Celebrant & ritual skills

Francis MacDonald, Spring

Celebrant and ritual skills

As coaches, we provide a container for our clients to do their inner work. We represent a sacred time and place each week or month when our client can feel seen, heard, and understood. And a time and place when our client can focus fully and completely on herself, her life, her desires, her thoughts, and her feelings. Its our job as coaches to insure that we have ultimate respect for this time in our client’s daily routine. We need to carry the reverence for this time in their week even if they do not. We owe that level of seriousness to it.

We must frame the time during our sessions as distinct from their ordinary engagements. And we must role model for our clients how to mark the sacred and mundane aspects of everyday life. In this way, being able to draw on celebrant and ritual skills as a way to honor your client’s experiences outside of sessions is the mark of an exceptional coach.

Should you feel in any way shy about engaging your client in ritual or celebration of life events during sessions, please understand that it can be done in only a few minutes if necessary and is an important teaching to deliver to our clients. They may not take the time to appreciate the meaning and importance of ritual and celebration in their everyday life. As coaches, its our job to model that for them.

Almost anything can be marked with ritual or celebration. For happy occasions, such as success toward a goal, the birth of child, marriage, home purchase, etc., simple rituals that mark the happiness of these events are all that’s needed. In the case of a client purchasing a new home, this is a significant life event that deserves acknowledgement. It can be as simple as the lighting of a candle during session, the taking of a deep breath, the setting of an intention for the client’s time in the home, and a short blessing to close the ceremony.

A ritual like this takes just a few minutes but provides intense meaning for the client. Client’s might not have anyone else in their lives who offers the time and space to reflect and celebrate these milestones in a way that truly honors them. That’s why as coaches, part of our job is to do just that.

When you connect with how beautiful a ritual like this can be, not only for you as the celebrant but for your client, who may very well not get an experience like this outside of her relationship with you, you will want to use ritual and ceremony every chance you get. We do significant work on ritual, ceremony, and celebration in the Authentic Wholeness Coach Certification program.

New House Blessing by John O’Donohue

May this house shelter your life.

When you come home here,

May all the weight of the world

Fall from your shoulders.

May your heart be tranquil here,

Blessed by peace the world cannot give.

May this home be a lucky place,

Where the graces your life desires

Always find the pathway to your door.

May nothing destructive

Ever cross your threshold.

May this be a safe place

Full of understanding and acceptance,

Where you can be as you are,

Without the need of any mask

Of pretense or image.

May this home be a place of discovery,

Where the possibilities that sleep

In the clay of your soul can emerge

To deepen and refine your vision

For all that is yet to come to birth.

May it be a house of courage,

Where healing and growth are loved,

Where dignity and forgiveness prevail;

A home where patience of spirit is prized,

And the sight of the destination is never lost

Though the journey be difficult and slow.

May there be great delight around this hearth.

May it be a house of welcome

For the broken and diminished.

May you have the eyes to see

That no visitor arrives without a gift

And no guest leaves without a blessing.