While working out today to one of those online workout videos, the trainer reminded me of something important. She said, it's the muscles in your posterior (your back, your buttocks, your hamstrings) that give you strength. This is where you power is.

My body knows this. My body knows how good it feels to ground into the strength of my legs and to straighten and relax my back. When something pulls me off center, coming back to these muscles stabilizes me.

Her words reminded me that this is just one kind of strength my back body connects me to. From a somatic lens, back is also an anchor for accessing what has come before. In attuning to what is behind, we remember all that we have personally come through to arrive at our present moment. We also acknowledge the strength of our ancestors whose fortitude and wisdom is made clear through our very existence. When something pulls us off, this truth is how we stabilize.

Ritual is our pathway for centering this knowing. Through ritual we become available to the whisperings and guidance of those who have come before.

Ritual slows us down. It invites space for contemplation and deeper alignment in our work, projects and relationships. It is the opposite of urgency, and in this way, medicine for counteracting systems that require speed and disconnection. When we invite ritual, we empower ourselves to move counter to this conditioning. We are strengthened. Our priorities shift and our pace changes. This is where our power is.

Connecting with ritual need not be an elaborate affair. This, Elder Maildoma says, is one of our confusions in the west, a result of colonization. We feel ritual is beyond us because we don't know what is "right." We feel that we are imposters, or continually don't make the time. Our ritual practices become overly precious and remote. But ritual is everyday.
It is:

• Offering incense and gratitude

• Eating with full presence and recognition

• Dancing in honor of what matters to you

• Ending with reflection and prayer

• Singing for the earth, the elements or ancestors

• Gathering with intention around a fire

• Taking time grief and loss

• Recognizing thresholds, transitions and rites of passage

We know we are connecting with ritual because we are opened. There is more listening and connection. The grip of linear time has loosened. Ritual is breath. It is pause. It is attuning to the sacred in the mundane. Though we may not "know" the ways of our people -- the practices, songs, ways of being and relating -- this medicine lives in us. We need simply lean back.

In belonging,
Kelsey