People picture ritual prep as candles and incense. Mine starts with a lot more physiotherapy than that.
The Toenail That Wouldn’t Quit
I’ve talked before about my 5yrs with an overachieving toenail – which turned out, when it was finally sorted, to actually be three toenails growing on the one nail. Genuinely. Three. It’s a great story at a dinner party. It was a lot less funny living through it.
Here’s the bit that surprises people: if you’d told me beforehand that my glute muscles had a significant role to play in walking, I’d have been surprised. Shocked might be the better word, actually. But there you go – five years of favouring that foot, hobbling really everywhere, and my glutes just stopped doing their job. My back and legs took the brunt of it instead. I had to relearn how to walk. Properly relearn it, the way you’d teach a child, cos my body had built a whole alternative system around not using the muscles it was supposed to use.
Almost 10yrs on from the first toenail removal, I still attend physio regularly, especially in times of stress. So when I say physical preparation matters to me before ritual, I don’t mean lighting a nice candle and having a cup of tea first. I mean I genuinely cannot stand for hours. I can’t kneel for hours either, or sit for hours, for that matter – any of it causes real pain. Whatever ritual I’m building has to work within that, not pretend it doesn’t exist.
Food, and the Other Injury Nobody Sees
The other physical piece is a history of disordered eating. When I say history, I mean I’ve done a lot of work on it, so most of the time I’m genuinely fine. But there are still things that trigger me, and they trigger me mightily, not mildly.
Food plays an important part of most ritual traditions – offerings, feasting, fasting, all of it. So if there’s something specific I want to do around food for a ritual, that’s a physical preparation question for me as much as a spiritual one. And fasting, which comes up a lot in ritual practice generally, rarely enters mine at all. There’s nothing wrong with fasting as a practice – it just doesn’t work with my history and my reality, and I’ve stopped pretending it should. If I’m doing something intense, what I actually need is plenty of water, not less food.
Shedding the Earthly Bounds
Most of the time, going into ritual for me means physically shedding things first. Jewellery off, yes, even my wedding ring. Bra off. No tight clothes. Everything loose, easy, comfortable…
With Samhain coming up, the physical preparation this time is bigger than just what I wear. I mentioned a few months back that I’d started decluttering – that’s continuing now, so that myself and my husband actually have a clean, clear physical space to hold our own ritual in, rather than trying to do meaningful work in the middle of everyday clutter. That matters more than people expect it to.
None of this is the version of “physical preparation” you’ll find in most ritual guides. But it’s mine, built around a body that has actual, permanent limits – and I’d rather work with those limits honestly than perform a version of ritual that ignores them and hope my body doesn’t notice.
