the best women are the virginal, same kind of women.

Thomas: Right. Right. Goodness.

I am so grateful to radio fairy godmother Anne Hoffman for introducing me to Betsy and to Betsy for sharing her story with us. I especially love the clarity that Betsy and Brandon brought to the ceremony, their love for Carol, their respect for the family members who didn't quite get it in the moment, and their commitment to honoring their desire to not get married. Ceremonies can be whatever we want them to be. They are a way to honor ourselves, our relationships and our growth. We can use them to mark transition, release old ties, start off on new paths, and affirm our commitments. Family and society will expect us to do predictable things, but we can surprise them if we want to!

Betsy Weiss carries on her mother's audacity for life, sharing it as Carol would have wanted her to. You can read how she processes grief and life at the website thethingssheleftme.com.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to share it with a friend. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E3 Wedding Therapy, Is That a Thing? (Landis Bejar)

February 28, 2020

Episode Summary

Landis Bejar has a job you may not have ever heard of before. She is a wedding therapist. In her room, individuals and couples plan for the big day by setting goals and processing the experience of the transition. Her blog offers tips on wedding therapy themes such as defending something you never meant to defend.

Episode Resources

→ Landis Bejar: https://www.aisle-talk.com

→ Why Stress When You Can See a Wedding Therapist: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/fashion/weddings/why-stress-when-you-can-see-a-wedding-therapist.html

→ Growing in Faith Group to Celebrate B'Not Mitzvah: https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20200214/growing-in-faith-group-to-celebrate-bnot-mitzvah

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

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→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

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Full Transcript

Bejar: Why do we need this? We're getting married. We're... you know, it's so early for us to be reaching out for ... people think of couples therapy as being the last straw or the rock bottom or something like that

Landis Bejar has a job you may not have ever heard of before. She is a wedding therapist. In her room, individuals and couples plan for the big day by setting goals and processing the experience of the transition. Her blog offers tips on wedding therapy themes such as defending something you never meant to defend. Join me for a conversation with Landis Bejar.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we're exploring the idea of wedding therapy. Did you know that wedding therapists are a thing? I had no idea until I read an article by Alyson Krueger in the The New York Times called "Why Stress When You Can See a Wedding Therapist." I learned that there are therapists who not only specialize in life transitions but that some specialize in weddings specifically.

Landis Bejar is one of those therapists. She's a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and she started her own practice called Aisle Talk two years ago in New York City. In addition to the New York Times, Aisle Talk has been featured in Brides magazine, Business Insider and The Atlantic. Landis is super personable and passionate about her work. She walked me though how Aisle Talk came to be and answered my questions about what makes weddings such a potent time for everyone involved. She is also a big proponent of removing the stigma from therapy. She regularly attends bridal fairs to get her work out into the world, bring it out of the shadows, and make it a shame-free option for couples. She stresses that there's nothing wrong with you if you are your partner are arguing a bit more as you approach the wedding, or if you communication isn't quote-unquote perfect. You're actually doing a monumental thing in rearranging your own life and potentially the lives of your family.

Landis shared with me the moment the idea for her practice was born.

Bejar: The sort of aha moment came up in the midst of an argument in a bridal dress salon between my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law was trying on dresses. My mother-in-law was commenting on how she looked in them. And I was sort of there for moral support. And my mother-in-law said something that did not sit well with my sister in law about how a certain dress fit and that sparked an argument between the two of them. So I sort of as the, you know, off duty therapist in the room said something to sort of smooth things over and kind of join them together and let each, essentially let each of them feel heard, which is a lot of what we do and family therapy, and kind of realized that, you know, this was not intended to be hurtful It was not intended to, you know, be taken in the way that it was and sort of got everyone on the same page. And in the wake of that, my mother-in-law sort of jokingly commented, "Good thing that we brought the therapist along. How come you're not a bridal therapist?" Which I thought at first was very funny. And a lot of people have made comments like that to me over my career, with a different specialties, whatever it was I was doing at the time, whether it was I was, you know, holding a baby or playing with an animal or something like that. "You should be a baby therapist...You should be a dog therapist." different things of that nature. But there was something about this comment where I sort of did have one of those aha moments. And I said, wait a second, does that exist? Because I've been a bride before and I know that there's lots of psychological and dynamic pieces that are involved in planning a wedding and thinking about getting married and there should be bridal therapists. So that was kind of moment where I started thinking about this as an actual business and some work that I could be good at.

Thomas: Why is it that the deep-rooted family problems can come out of the woodwork at weddings?

Bejar: First of all, like weddings are not new, even though the way in which we might experience them feels like it's ever-changing and ever-evolving. It's a really long-standing tradition. And so I think that with that comes lots of ways to interpret that tradition and that can be just very different in one family to another. It can be really different from one individual to another and it can be really, really different from one couple as compared to each of their family of origin. So we have this thing that like has been around for so long, but everybody interprets it differently. And so I think that that's one set of circumstances that sort of informs, you know, how that can cause some family issues to arise along that, along that plain, you know, weddings are also culturally informed. So there's cultural expectations, there's generational expectations about how this milestone is recognized. And it's a milestone not only for an individual person, and not only for a couple, but many view it as a milestone for our family. So I'm kind of, you know, those I feel like those two things are like a Venn diagram where there's separate things and then overlapping things. And then on top of that, it's a marker of time. You know, and with any sort of marker of time or what I call in my work, life transition, all kinds of stress comes up because as we mark time, and as we move from one life state to another through a life transition, we ostensibly are grieving the previous state in order to make space for the new state. And that can be challenging both for the person who's moving through it and the people surrounding that person. So if we remove ourselves from the wedding example, we have like a mom sending her five-year-old to kindergarten, a mom might cry. And it's not because she doesn't she's not happy that her child is ready for the next step in their life that she might be grieving those toddler years or those years where she spent more time with the child and now is kind of watching them gain their independence and moving into this next state. And same reason why we cry at graduations, you know, and you know all of those things, so that comes up during weddings as well. And the other thing that I would say is that like, there's a lot of pressure for this to be the happiest day of your life. And so when you have all of these other sort of variables coming up that would naturally challenge our emotions and psychological states and family dynamics, the first sign of distress feels really upsetting and maybe extra upsetting because of the pressure that we're all supposed to be so happy. And I think that that kind of creates a little bit of a pressure cooker for some of these things to come out in really aggressive ways that we're not expecting.

Thomas: You had spoken before about the taboo of therapy. It sounds like you, you address that in your work.

Bejar: I do try to address that in my work first by acknowledging how hard it might be for somebody to reach out to me. And also to make my practice one that is trying to sort of in its presentation and where we show up, whether it's a bridal show or a workshop or you know something like that, but just in by by showing up and not being sort of in the dark corners of the internet, we're modeling that it's okay to seek out therapy. It's okay to seek out therapy during this time, and things like that.

Thomas: That's wonderful. And specifically, how does that taboo relate to folks are planning to get married?

Bejar: Yeah, I think that I think it's like that image of like, if somebody is sort of operating either consciously or unconsciously from this place that there is a taboo around therapy, then people might relate to either themselves, or maybe the perception of others that if you're going to therapy, you have hit rock bottom or things are really dire or things are really terrible. So, if one or more of the partners is operating under that assumption or they feel like people around them are operating under that assumption, that can be really disheartening to think that you've hit rock bottom when you're just about to get married, which is certainly not true, not true most of the time, of course, could be true, I'm sure in many cases, but it's not a requisite to seeking out therapy.

Thomas: Are you putting that message out there to help combat the taboo of therapy around the couples that are getting married in some way?

Bejar: Yeah, I think that in a like you know wider brushstroke when we're talking to like more people like then we're doing it sort of inherently in our actions rather than our words, right? So like showing up at an expo and being like, you know, at a table in between your, you know, the personal trainers and the bridesmaid's dresses and the make up artist, is like your wedding therapist. I think that showing up in that way is our sort of like walking the walk rather than talking the talk is like we don't feel ashamed about it. We want to tell you what we're here for. We want to tell you the things that are very common to experience during your wedding planning and if that relates to you, come on over like we are here to support you during this process. And I think that is sort of like our, our walking the walk of de-stigmatizing therapy to not sort of be in the closets and in the shadows and be very present amongst the people the other people who help you with your wedding planners or your you know, all the things that you do as you're preparing to get to get married. And then maybe more on a micro-level is when we're working with people, that's the first thing that we're addressing. We're saying, you know, it's really hard, you know, we're seeing how hard it is in the midst of whether it's our own personal stigma that we carry, or just societal stigma, we're acknowledging how powerful it is that they're seeking, seeking support in spite of that and normalizing for so many people that this is so common, and it happens so often, and there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing pathological about you because you're arguing a little bit more during this time or you're having difficulty with communication. You're collaborating on a big event together, not just the two of you but also incorporating the needs and wishes of your two families and trying to strike a balance between that. And you're on the precipice of committing to a life together and there's a lot of pressure in that. You know, and you're mourning, maybe a loss of your singlehood, which nobody wants to talk about. So we're really doing a lot to sort of normalize that experience and the stress that inherently comes with that.

Thomas: What is the experience like for you, when you're at the bridal fairs? How to couples relate to you?

Bejar: It's interesting, I think that like I do notice a difference between... like kind of across generations. So I noticed that some of the moms in the group or some of the maybe older generations will have, will have like, definitely some humorous reactions. I've definitely had like some older folks come by and just say, you know, kind of like laugh or giggle or say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe... They think of everything lately!" Which is totally true and I totally I acknowledge that but I also think that in that is maybe layered with some discomfort perhaps with the idea of seeking therapy for all of these different reasons. But by and large, the reaction is, "Oh my god that is so needed. What a great business!" A lot of times we have people who are stopping by who maybe are accompanying a bride and they say, "Oh my gosh, what I would have given for this during my wedding planning!" or "My family needed this so much," or reactions like that. And then the other reactions are from the other vendors who have probably subbed in as surrogate therapists or just support people as they've been closer to the stress up until this point and wedding history and have taken on the brunt of, you know, family feuds or emotional breakdowns or things like that. And they're oftentimes the most supportive of this mission because that's not what they are contracted to do necessarily, or what they feel comfortable with, or what they're trained for any of those things.

Right. So how cool would it be to actually have a trained therapist on staff, if you will, to help you navigate the stresses of the ceremony - not only your stresses, but those that might be coming up from the folks around you? I'm hoping this wedding therapy idea is one that catches on. May we all have all the support and witnessing we need as we go through our life transitions.

Thomas: So on the show, we talk a lot about life transitions, and we've been focused on creating rites of passage for those as, as we feel called to do that, whatever we feel that urgency when something is really intense, and we, we really want to honor a transition with ceremony. And we also talk about rites of passage that we had, that we had in our life or that we wished we'd had in our life. And so I'm curious if there are any transitions in your life that you wish you could have had a rite of passage for.

Bejar: Yeah, I don't know if I've ever really like articulated this. But when I was in like, middle school time, so like seventh eighth grade, I had a lot of friends who were having Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. And I think, for me as someone who has one Jewish parent but wasn't raised with any sort of formal religion in my family growing up, it was a time where I sort of long to be part of something a little bit more structured and I saw my friends kind of going through that rite of passage and all that comes with it. It's not just a day but it's, you know, years of practice and study and understanding and sacrifice in terms of like, the time and the energy and when you're, you know, a really young person, and you're often working on like a special philanthropic project, you're learning a new language, you're sort of performing that new language in front of other people, you're interpreting it, you're doing a lot of things that probably at the time I was like, interested in certain aspects, but as I've gotten older, I'm think it's really interesting, sort of rite of passage for a very young person and like, tasked with a lot of responsibility. Then I guess 10-15 years later, I was, you know, thinking about getting married to my partner and my person who I found and I was marrying somebody who is Jewish and who longed for a partner who was Jewish and might have converted or being if they weren't already either converted, or in my case sort of affirm their Jewish identity and gone through a process of like, doing that so that we could, you know, raise a Jewish family and things that I probably wasn't able to do without having the Jewish upbringing and just having my one Jewish parent. So, I think that, you know, that was a very special time for me going through that process before getting married. And they think that it's really interesting that as you asked me this question, the rite of passage of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah that I immediately think of feels very, feels like it fits really well because ultimately like I did sort of go through this conversion or affirmation of my Jewish identity that has been very important to me. And I feel like as a part of that work that I did when I was an adult, I reflected on many moments in my life where I longed for like being more a part of that community and I feel like as a part of getting married, I got to do that in a more formal way that I had longed for as an individual and then kind of gone through a process in my, you know, planning to get married.

Thomas: So you went through the Bat Mitzvah process, but when you were older?

Bejar: It was a conversion process. It was different than the Bat Mitzvah, but it feels like it feels very relevant that I guess that was something that I longed for, and later sort of affirmed my Jewish identity in a different way and sort of this adult way, which you can have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah at any age, and it's something that I kind of think about but it is actually quite more involved than the conversion - which is are already very involved, it's like a year-long process - but the Bat Mitzvah... which is like amazing, because this is something that I try to wrap my mind around doing now and like, you know, 12 and 13 year-olds are doing it at that age and I feel even more impressed by it now as an adult. But yeah, it’s still something I think about doing today but haven't. But I feel like it just fits in with the sort of this path that I sort of took on a little bit later in life.

Thomas: There was actually an article in the Austin Chronicle this week about women in the fullness of their womanhood, no longer, you know, pre-teens and teenagers who are going through kind of a Bat Mitzvah experience. They call it a B'Not Mitzvah.

Bejar: Oh, that’s cute! That's so cute. Well, when I was doing my conversion classes, there was actually a class there was simultaneously going on in the synagogue which was women who were, you know, fully in their womanhood, not teenagers or pre-teens, and they were all doing a Bat Mitzvah class together. And so I was in my class over here which was different, but I would sort of look over and say that would be something that I do you later on down the road.

Thomas: Yeah well, thank you so much for this conversation it’s been so inspiring to talk with you today.

Bejar: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about these things. I feel like things are all things that I love to talk about and I love to reflect on and are so important to me. And I love the kind of context of really focusing in on the transition of the ritual and how that is impacted by all things that, you know, my specific work is impacted by in terms of stigma and pressure and all of those things, so I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.

Landis Bejar is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in private practice in New York City. Her practice is called Aisle Talk. Aisle talk focuses on helping individuals and couples cope through the stresses of planning a wedding and getting married through therapy and counseling. Learn more at https://www.aisle-talk.com. That's aisle DASH talk.com.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, we'd love it if you'd share it with a friend. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E2 San Francisco as My Witness (Betty Ray)

February 14, 2020

Episode Summary

Betty Ray walked to the top of Bernal Hill at the turn of the millennium. She brought three things with her: a candle, her checkbook, and a ring.

Episode Resources

→ Betty Ray: https://www.bettyray.net/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

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Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Ray: Did that make sense? Should I say it again? Okay, I think that when a ritual is designed well, it is designed to make space for the soul to flourish and to show up.

Betty Ray uses design thinking to help individuals and communities create meaningful rites of passage to navigate transitions. She’s a recent graduate of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, part of Columbia University. She’s currently developing a program called Human Nature Academy to work with adolescent rites of passage. Join me for a conversation with Betty Ray.

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life Transitions. We are going to tackle two ideas today. The first is to explore the benefits of ritual - what it does and how it can be useful to us. We will reflect on some of the ways our Ancestors used ceremony and look at the benefits ritual can bring us today.

The second thing we will touch on is a certain kind of ceremony you may not have heard about before. As you know, this season on Shame Piñata we are focusing on weddings and commitment ceremonies. There have been an increasing number of people over the past decade who have decided to commit to themselves instead of, in the absence of, or alongside the presence of a partner. It's called self-commitment or self marriage and it’s gaining popularity.

So let's dive in. In our first episode, we talked about the power of ritual to create a container for the strong emotions that come with transition. Getting married, losing a loved one, the birth of a child, the end of a relationship... these are all times when our way forward changes, the future in front of us is totally new, where the sidewalk ends, as poet Shel Silverstein said.

Who we were won't work anymore, we must become someone new: we must become the husband, the mother, the single person... The ceremonies that we turn to at these times help mark the beginning of these transitions, but they can be limited. Weddings, for example, can focus so heavily on joy that they block out any feelings of grief or loss which are a normal and healthy part of any transition. And funerals can feel stilted and solemn, laying expectations that grief is only appropriately expressed in tears, when in fact healthy grief shows up in a wide variety of ways.

We can work with the traditional rituals as we have inherited them, making them deeper, richer, and more personalized for our own needs. We are 100% capable of this, because ritual is an inherent part of being human. Here's Betty Ray.

Ray: So I feel like ritual is one of those things that has been in human experience since we were... since we were putting pigment on cave walls. I mean, ritual has been part of the way that humans have oriented ourselves. I mean, I think the earliest rituals were really a response to a chaotic world, and to uncertainty and unpredictability. And rituals gave people a sense of regularity and structure and they served to bind the community together, that we would all come together at the harvest, or we would come together to sow the seeds in the crops or the hunt or... you know, as young people came of age. There was a way for communities to reaffirm their strengths and their bonds and it was a way to sort of stay connected to the larger world in a way that felt safe. Because, you know, obviously when you don't know why the sun is you know, when the moon goes in front of the sun and, like, it's going dark, and you don't know why that's happening, that's pretty scary! So, you know, having stories and narratives and mythologies and rituals to kind of keep communities bonded together was a way to keep them safe and obviously propagate. Rituals have been going on forever. So we have, you know, there's been a lot of study about rituals and research about the role of them and you know... And that one thing that I think is so interesting is that we know from all the research that rituals have been, like, literally from every country, in every culture, and every society since the beginning. Like we just do it, it's human, it's in our DNA. I don't know if it's in our DNA, that's not a scientific quote, but I mean, they are really powerful and people do them and, and why? Why is that? Why do people do that? I mean, that's, you know, that's exactly your question. But I think it's, I do think it's about helping us feel safe and connected with one another. Rituals offer people a structure amid chaos. And whether that’s back in the day when we didn’t know if a mountain lion was going to come over the hill, or today when all of our systems are falling apart, you know, that when we have a sense of familiar... The mark of a ritual is that it is rigid, it’s familiar. You do the thing as it’s always been done and you do it with an intention to devote yourself to that practice so that devotional angle... that devotional element of, like, I am surrendering myself to do this thing that is bigger than me - is healthy for people, to have a sense of right relationship with things that are larger than us. I think that when we have a ritual that is designed to help us grieve something, or help us celebrate life, or help us with more life transitions - and this gets us a little bit into rights of passage - but those rituals are really... there’s an element of them in which ego death is facilitated. We are no longer in control. It is not our thing we’re pushing through, it is a larger thing. That, you know, when you’re going to a ritual space, you are suddenly in a place that is less driven by, you know, sort of cognitive, intellectualized approach and it becomes more of a soul practice. And I am really interested in the soul practice because I think the soul the healthy element of rituals to my mind as a nurtures the soul. And we are desperate in our 21st-century hyper-mediated, hyper technology-focused, environmental crisis place, we need this more than anything in my view.

Thomas: You gave me chills.

Ray: Good! I really think... I mean it’s so important, it is so important because the soul is smart. You know, the soul can really help us, the soul has a way for us to.... the soul knows a lot and it’s very wise. But Parker Palmer said once that was that the soul is like a wild animal. It isn’t something that you can be like, “Hey, soul, come on and party with us!” or like you know, “Come on, I’m going to make you come out!” It’s a wild animal and it’s fragile... Cultivating a place for the soul is an art and it needs certain kinds of tending. It needs to be welcomed and know it’s going to be okay and be able to express its wildness which means it’s not always going to be pretty. We live our day-to-day with so little awareness of the soul. We are so much about like get in the car and go to work, and I’ve got to figure out all the things I have to go to my day and I’ve got to write this and I’m going to talk to these people and we’re just in our heads and in our doing mode. And rituals provide a space for us to be in a more creative, deeper, messier-in-a-sense soul world where the soul is able to come out and be curious be aware. And we can listen to our souls with more clarity we can hear it more clearly because the ritual provides a buffer or a boundary between the sort of the crazy-of-every-day and increasing crazy-of-every-day. Rituals give us a quiet, centering practice that we can rely on to be nurturing to that soul part of ourselves.

Self-commitment can be defined in many ways. At its heart, it means committing to ourselves first, being our own chosen one. It's mainly a women's thing right now, but I'm hoping that will change. Women commit to themselves in many situations: after a breakup, if they are tired of putting their energy into looking for someone when they are about to get married. Ceremonies can be as simple as putting on a ring at a self-marriage workshop or as elaborate as planning a full wedding. Betty took the opportunity to design a self-commitment ceremony for herself about 20 years ago. As this episode will be airing on Valentine's Day, we thought this was a wonderful time to share her story.

Ray: Oh my gosh. Well, I wasn't planning on having a self-commitment ceremony actually. It was the end of the millennia. It was December 1999. And I had been involved with this conversation with this guy who I had had this like massive crush on for a long time. And I was really, like, we were supposed to go down to Mexico to a Mayan pyramid. We were gonna hang out down there and I was gonna conceive a baby. This is really embarrassing. And that was my grand plan. And anyway, he like at the last minute was like, "No, I don't want to do that,” but he didn't really tell me and I was embarrassed and I was like, and mostly I was just like, heartbroken and embarrassed and I felt really stupid. And so on New Year's Eve 1999, I had bought this ring that had the drama faces on it, you know, tragedy and the comedy. And I had this idea to go up to the top of Bernal Hill with my ring... and I brought my checkbook and a candle. And I, I kind of had an idea that I was just gonna... so I got up there I wasn't sure what I was going to do with all this stuff, but I knew I wanted the ring because I was... and that was part of the design. So I got up to the top of Bernal Hill and I wrote myself a check to myself and I wrote a check to him. And I lit the candle and I burned the check to him, and "I'm not going to spend any more time on you, dude." And the check to myself, I fold it and I put it like near my heart... I guess I was wearing... I put it in my bra, frankly. And then I took the ring and I made a statement. I made a statement as San Francisco was my witness as I was up on the top of Bernal Hill and it's kind of this cloudy, foggy you know gross San Francisco winter day. Kind of at the at the winding down of this millennia, you know, and so I had this sort of weight, this gravitas of the sense of this millennia is ending and I'm committing to myself for the new millennia to not get into drama with men anymore. And this was not the first time, this is clearly a little bit of a pattern. I don't know if that's clear, but it was totally a little bit of a pattern. So I took the ring and I put it on my left finger. And I said that I will now... I now am committed to myself and I'm marrying my own drama so that I don't need to marry it externally. I don't need to bring my drama... I don't need to create it externally and I certainly don't want to be engaged in a relationship with it anymore. I don't want to do that. That's done, adios. And so I, I finished and I blew out the candle and I went back home and I went out and I had an incredible New Year's Eve. And I was just like, I was in such gratitude like, let that guy go! And I just, you know, I could feel dancing... I was dancing and I just, you know, I danced him out... and you know, it was a way for me to reclaim my power. It was a way for me to reclaim my sense of agency about myself and to not be so, you know, not to outsource my sense of self and my sense of purpose and strength. And so it was a really, really important thing to do. And I'm so glad I did it! And I wore that ring forever, just about until I got married. Now I have a different one. Yeah, but anyway, so that was yeah, that was my self-commitment. So it wasn't really a conscious decision. It was more of a, like, I gotta heal, I feel stupid, and I'm humiliated, and I'm embarrassed and I need to take care of myself because I did something really dumb.

Thomas: I love that.

Ray: Yeah. It was fun. It was powerful.

Thomas: Wow. Wow, I love you're like, I took my checkbook. Like oooh, what's gonna happen with the checkbook? This is really interesting.

Ray: Well, it was, you know, it was a symbol of you know, back in the day, right, people had checkbooks we probably don't have that anymore. Do you have a checkbook? I don't even have a checkbook. Anyway. Well, you know we had... that it was a way for me to... it was a metaphor for my money, which is power. Like it's my... it was a metaphor for my, my life force, which I was... I just... I had really stupidly given up and just embarrassingly so because, I mean, I'm sure he was like, "Who is this crazy stalker woman that wants to go to a Mayan pyramid with me and have my baby?" I don't know. It's kind of funny, but I don't know if it's like the long term, like realistic most realistic, you know sane thing to do.

Thomas: What exposure had you had to the idea of self-commitment before your own ceremony?

Ray: I don't think I had any exposure to it. I would... Again, I had come to ritual through my mom and my mother and her use of ritual and I knew that having rituals could catalyze change. And I had done several other rituals over the course, since my rite-of-passage-one that were sort of self-related, but they weren't self-commitment - that was different. So I don't know. I mean, maybe it's... I think, I honestly think these ideas float around the ether, and that we pull them down when we need them.

Thomas: What are the benefits that you feel the ceremony brought to you short term and long term?

Ray: Well, the short term ones were that I just had the best New Year's Eve ever, you know. The long term benefits were that I had a catalyst to... an experience that helped me catalyze a change in my attitude towards myself and my relationships. That it was an intentional taking back of my power and releasing him so that I could be more, you know, healthy and you know, all the stuff that you want to be when you're not obsessed with someone. You know, I think the long term effects were very real and that I feel like when, you know, I would get kind of like, "Oh, I wonder what it's doing," or, you know, I would just take it back and be like, "Dude, you just had this thing. You wrote that check. You can't... you know, that thing's burned! He doesn't have that check anymore, you've got the check, and that's not going to him!” So there was a way in which the just the gestures and the actions... the ring, I would look down at it and I would see it, you know, and I would maybe, you know, another several years later, you know, there was kind of a beginning of another relationship and I could feel the drama alert. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no! Look at that ring, look at what you got on! No, no, no, run away!" Like it is not... So I think that part of it was the act but also the gestures, the ring, the checkbook, that that really concretized it for me so that, it helped... it was a tool that I would rely on as I kind of navigated through my, you know, some of these more treacherous waters which weren't as treacherous by that point. So the waters became less treacherous too because I was more like... my identity was less about, "Oh, you need this kind of man or, that kind of person, you need to be in a relationship." I was single, I was happily so. It was really... it helped support that single exploration for me. Very, very, very helpful.

Thomas: How does being married or committed to yourself mix with being married or committed to somebody else?

Ray: That's a great question. Being married and committed to myself makes me a way better committed partner in reality because being committed to myself, in the way in which I'm committed to myself, means I'm more authentically myself and I'm not... I don't hand over core parts of myself for my need for approval, or my need for someone to tell me what to do, or my need to be in control, whatever those needs are, like I'm a much more whole partner as a result. So I can bring elements of myself my sucky or more annoying sides as well as my, you know, loving and compassionate sides in with more authenticity and more integrity. So it actually made me a much better partner. Yeah, I see no conflict there at all. It makes you a better person. When you're committed to yourself, you're much better. You have much more reserves to give, you can give a lot more, you have much more resources to give. And that makes you a better partner. I actually had a version 2.0 of that ceremony. When I met him, the man, I met him for coffee a couple years ago. And after he... and he's a writer, and he's got you know, he's just a really interesting person and very, you know, all the things that I loved about him I got to see, you know, and it was really fun and I finally had my act together. And after he left, I made a conscious decision to go sit in the chair that he was sitting in and to like, take back the energy that I had given him long ago. So I did a deeper dive. So I think we can so I guess what I'm saying is that we can always revisit our older commitments ceremonies and our older earlier ceremonies. We can we can ceremony anything. I mean, it's, you don't want to one doesn't want to, but we can if we need to.

Betty's story speaks to the power of ritual to help us gather our full selves back up from the chaos of chasing other people, which sometimes - can happen even when we aren't meaning to do that! There are so many ways we can get lost in the idea of a partner completing us. It’s kind of the water we swim in if you think about it. And when we find someone, it’s easy to inadvertently toss our authentic dreams and goals out of the boat to make room for the daily events that come with being in a relationship. This can be especially true for women given the historical importance of marriage for the women in our lineages. Committing to ourself can be a way to ground back into who we are at our core - our core values, core beliefs, core essence. Those are gems to be nurtured and honored.

Betty Ray is a 2020 Mira Fellow where she is developing a program called Human Nature Academy. Before this, she spent the better part of 10 years working in senior leadership roles at the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Learn more about her work at bettyray.net.

Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple podcasts. That is the very best way you can support this new baby show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 E1 We're Together (Tria Wen)

February 1, 2020

Episode Summary

Tria Wen knows a thing or two about letting go of expectations. She used to be a wedding planner who loved her job. The only hard part was the divorce. Her divorce.Now Tria is getting remarried. She and her fiancé want to create a unique wedding ceremony that is not only different from her first wedding, but also one that won’t give her any flashbacks to the many weddings she has planned. But how exactly does she do that? What are her options? Is the sky the limit, or is there a way to go too far and screw it up?

Episode Resources:

Tria Wen: https://triawen.com/

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

Support the Show

→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata

→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp

About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

Listen If

→ You’re feeling stuck

→ You’re going through a tough time

→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it

Love Shame Piñata?
Subscribe on iTunes | Follow on Spotify
Follow on Instagram | Connect on Facebook
Join us for a Ceremony | Follow on Podchaser

Full Transcript

Chang: I think I’m a bit of an anxious person. We all have a little bit of anxiety in us, you know, even from children and just being nervous about the first day of school. And the way I’ve managed my anxiety over the years is to plan very carefully and plan well. And I feel like it’s a lesson in my life that I want to plan well still but also let go of expectations and detach myself from the outcome.

Tria Chang knows a thing or two about letting go of expectations. She used to be a wedding planner who loved her job. The only hard part was the divorce. Her divorce.

Now Tria is getting remarried. She and her fiancé want to create a unique wedding ceremony that is not only different from her first wedding, but also one that won’t give her any flashbacks to the many weddings she has planned. But how exactly does she do that? What are her options? Is the sky the limit, or is there a way to go too far and screw it up? Join me for a conversation with Tria Chang. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas.

Welcome to our first episode. I’m so glad you’re here! I want to take a few minutes to give you the lay of the land for this show. This mini-season will focus on weddings and commitment ceremonies. We’ll be speaking with guests who created unique, out-of-the-box events that allowed them to commit to their partners in the way that felt the most right, the most authentic. Some of the stories you will hear may sound familiar. Others may surprise you. We’ll touch on the idea of self-commitment as well as committing to partnership with another person.

But first, let’s take a step back and look at the purpose of ceremony. Why do we engage together in this way? How does the tool of ceremony support us? In the words of psychologist Evan Imber-Black, "Rituals are a container for strong emotions and they help us to hold them. Whether that's joy or whether that's sadness."

And emotions are a huge part of change, right? As we go through life we face transition after transition: Mom and dad bring home our new baby brother. Our family moves and we have to make friends at a new school. We get the call that our closest grandmother has passed. We go away to school and have to learn how to survive in a new climate in a different part of the country. We go through breakups and maybe divorce. We meet new people we like and maybe get married. Our parents grow older, maybe move into care and eventually pass away.

We are unique in how we move through each of the transitions in our lives. Some may be easy and others not so easy. But at least we know we’re not alone. Transitions are such a known and expected part of life that certain ceremonies have been created to help us create the container for the emotions they bring up.

Marriage itself can bring up a huge host of emotions, not only in the couple but in those closest to them as well. We think of weddings as joyful occasions, but they’re not without their challenging emotions.

It is SO important to create room for all of the feelings that come up so that we can show up to the altar as our fullest selves ready to make the commitment at that deep level. How we structure our wedding ceremony can dramatically affect how much room there is for emotion and the change. We'll talk more about this throughout our first season.

Now I would like to share a story with you about a divorced wedding planner planning her second wedding. While planning her first wedding, Tria Chang noticed that many successful businesses in the wedding industry were run by women. Inspired by this, she started her own wedding planning company in 2009. Starting a new business in this field allowed her to hold on to the sense of joy she felt from her own wedding and to begin her new career in a rose-colored garden (those are her words). In 2016, she sold the business. During that time she saw a lot of weddings.

Chang: Yeah, I spent five years as a wedding planner. I’ve probably participated in or seen at least 100 weddings.

100 weddings? Wow, I could barely imagine that. I asked Tria about the range of traditions she had seen as a wedding planner over those 5 years.

Chang: I should preface this by saying not everyone hires a planner. Those who do hire a planner tend to be people who want a little more guidance and a little more structure. So I would say these types of people tend to be a little bit more conventional in what they’re looking for for a wedding. At the same time, my business partner and I, we emphasized our company’s creativity and how we were more interested in providing couples a chance to bring their individual story to the forefront and their individual personalities as opposed to cookie-cutter weddings. So we got clients that had an interesting tension between traditional needs and wanting a little bit of individualism. So I would say the way that played out usually in terms of traditional things is, in the timeline, in the structure of the day, it was almost always a ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner with toasts, and then first dance, dancing, and some kind of grand exit. So people generally felt safer in a decided-upon format that was often dictated by their vendors because caterers, for example, have a flow that they’re very confident in executing and they will encourage couples in that direction. Photographers also have a set number of hours and different types of shots that they‘re used to providing so that kind of guides the couples as well. In terms of mixing other of the things into the creativity, people would draw from their cultural backgrounds or different religions, sometimes from their personalities or how they met. So a couple who met in law school might have pages from legal textbooks as part of their decoration or names of drinks like Liability Lemon Drop or something fun to bring that part of their story into it. But I do think there tends to be a little bit of anxiety or even fear around stepping too far outside of wedding boundaries because people would worry about, you know, is it still a wedding, are we really married after this? Most of my clients were getting married for the first time, so they more wanted to make sure they did things right, whatever that meant. So there was a lot of looking toward the vendors for guidance or trying to fit their special creativity into a set template.

Thomas: So you mentioned people getting married for the first time. Did you also work with people getting married for the second or third time?

Chang: That happened later on in my wedding planning career because in the beginning, when you’re just starting out as a planner, you can’t charge as much because you don’t have as much experience. So we often had younger clients who couldn’t pay as much. So that sort of shaped the types clients that we had. And then as we got more experienced as planners and were able to charge more and offer more in our planning services, we did start getting couples who were getting married for a second or third time, families who are blending, so people who had children as part of the ceremony and who had more complex family relationships. And yeah, that was actually very encouraging and inspiring for me because I went through a divorce during that five years as a wedding planner and in the beginning I was only seeing people getting married for the first time and hearing things like, “Oh! You only get married once, so better have a perfect day!” and just really feeling the pressure of that and then as I started getting these couples who were on their second marriages or who had children from a previous marriage, I saw how it was more complicated, but also more beautiful in a way. I remember seeing one ceremony where there was the couple at the altar as usual with the officiant. But they also had their two children, one who was an infant they were holding in their arms, and another little girl whose hand they were holding. And they just formed this really special circle and that was really inspiring for me.

Thomas: That’s beautiful. I love that image.

Chang: Yeah. The complications can be beautiful.

Thomas: That’s so well put! I love that. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about here, right? Contrasting the perfect wedding day where everything is perfect, and kind of simple maybe in the way it’s executed, to real life and the complication that we all each have in ourselves and so many feelings and with each other and the blending of families, my family, their family, everything is blending and there’s lots of complication and it’s supposed to all jam into the perfect day and somehow just be wonderful.

Chang: Yeah absolutely, it is a little bit limiting in some ways.

Thomas: And you are preparing for your second wedding right now.

Chang: I am, I am. Yes, it’s a very different experience this time.

Thomas: And you said to me that you’re looking, that you and your fiancé had been looking through all the wedding traditions and trying to pick only the ones that were the most meaningful to you. So I’m curious where you are in the process now and how you’re feeling as you’re approaching...

Chang: Yeah, so I had the advantage of expertise and of seeing many different kinds of weddings and in thinking about what really mattered. And I talk to my fiancé about it and luckily for me he’s really interested in exploring those things as well and questioning why do we do certain things and do we need to do those things. So for example, walking down the aisle is kind of a given. And having your father, as a bride, give you away it’s kind of a given for most people, unless your father passed away and there’s a strained relationship. The default is to have the groom already there at the end of the aisle waiting for you and then to have your father walk you down the aisle and essentially give you away, give responsibility to your husband of you. And I think, I did do that the first time. I was young and in my 20s. I wanted to, as I mentioned, just do right by wedding traditions and make sure I didn’t mess anything up or, you know, curse our wedding in some way. So I did have my father walk me down the aisle and I don’t regret it. It was really a special time for us and very beautiful and emotional. My mom had passed away just months before, so it felt particularly meaningful for me to be holding my father in this very emotional time. But at this point in my life and 35. I’ve lived across the country for my father for over a dozen years now. So the symbolism doesn’t quite make sense of him giving me away to someone else. And for my partner and I, it was also important for us to realize that this is a phase of our life that we’re going on together. It’s not him standing there waiting for me to join him and get on his journey. It’s really going on something together. So, one, we don’t have an aisle, we’re not getting married in a church, but we plan to just show up to our guests together at the same time.

Thomas: That’s, that’s a nice example of how you’re reclaiming the tradition and make it your own.

Chang: Yeah, and there are so many things that we do so automatically I think, without questioning or wondering about them and it was important for us to really pair down things and think, you know, do we even need this or that? Or, can we do this in a different way? How can we do something that has meaning in every step of it for us? My advice to that friend and to anyone who wants to make a wedding their own is, you are absolutely allowed to do that. You don’t have to follow someone else’s way even if they have more experience than you, or even if they care about typical wedding things more than you do. It’s really your day. But of course, if your family is important to you, there are ways to involve them in a way that will make them feel included and loved still. So, yeah it’s really different for everyone, but I do think conversations between the couple about priorities and what the core essence of their relationship is - I think that will really help determine what the day is. For my partner and I, we have a little story that is kind of our core essence. We were invited by his uncle to go crabbing in the Pacific ocean and I was very excited. So we were in his boat and it was speeding through the water and I was thinking in my head, “I think I’m going to do this every weekend, I love it so much!” But then when he stopped the boat it started moving in a way that my body did not like at all so I ended up, unfortunately, throwing up at least a couple times over the side of the boat. And my fiancé also was quite affected, so we ended up just kind of lying in the back of the boat and feeling really sick even though in our minds, we thought we would be great crabbers and really helpful in putting up the traps and getting everything set. We were very useless, useless to the point of only being able to look at each other and even though we have this desire to take care of each other and fix things for each other, all we could do was hold hands and look at each other and say, “We’re together”. And for us those two simple words and that sentiment of just recognizing that we’re together we really realized was the core of our relationship, just being together through times that are sickening, that are difficult, that are surprising, that are joyful as well. It’s really a very simple thing that our whole relationship is just about sticking through those times together. So that’s kind of the theme of our little wedding, and that’s why we wanted to have a wedding with fewer bells & whistles. We didn’t want to be kind of on stage. Like a lot of weddings feel like it’s a performance by the bride and groom and that you only get to wave at them from across the room or maybe have a quick couple words with them but we really wanted to feel together with there, so we paired it down to a very small guest list so that we can really just talk to people and we won’t be distracted by having to perform something or having to remember certain words or dance steps and just be with people.

Thomas: Are you going to serve crab at the wedding?

Chang: We are actually… let’s see, are we having crab? We are having a clambake. But I’m from Maryland so crab is very popular there and seafood in general. But I think there were a couple of allergies among the guests, so we’re having a clambake with some seafood items that avoid everyone’s allergies but it’s a very, yeah it’s a family-style, the chef described it as being a big vat that he’ll bring out and kind of dump on the table which is very exciting to us so yeah. That was one of the few vendors. We just sprung for a chef, because food is an important way for us to show love to people that we love them and feed them and nourish them, so our chef is the only main vendor and then we also have a photographer there for a few hours just to capture some of the moments together.

Thomas: Wonderful. Well, thank you.

Chang: Of course, thank you.

Tria's story reminds us that beautiful things can happen when we allow ourselves to step outside the box and do things our own way. Sure, there might be friends or family who don't understand our choices, but truly, in the case of a wedding, this is the couple's day and the celebration is about the couple - who they are individually and who are they are together. And who is anyone to get in the way of that?

Tria Chang is a writer working on a memoir about divorce as a wedding planner. You can read her work at triachang.com. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. That is the very best way you can support this new baby show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

S1 Trailer The Big Day

January 1, 2020

Season 1 Trailer

On this trailer for the first mini-season of Shame Piñata, we hear from people who pressed beyond the limitations of traditional weddings and commitment ceremonies to create unique gatherings that allowed them and their partners to truly shine.

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→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times

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About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

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Full Transcript

There was a knock on the door as my husband of two minutes and I stood in our first private embrace as a married couple. I was told that my mother was demanding my presence. I asked her about that moment recently, asked what was so important, and she didn't remember it had ever happened. It was one of those unique undercurrent moments that pop up at weddings as relationships are rearranged

I’m Colleen Thomas. I'm a ritual artist. I help people make sense of life through ceremony. This is Shame Piñata. The name of this show comes from a ceremony I created at a time when I was feeling completely deflated and unable to move forward. I felt like I had lost my soul and the ceremony helped me find me again. Ritual is wonderful in times when we feel lost. It is also wonderfully adaptive, allowing us to customize traditional ceremonies to meet our unique needs.

On this first mini-season of Shame Piñata, we will look at the challenges of weddings and commitment ceremonies.

Sound clip: I was young and in my 20s. I wanted to just do right by wedding traditions and make sure I didn’t mess anything up or, you know, curse our wedding in some way.

Sound clip: For women, marriage has meant really the death of self. I exist to take care of the man and to take care of the children and that’s it.

Sound clip: Some of the things I was taught as a woman, about myself worth, about like that I was told that I was causing men to sin and I was a problem because I was a female and an attractive person.

Sound clip: Because I’m feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I’m not over-the-moon ecstatic, something must be wrong with me or with my partner or with the decision to get married - something’s wrong.

We will hear from people who pressed beyond limitations like these to create original ceremonies that allowed them and their partners to truly shine.

Sound clip: So I had to sort of weight, this gravitas, the sense of sort of the millennial is ending and I’m committing to myself for the new millennia to not get into drama with men anymore.

Sound clip: It was so hard for her not to plan a wedding and so she was like ok well, you need centerpieces so I’m going to create centerpieces and we need theme... and they kept trying to ask me these questions...

Sound clip: You’re feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You’re feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity a single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life a new identity and there is no way to go through that without feeling grief.

On this first season of Shame Piñata, join me to explore how to create a wedding or commitment ceremony on your own terms. Episode 1 launches on February 1. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public or go to shamepiñata.com to learn more.