Self-Help Review: The Power of Ritual

Summary: This sometimes felt light or repetitive, but I definitely took away from helpful ideas!

I had mixed feelings about this book on giving some of your everyday activities more meaning by turning them into rituals. It felt fairly light to me and even at only 200 pages, there were parts that were repetitive or felt like filler. In particular, I wasn’t interested in the author’s opinions about how technology has made us busier and more disconnected in modern life. He does a good job of citing specific studies to make smaller points about how people live now, but the overall conclusion felt like an unsupported opinion I’d heard before. However, the overall concept of creating rituals does feel useful to me. There were also enough specific suggestions that I’d like to try and revisit that I’m considering buying a copy to reference. I have to give a book pretty high marks if it has enough useful content that I want to own a copy!

It’s clear that the author of this book is the one of the hosts of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. The section on reading as a sacred practice is the longest and includes the most specific suggestions. This was in the section on connecting to yourself better. The other suggestions in this section was having a sabbath. I think this is one idea I do already use, reserving Friday nights as a date night and making it the only time I won’t attend a group social activity or online meeting. However, the author’s example of a tech sabbath made this feel quite unoriginal. The section on meaningful connection with your community was most useful when it identified large organizations that exist in many US cities. The remaining two sections on connecting to nature and connecting to the transcendent didn’t have many suggestions that I connected with.

Overall, I think there are two main ideas I’ll take away from this book. The first is the idea of reading as a sacred practice. I’m excited about the idea of picking a book that I love and reading it as closely as they suggest. I particularly like their idea of relating the text to your life. For me, that’s the component of their suggestion that moves beyond what’s recommended in any book on reading well. The second idea is their idea of what makes a ritual – repetition, intention, and attention – and making a point of bringing more of those second two components to activities that are already part of my daily life.

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