Head Shaving Ritual

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These days, I hear of more and more women who are creating a sacred head shaving ritual instead of waking up to clumps of hair on their pillow or just standing in front of the bathroom mirror and shaving it all off. I knew that I wanted a ritual that expressed the power of the initiation I was about to endure, and I asked a friend of mine, Madhavi Shirman, who teaches ceremonial arts at the Star House in Boulder Co, to help me plan it.

Ria and Madhavi

Opening Invocation:

We gently invite the presence of Spiritual Source into this space, and ask Source to manifest within the following archetypal expressions: Warrior Goddess of Creation and Destruction, Kali, for the great good and healing of our sister Ria. We invite the Green Tara in all her Healing Glory and we invite Isis in her aspect of Powerful Resurrection. We call to our personal guides to light this evening with transformational love. We call to the alchemical elements of Mother Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Ether to quicken and enliven this space. We now weave and hold this space sacred.

Working with Sacred Sound

I set up an altar in our living room for the ritual, and empowered it with prayer, intention, sacred objects, candles, incense, flowers and offerings to the archetypal deities.

Lighting the Incense

The Altar

My Statement of Healing Intent:

I, Ria, intend to release all attachments that are hindering my healing and wholeness on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.

• In the spirit of this intention, I offer my hair and my breast as Sacred Wounds in sacrifice to Kali, the archetypal expression of transformation, and ask her to transform my body to the highest state of purity, health and wholeness.
• In the spirit of this intention, I offer flowers, butterflies, incense, fruit, music, fire and water to Green Tara, the archetypal expression of healing, and ask her to transform my body to the highest state of purity, health and wholeness.
• In the spirit of this intention, I offer to Isis, the archetypal expression of regeneration, my lifelong intention to remember my true nature, and to re-member my lost parts which had left me homesick for heaven, but which are now restored to me. Thank you, Isis, for gifting me with heaven on earth.

Anointing with Oils

Ria and Cha Cha

Closing Words of Ritual:

I am undergoing a level of spiritual transformation that I never thought possible. It is the death of who I thought I was and the birth of someone I have never known. I accept this death rebirth process, and I trust the chemotherapy that is supporting my body to stay alive within it. I welcome this medicine, and know that it will alchemize into healing salve within my body. This ritual is a vow to accept my shamanic journey, and live within this new, refined vibration that is being birthed within me. It's a consecration of my commitment to embody my higher self. It's an acknowledgement of the death of my old patterns that no longer serve me, and a commitment to my rebirth.

I'd like to read this poem by David Whyte:

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath dark clouds

The passing light over the water

And I heard the voice of the world speak out

I knew then as I have before

Life is no passing memory of what has been

Nor the remaining pages of a great book

Waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed

It is the vision of far off things

Seen for the silence they hold

It is the heart after years of Secret conversing

Speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees

Before the lit bush

It is the man throwing away his shoes

As if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished

Opened at last

Fallen in love

With solid ground.

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