Blessing and Releasing: Rituals for school transitions
It’s that time of year again…
Starting pre-school or kindergarten?
Going to middle school or high school?
Starting college?
Moving schools?
These moments can be exciting and scary, wonderful and frightening. For our children AND us.
In these threshold moments, when we are about to step into the unknown, it can feel so hard to release and trust our children into the new environment.
One way to cope with this transition is to keep getting in touch with what is going on for us. When we tend to what is happening for us we will be much more capable of supporting our children.
To help us tend to what's going on, we can use Ritual.
When our children make one of these school transitions, a blessing and release ritual can do wonders for settling us and being prepared to respond to anything that may come up with the spirit of collaboration, good faith and strength to guide us.
When I ran the elementary school I co-founded, I supported the families in a beginning of the year ritual. It was simple and beautiful and felt very important and sacred each year.
Here's how it worked:
Each family painted a rock for their child ahead of the first day of school. As I watched parents lovingly paint the rock with their child’s name, blessings of love poured out of the parent. Even though I’m pretty sure most were not thinking they were “blessing” their child, that’s what a blessing is- a moment of well wishing.
On the first day of school, we gathered all together and each parent came up with their child and put the rock into a basket that represented their classroom. By putting their rock into the basket, it served as a symbol of the parent’s release and the child’s entrance. Then, together, they banged a drum to announce their “arrival” and we all got to cheer in welcome.
On this day, there was a feeling of connection between teachers and parents that was bonded through a feeling of tenderness and care for the children. This felt particularly poignant for the families whose children were just starting school as kindergarteners or were transitioning into our environment for the first time.
This can also happen on an individual level.
Dear friends of mine asked me to help them a few years ago when their daughter was going to begin kindergarten. They were excited but terrified for her. As a very close, loving family, they were looking forward to the experiences she would have, but also worried about the toll on their creative, sensitive, magnificent young human that they had been carefully raising.
We used the power of Ritual to help them drop into THEIR strength and HERS and call upon the capacity of the system.
We took time to bless her teachers (a.k.a. think good thoughts)
We took time to bless her new school backpack and her cute little tennis shoes
We took time to cry about the fears of what she may experience out in the “big bad world”
We took time to revel in her capacity as a young human. Her intelligence, her humor, her creativity, her resilience.
We ended by drinking tea and dancing.
It was beautiful.
And her parents were more ready to be the emotional rock she needed so she could set off on her adventure into her new school life.
People sometimes think they don’t know how to do ritual.
But you do. It’s in your bones. It’s in your lineage.
It was a language we were all familiar with not so long ago.
It is the meeting of intention and imagination.
There is no right way or wrong way to do it.
Try it and let me know how it goes.
Or contact me and we can chat through possibilities. :)