I’m really interested in your perspective on the space that ritual holds for humans, its importance, and the places where it’s happening in our world and lives – and why. What makes it so important? Of course, we always talk about how there’s a social erosion happening. The question that we ask in this podcast is: once we understand the importance of what ritual really is, and then we understand how it’s being eroded in our culture or society, then we can understand what humans are losing – what the cost of that is. That’s the place where we usually land in terms of reverse engineering and saying, “Let’s bring back not just the idea of ritual but the real underpinning value of ritual so that we as humans can flourish.”
So much of these topics are about trying to be more additive, not subtractive. What I observe in culture, societies, and individuals is that when we have less masterful thinking or behavior in certain domains like ritual, logic, or whatever our topics are, they become ineffective, and then we ditch them. Society ditches them. Individuals ditch them. Really, it’s not the topic or the thing itself; it’s how we’re using them.

With ritual, the first place and really the focus for me is around the words “symbol” and “lingering.” Symbols are something that we’ve lost contact with in a machine-driven world, an AI-driven world, in the fourth industrial revolution. Humans are very much reducing – we’re trained to reduce information and data to something literal, and we’ve lost our connection to symbol. Ritual is a way that we can engage symbol.
In Human Decision Intelligence, we work with symbol as a primary focus, not just in ritual but in the ways that we think and orient ourselves. Being connected to semiotics is a critical way we process as human beings. Ritual is a place where we can engage symbol, where we bring our attention to something, and attention can be a form of love. It’s focus. It’s something that we are giving our whole selves to, and that is important for humans – to be able to sit with something long enough to start interpreting it differently, to give it meaning, or to give it different kinds of meaning.
The two words would be “symbol” and “lingering.” What ritual provides humans is time – a lot of repetition and spaciousness, through which we embody as humans. We don’t embody well without repetition and without time. Time and repetition are really important to becoming and embodiment. Then there is the use of symbol – how we can transfer and make meaning out of something that’s less literal but stands for something, that represents something, that helps us make a connection to something more expansive.

There’s a couple of things that came to mind. I think we can keep going on that thread. I have this Post-it note next to me where I’m always taking all of my notes. There are two kinds of processing that I’m really familiar with: intellectual knowledge of something, and experiential knowledge. When those two come together, it creates something new in how I’m able to move forward or apply that thing. The third element, which I came across recently, is symbolic. This is a whole other entity – another layer of attaching meaning or gaining understanding. It’s like a poetic expression. Is that how you would say it? It adds some layer of meaning. I’m trying to figure out how that lands in ritual as you’re attaching it to symbol.
For example, when I make my tea every morning, I bring an intention to the tea. When I slow things down and connect to what me pouring the water into the kettle represents – like filling up for the day, fresh water running, that I have to fill up and wait and watch the water run and fill up, then wait for the water to boil, then put in my matcha powder and sift it – the process of making tea is a symbol of life in so many ways. The different stages of life, the different parts of our day, the different places where we have to wait, the places where we watch something form. For me, as I whisk, it has to have the right kind of speed or it splashes out. In this ritual, I’m noticing these things because my attention is brought out to the forefront. I’m noticing: oh, this requires a certain kind of patience, a certain kind of formation, speed, energy, sequencing that matches how we grow, the mistakes we make in life – all in this little five-minute ritual.
Then I can bring a prayer or mantra to it. That puts my attention into a different place. These rituals – this isn’t my original idea, obviously rituals are ancient – are a way to reach the heart, not just the mind. That’s why rituals are important to embodiment. It’s not something that we’re only intellectually engaging in. The repetition and the time that it requires is a way that it reaches our heart. They’re active meditations that reach different parts of ourselves and allow this symbol to emerge.

Certain days I’m noticing things representative of my growth or obstacles or frustration. It doesn’t matter what it is; I’m connecting to something beyond the literal sight of a green powder. It’s more than that. It’s a space to practice all of these skills we talk about: noticing, gaining intel, processing it, lingering as we talk about liminality, and spaces of waiting to notice what surfaces. Ultimately, these skills build capacity and the ability to notice patterns or track and measure internal growth because it’s you in relation to this stable process.
Additionally, in our modern world, we’re a culture and people of immediacy. That immediacy has many drawbacks, even if it has advantages. We rush through our day mentally, physically, emotionally, relationally. We move from one thing to the next. Our primary points of contact in a machine-driven digital world are disappearing. They vanish. There’s less permanence and stability. Ritual grounds us to time, lingering, and formation – something becomes stable; it exists versus disappearing. That is really important to our humanity. We’re physical creatures living in a physical world as well as a digital world. As we’re transversing from digital to physical, we need practices and focus that ground us physically and emotionally.
Similar to exercising, it’s difficult to make our bodies different if we’re not getting into the gym or going on walks. There’s intentionality we bring to a physical routine or ritual that gives it meaning, allowing us to tap into what’s happening in our deeper emotional states. You referenced it as the heart, but it could also be deeper places lodged in our subconscious or physical body. For example, if we’re tapping our foot, impatience might surface in many different ways.
It’s obvious but important to state explicitly: what we’re losing in a culture of convenience and speed are these moments. In my earlier reference, intellectual experience is knowing matcha is good for you, taste experience is wanting to drink matcha, and symbolic experience is how the process of making matcha grounds you in a space where there’s so much information about your day or contemplation that can take place to bring you into a deeper state of being. That’s where the real gold is in terms of adding layers and dimensions to our processing.