Heather Stringer - Ritual Maker - Episode 24

Heather Stringer, Pyschotherapist, facilitator at the Allender Center, ritual maker and performance artist. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s Degree in Counseling and Psychology. She is also mom of two kids.

Danielle and Maggie are Practicing Social Distancing recording this podcast even though they are living in the same town. This podcast was recorded using zoom. 

Heather Stringer is from Chicago, IL originally. She came out to Seattle to attend graduate school for counseling and psychology. While at the Seattle School she took a theology class that gave her the opportunity to do an art piece rather than a paper and it connected her back to roots in performing arts.  She views performing arts as a way to use the body as a place work out concepts in a way that invites the audience to participate. It’s not just a consumeristic experience. This led her to continue to explore performance arts as she began practicing therapy and realized there is something more that she was wanting. It was through a friend’s desire to create an experience for her birthday that led Heather to ritual making.

We asked Heather how she is holding up during shelter in place: she said she has felt so close to the experience of grief and gratitude. To have them both commingling so intimately has been such an experience. Feeling grief of life being restricted, not being able to be around friends and family [a very bodily experience], the impact of the economy, how our world is being turned upside down…. But also feeling gratitude for seeing her kids’ faces in a way that she hasn’t seen before because of schedules and all the busyness of life. “There’s something about our rhythms being synced up in a way that I haven’t felt before… There’s this peace of gratitude I can’t escape.”  She finds herself homeschooling her kids, which she never thought she’d be doing. “It’s not for the faint of heart!” But she says she’s going the best she can, giving herself a lot of space to improvise including playing capture the flag in the middle of a hail storm. Heather says this is what really matters. COVID has been a stripping of superfluous things and finding what you want to say yes to with your kids. “Every minute is different.”

Danielle says the concept of grief and gratitude used to be a heady concept but now it feels like she writing it and it’s dripping on to the page! Tears and kids crying because they are missing an activity or being grateful to be able to go on ride bikes, walking the dogs for hours until the dogs begin to hide.  She even feels the stress even in the animals!

Maggie really resonated with Heather’s experience of seeing her kids’ face in a new way. Even though she is mostly at home with her kids as a stay-at-home mom who volunteers and studies on the side. But things are way different now. It’s like all of sudden the kids seem older and she are witnessing their growth right in front of her eyes. It is a remarkable experience to see who they are becoming. Maggie is also filled with the grief and gratitude because homeschool is not for everyone but what a gift we have in being able to see our kids in a new way and play with them, saying yes to them.

Heather says there is some kind of necessity in saying “yes” to the kids. It’s more energy to say no! Saying yes to the kids getting the sprinkler out when it’s only 46 degrees out. There’s something stunning about this stripping away and saying yes to our kids, because we say no far more than we need to.

Heather posted two videos on the ritual of release. [You can see them here and here.] Ritual making - when we are undergoing changes (changes within us or something happening to us) we don’t always have the practices to mark and move through it. Ritual making is a way to say what I am experience matters and deserves my whole self—body, soul, and mind—to move through this to come out on the other side.  The videos came out of her own process of moving through this season of COVID-19 and her own reaction to what’s happening in her part of the world. We are all having a reaction, and not just at the age we are at this very moment but all the ages we’ve ever been crashing into this moment. “What’s happened to us at 5 will color the way we approach what’s happening now.” Ritual making is a way to open that dialogue and then mark on our bodies through actions to help us say, this is what happening and this is what I need.

The release videos was a way of her acknowledging the weight that she carries — like her sister who is a nurse right now, kids in her son’s class who are struggling being at home right now, centering herself even going to the grocery store respecting distance from other people… Our minds are constantly on. “I need to find ways to move my body so that I can push out that energy that is hunkering down. And I need to make sounds that are usual that are attuned to what it is I am experiencing.” It is through accessing these places that you can release the parts that are weighing you down.

Danielle acknowledges that we all have to have a certain level of hyper-vigilance right now, on top of what we already carry with us whether that is trauma, individually or collectively. The places those come from are from the core: self-preservation. And they feel very young.

Heather says that in America, and especially as a white woman, there is such a narrow way of being able to give expression and we need to be able to access those primal places that allow us to move through whatever it is we are holding. This is much more common in indigenous community—there’s more movement, expression and dance to get out what we are feeling. But  America is individualistic and isolated so we hold on to what we know rather than let it out. Because of that bottling up, it ends up finding it’s way out in wonky ways, ways that we don’t like.

How about rituals in her own home, what does that look like? Within her own family Heather wanted to start by teaching her kids that they have good bodies. Heather said they have a practice to teach their how to touch their bodies in ways that are kind and honoring, and with this notion that our bodies are good. Kind hands, good bodies. They also find ways to mark the beginning and ending of school, tossing rocks into bushes naming things for each other.

Not everyone or every family incorporates rituals into their lives but Danielle said what Heather is describing is not some major elaborate set up, it’s just as simple as throwing rocks. So how can we find ways to express anger, frustration, feeling coped up…. It is something you can do and you don’t have to go to the store and buy up things. We can utilize things you already have like cinnamon in your cupboards, using them in a way that attaches meaning. And especially with kids, simpler is better. When there is a physicality involved, kids will be more engaged. When we begin with the physical it allows us to access more of our heart and soul.

Maggie says it’s just a Western way to live to not be in our bodies. Even now as we’re dealing with social distancing and isolation we find it intolerable to be in our bodies. And so  care for ourselves starts with caring for our physical bodies and the begins with movement.

Heather doesn’t have a specific ritual for walking someone through anxiety. She is more of an improv artist and really trust in that for how she engages others. It always depends on the person. All rituals deal in past, present and future. How is the past influencing this present moment? What is stuck in the past that needs to be moved in the present? If someone is feeling helpless and anxious, what is a place that you have felt that before and what action could you create to symbolize movement in the past as a vehicle  into the present. Cold water is really important — a cold shower forces you to take deep breaths and that is at first unnerving but then it is calming. Anxiety doesn’t have a lot of language and description, we need to have an idea of what our anxiety is really about.

Danielle has used the cold technique before to keep her self from feeling disconnect. She work a puffy vest with a t-shirt under it so she would feel the cold outside in winter. She also washes her face in the morning with cold water to wake up and say “ok, I’m going to be present now.”

Heather is a facilitator at the Allender Center - she leads a small group during doing story work. She believes in the methodology and just encounters truth every time she is there. She also leads breakout sessions in Ritual Making to mark and embody story so that it’s not just cognitive and language.

Ritual Making - can be as simple as marking that this birthday is not like other birthdays and we’re going make meaning out of what’s been happening all these years and invites witness. Bringing others to witness is powerful, people show up in vulnerable ways. “Ritual isn’t about doing it right.” We move from pre-frontal executive functioning to the creative places in our brain that allow us to receive. Something shifts.

Danielle asks, How do we mark the moment we’re in right now? This moment of grief and gratitude commingling, of being isolated when our bodies want to be together… “What rituals might I do with my family? What things I have available in my house to mark these moments that would help us with all the anxiety swirling around?”

Heather says “How do we allow our senses to help us versus being plagued by our minds?” “Can we let our senses lead?” “How do we pause in these moments and break the patterns of our anger or frustrations, can we try a new rhythm?” New rhythms are awakening and they jolt us out of old patterns.

Maggie talks about when she took a breakout session from Heather on Ritual Making, not really knowing what she was getting into… But it was a sacred and holy space where we got to be witnesses to someone else’s story, even without knowing the details.  It was a way to mark this moment, to make meaning of something in our stories and to witness someone else’s marking. We are not meant to live alone, we require witnesses and the fact that we are all living in social isolation right now is devastating.

Danielle was out in her yard talking out some of her frustration on some blackberry bushes and she looked up and saw her bright yellow azaleas in full bloom. She ran in to get her husband to show him. “Can we allow our her senses to interrupt?”

Connect with Heather:

Instagram: life_in_ritual

Website: www.lifeinritual.com

Heather is reading: Brain Talk by David Schnarch

Heather is listening: Max Richter

Heather is inspired by: All the workers in the medical field, from doctors to janitors.