Episode #44

Episode #44: Day Schildkret Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Intro:

Laura Dawn: My name is Laura Dawn and you’re listening to episode #44 of the psychedelic leadership podcast featuring my beautiful conversation with artist, ritualist, and award-winning author Day Schildkret. 

As we collectively move through these times of enormous transition, the power of ritual helps us to make contact with the fullness of the present moment, inviting us to pause, and remember how to turn towards and tend to the sacred. 

And when we do this, rituals can help us punctuate the story and the transition through the various chapters of our lives with meaning and purpose and a greater depth of significance. 

As many of you know, I’ve personally been moving through times of major transition in my life, as many of us are, and rituals, and ceremony and daily practice have been such a profound and powerful tool to help me find inner stability through these shifting tides. 

And that’s why I was so thrilled to invite Day Schildkret onto the show to talk about the power of ritual. 

He’s the author of Morning Altars, and just published a new book called: Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration and Change.

I just adore this man. And just feel such a deep sense of kinship with him and love his work so so much and feel so honored to be able to spend time speaking with him because I learn so much from him. 

One of the things I love about Day is that he calls himself a word nerd, and he shares the etymology of words like ritual and ceremony, and all the way at the very end of this conversation he breaks down the meaning of the word catastrophe, which I highly recommend tuning in until the end to listen to what he has to say about how the meaning of the word has sort of like, instructions for us, for how to navigate through change without fearing it. 

In this episode, we talk about the significance of rituals, and how a symbolic action is essentially a tool for meaning-making, and he shares why rituals are so important, especially right now. Day shares various ways of defining and understanding what ritual is and explains the difference between ritual, ceremony, and routine. 

Day is just such a heart-felt human and he shares some beautiful deeply personal stories, and He also comes out of the psychedelic closet for the first time publicly and shares how he microdosed throughout the entire writing of his latest book, hello goodbye, which I highly recommend getting a copy of and I’ll include a link to his book in the shownotes. 

And just a reminder that all the resources mentioned in each episode can be found on my new website LauraDawn.co and for each episode it’s just / and the number so to access more information about Day and his work, all the resources mentioned, the full transcript and to learn about the featured musician, you can go to LauraDawn.co/44. 

I also have a bunch of free downloadable resources on my website, including integration guides, questions to vet your shaman, free 8-day microdosing course, playlists for psychedelic journeys and beyond and other free resources as well. 

Also My Psychedelic Leadership Mastermind for Medicine Women called Your Message Is Your Medicine, and that starts March 2nd, so it’s coming up very soon, and I have a few spots left for that. And it’s a 12 week program. I have an amazing group of women coming together for that. And if you’re feeling the call to step out and contribute your voice to the psychedelic space and the medicine movement, and you want to learn how to cultivate your thought leadership and refeine your core message, and build an offering around that, then this is likely a program for you. And it’s more than just covering strategic tools, it’s also really diving into what it means to embody feminine leadership and how we can learn to expand what we believe is possible,  and we’ll explore what I think of as the codes to upleveling. Choosing to step out requires a lot of courage, because it really brings up all of our core stuff, which is why our message is our medicine, which makes it a path for inner transformation, growth, and healing. 

So I’m actually going to keep this intro pretty short today, a rare occurrence I would say, as many of you who’ve been listening to this podcast you know how much I love long intros. 

And I’ll be leaving you with a song called the Offering by my dear medicine song sister Aea Luz. And this was such a perfect song for this episode and I can’t wait for you to hear it. 

One last thing, as many of you know, just such an enormous amount goes into the production of each episode and so if you have been tuning into this podcast and have been enjoying it,  I would sincerely appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave me a review on itunes and let me know how this podcast has impacted your life. That would mean so much to me. And if you send me a message on Instagram at Livefreelaurad letting me know you left a review, I’ll share your review with my audience in my stories and tag you in that post. 

I’m also starting to release my episodes a little more raw and uncut, which I’m really enjoying actually,  so you’ll hear that in this conversation, I started recording when we hopped on the call together, so you’ll hear us settle into the conversation together. 

Ok, that’s all from me for today, thank you thank you thank you for tuning in to the psychedelic leadership podcast, thank you for witnessing me grow on this path, it’s been quite the journey. 

and just so much love and gratitude to my brother Day for this epic conversation that nourished me on so many levels.

Day Schildkret: Hey, there.

Laura Dawn: Aloha, hey, brother.

Day Schildkret: Hey, how’s it going?

Laura Dawn: It’s going well. Day Schildkret, I was practicing it. Schildkret, Schildkret.

Day Schildkret: Schildkret.

Laura Dawn: Schildkret. Did I get it?

Day Schildkret: Yeah. Think of it like shield, but it’s with an all, Schildkret.

Laura Dawn: Schildkret. Yes, I’m getting it

Day Schildkret: And I told you what it means, right?

Laura Dawn: No, you didn’t tell me what it means, this is the best part.

Day Schildkret: It means turtle.

Laura Dawn: Yes. I like that. I’m lighting some Palo Santos, after we spoke the last time, I feel really inspired to actually just invoke the ritual process for my episodes.

Day Schildkret: Beautiful, yay.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, I’m really excited to dive in with you. I just want to say, I so appreciate the work that you are doing in this world.

Day Schildkret: Thank you.

Laura Dawn: Yeah. I just really want to elevate your voice.

Day Schildkret: Thank you, darling. We’re all in it together, you know what I mean?

Laura Dawn: Yeah.

Day Schildkret: It’s really; the only way we’re going to make an impact is by uplifting each other, so thank you.

Laura Dawn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and just speaking to these times, and I would also like to dive into some of your story, but I almost just want to start at this place of the narrative of this time that we’re living in and ritual as this powerful tool for meaning-making. So, I’m kind of curious, what is the narrative that you’re telling yourself about this time that we’re transitioning through right now?

Day Schildkret: Change. Really, it comes down to we’re in a major transitional period. Most of us have been taught to fear change, most of us are showing up to this time craving normalcy, even the word, the new normal, it’s in the mainstream culture, it carries so much value. And really what that is, is change phobia, we’re terrified of change. I get it, I have a lot of change in my life, it’s scary, especially when that kind of change makes the ground fall out from under you. However, change is the only constant in our life, and showing up to change as an amateur is really not a skillful option, especially as an adult, so the question becomes, how do we cultivate a skillful and purposeful relationship to change?

There are lots of ways to do that, meditation is one way, psychedelics is another way, music is another, there are many ways, I’m not promoting one way, I’m not a monotheist like that. But ritual and ceremony is a very, very important way to cultivate a skillful and purposeful and beautiful relationship to change, one that doesn’t turn away from it, but that turns toward it. One that doesn’t promote more fear, but more respect, one that doesn’t make us feel isolated, but lets us feel collected in or gathered in, and so that we can cross our thresholds both personally and collectively with beauty and be changed by change.

We’re talking about evolution both as personal, as people, and as a culture, evolving, transforming, renewing, these are all qualities of ritual.

Laura Dawn: It’s so interesting because actually at the heart of it, we have a very similar core message, so much of what I talk about is actually bowing at the altar of impermanence and how we actually cultivate that warrior strength to show up and actually sit in the middle of the fire of the emotional pain of what it takes to actually touch it completely and turn towards it. And yet rationally, we can sit here and say, yes, everything changes, we know this on a rational level, but emotionally, this is so hard for us to grasp, and actually, this is the root teachings of the Buddha and Eastern philosophy that the core root of suffering is this fundamental denial of the true nature of reality, which is fundamentally impermanent and always changing.

Day Schildkret: Exactly. And, I think you said bowing on the altar of change or something like that, part of my work is making altars and I’m also a word nerd and the root of the word altar means to raise up, that’s what the word etymologically means. It means the things that you’re putting on the altar you’re uplifting them, so Altus is the Latin, and so putting change or objects of change onto the altar, in some ways it uplifts them so that you’re not kind of smashed or buried or depressed or fearful of them, but you’re raising them up so that you can elevate them to being beautiful, being valuable, purposeful, not something that shouldn’t be.

And that’s a skill just like playing the piano, the more you play it, the better you get, it’s just kind of, that’s the dynamic of practice, so the more that we can practice turning toward change and facing it, welcoming it even, honoring it. The keyword here, which I love, and very few people talk about, but I freaking love this word so much, it’s the word hospitality; I think I’m going to write a book about this. Hospitality, how are we as a guest? How are we as a host? When change knocks on your door, what kind of host are you? How skillful are you at the old tradition of hospitality?

And in our culture, I’m talking about people that live in North America, we suck, we absolutely suck at hospitality compared to so many other cultures around the world. I can tell you, I’ve traveled around; I went to Ukraine years ago on a mission, bringing medicine and supplies to elderly and housebound people, people that couldn’t leave their houses, poor people. And I walked into their houses and waiting at their dinner table was their best fish, their best vodka, their best everything, they had no money, but they gave it all to me because I was their guest, and that’s the rules of hospitality in those cultures.

So here, it’s the same thing, when change shows up at your door, are you giving it your best or your worst? How are you treating your guests? To me, let’s talk about that, I love the skillsets of hospitality, it’s a reciprocal relationship, change is trying to give you things, it’s trying to change you, trying to take things from you and give things to you. Are you trusting that? Are you open to that? Are you interested in what it has to say and what it has to offer? And ritual is one way where we can elevate change and treat it as the holy guest that it is.

Laura Dawn: I’m curious about your perspective, and I want to ask you your definition of ritual in a moment, but I love the way you frame this as a skillset and in this notion of hospitality, which I love this narrative around that. And I also think of the skillset of how we hold our seat and our center at the altar of impermanence, which is a skillset, how do we not get knocked off in this way or knocked off in that way by, the good thing happens, the bad thing happens and actually just root in awareness and making direct contact with what is. And I’m kind of just, I’m really curious, how does that weave into your narrative of hospitality?

Day Schildkret: Well, first and foremost, anyone that practices anything knows that the core skill of practice is fucking up, that’s the core, I play classical guitar, it’s all about fucking up, the mistakes are necessary, that’s what makes it practice. That’s how you learn, you have to, I play a chord or note and it sounds terrible, and I’m like, oh, that’s teaching me how to get better at it, so getting knocked down is kind of the core function of change, you have to get knocked down. We live in a culture, the dominant culture of North America that has its roots everywhere now in the world that is competency addicted, it’s addicted to always needing to get it right, always needing to look good, always needing to be competent.

I’m doing my absolute best, maybe you are too, of trying to proceed genuinely to my audience, genuinely meaning, I’m heartbroken, and today was hard, and last night I had trouble sleeping and I’m worried and just being a real human. And not always being competent, not always getting it right, not always being on point, sometimes sitting at the altar is full of tears and sometimes I’m collapsed and sometimes I don’t know, it’s not necessarily about not getting knocked down. it’s about how do you return.

Laura Dawn: Right.

Day Schildkret: And to me, that’s, this is such a beautiful word, return, it has the word “re” in it, meaning you do it again and again and again, and it has the word “turn”, which means to turn toward or turn away, but to turn toward, or to spiral in again. So, calendrically, New Year’s is a time where we return in the circle or the summer solstice or the spring Equinox, we return again, or a birthday or an anniversary, we return, so it’s like we leave and we come back, and that’s part of change, is you have to depart and you have to come and arrive back. And I think the skill is how do you do that?

In some cultures, we just celebrated the Chinese New Year, I’m not Chinese, but gosh, a culture that does that beautifully, so beautifully, with color and celebration and food and ritual and tradition and family and ugh, it’s gorgeous, it’s so hospitable for the year. It’s delicious. So, we in the west need to remember how to return beautifully, even if that’s you sitting at your altar and you had a shitty day, or you lost something or something ended, or someone died and you’re collapsed. How do you return beautifully with all of your imperfections and all of your sadness and sorrow and include that into the wholeness of that moment?

Laura Dawn: I love that, it actually makes me think so much of Pema Chodron’s teachings, she’s the one that I learned meditation from and it’s like the mind leaves, that’s just what the mind does, it just goes, and meditation is really just the returning of the mind back to center over and over and over again, and it’s like training a puppy. When the puppy goes all over the place, you don’t hit the puppy, it’s, oh, you’re training the puppy, good puppy, we want to love the puppy, so it’s returning with that sense of loving-kindness and compassion and, it’s okay, life is really wild for a lot of us right now.

Can we actually even hold the paradox of grief and joy in the grief and the hope in grief, and knowing that it’s full spectrum right now, and can we just be open to all of it?

Day Schildkret: Yeah. That to me is, and you’re talking, Pema is a beautiful teacher and that teaching applies personally and communally and collectively that teaching of leaving and returning, there’s no question, it’s kind of, it’s a miracle I arrived at the name of this book because it’s just, literally you’re talking about hello, goodbye. Whether it’s you and your mind, goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, whether it’s you and a relationship, whether it’s you and your kid growing up and then going off to college, whether it’s you and your parent, whether it’s you and your home.

We face so many moments, whether it’s us and democracy, you can, whatever, whether it’s us and climate, it’s these moments of endings and beginnings, and you can bring it back to meditation, ending, beginning, endings, beginnings, always this moment of coming and going, coming and going, that’s why hospitality is crucial. I swear I’m going to write this book after this interview.

Laura Dawn: I love it. Okay, let’s dive in, how would you define ritual?

Day Schildkret: Well, you’re talking to a word nerd and that means I love etymology, okay, it’s even more profound than that, I’m not a word nerd, I’m a root lover. I love the roots of things, I love how deep they are and how invisible they are to the eye, and so words have roots, they come from places, they travel just like people, and just because we’re speaking a word doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the origin of the word. So, the word ritual comes from, it etymologically means to count; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, however, I come from the theater, I also play music, I used to dance, and so musicians and dancers count very differently than that.

They count like this; 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, so they count in patterns, rhythmically, that’s how they stay in rhythm with the music, if a dancer stops counting, they’re all over the place, if a musician stops counting and they’re playing with other musicians, they’re gone, they’re lost. So, the counting helps everyone stay together in the music, ritual works the same way my friends, it helps us stay in rhythm with our lives. When things change, when things get ungrounded, when things get chaotic, when things go wacky, ritual helps us remember the counting of the music, oh yeah, that’s where I am, oh, right, this is where I am, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1.

Because otherwise we get lost so easily, collectively, we get lost, personally, we get lost. Do you ever read the book, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’?

Laura Dawn: Yes, I just actually returned to it recently a couple of weeks ago.

Day Schildkret: So, it’s Robin Wall Kimmerer and inside the book, she put it perfectly, for those of you listening that don’t know; this is a book written by an indigenous woman, she’s a botanist. And this book is very much a bridge between indigenous plant wisdom and scientific botany wisdom, and she’s that bridge, and inside of it, she says something like, our elders say that ceremony is our way to remember to remember, whoa, ceremony and ritual is our way to remember to remember.

Why? Because being human, we forget all the time, that’s what being human is, it’s so easy to forget, so we need these things that we do called ceremony and ritual, that literally snap us awake and say, oh, yeah, right, this is important, oh, yeah, the season just changed. Oh, yeah, my father who died, we’re coming on the anniversary of his death, oh, yeah, something tragic happened, oh, yeah, someone was born, it’s these moments that snap us awake and help us remember where we are, who we are, what now, where we’re going, it helps us to remember.

Okay, one more word nerd thing, remember there is that “re” again, that doing it again, but we don’t really have the verb to member, but remember, basically says something was dismembered or forgotten. So, we have to bring it back into a whole again, called memory, oh, yeah, things get scattered and dispersed, we have to bring things back to the whole, to the memory, and that’s the rhythm, forgetting, remembering, forgetting, remembering, and ritual is a very important way that we can do that.

Laura Dawn: When you just expressed the definition of remember, it makes me think of the word integrate. So, in a way, I wonder if there’s a way we can also loop that into this narrative because, especially in the plant medicine space, integration is such a big topic, but in a sense, as ritual, we’re sort of, the way that I define ritual, or one of many ways, is that it’s an invitation to make direct contact with the present moment. And in that way, we’re punctuating the days and the chapters of our lives with meaning and significance, and so in a way, when we’re doing that, we’re also integrating the process of, oh, this has been a year now, since the passing of this loved one, it’s actually a meaning-making tool.

Day Schildkret: Bingo. Yep. It’s a meaning-making tool for integration, for transformation, for wholeness because when we say these things, for instance, integration, this is a word that sounds great and is great, but we have to include when we talk about these things, the disintegration. We have to name the thing that we’re not saying because, for instance, I don’t know if you’ve had a lot of death in your life, in your family, but I have, and there’s a lot of forgetting that happens in that, there’s a lot of grief that happens spontaneously in that, there’s a lot of letting go and there’s a lot of different, messy experiences that happen with death.

So, the integration means to include back, but why? Because it gets scattered, because it gets forgotten, because life’s busy, and crazy, and chaotic, and forgetful, and all of those things. So, an integration doesn’t just happen, we have to do it, and therefore it’s a skill, ritual can’t be thought, it has to be done, our hands have to do it, our mouths have to do it, our feet do it, our bellies do it, whatever it is, we have to do the ritual. So, we do it, and the mechanism to remember is when we realize we’re forgetting, that’s the mechanism, oh, right. If we don’t do it, then it just continues to go into the space of forgetting.

Laura Dawn: Oh, yeah, I want to dive into that deeper, o you have your book close by?

Day Schildkret: Got it right here.

Laura Dawn: I’m curious. Yeah, I love it. I love it, and I’m curious, are there a couple of other definitions from people that you shared in there?

Day Schildkret: Of ritual?

Laura Dawn: Yeah.

Day Schildkret: Yeah, for sure. These are not mine, but I’ll end with mine. Okay, so just know that I’m reading other people’s definitions. Someone said, and by the way, just to give a little backstory, I interviewed about 250 people for this book, hour-long conversations each, most of the time we’re both crying, it fed me as much as it fed them. Not a lot of people want to speak to you on the phone about a major moment in your life where you get to unpack it, it was a moving conversation, they are the bones and muscles of this book.

So, one of the questions I asked everyone, the only question that everyone got asked, the same question is, how do you define ritual? And, of course, there were over 250 answers to that question, really interesting, so these are some of the ones that I thought were really worth highlighting. It’s a language for meaning-making, interesting a language, something you do to mark occasions out of traditions, a meeting place where the spiritual meets the physical, the unseen meets the seen, the formless meets the form, concretizing the sacred. Woo, that one was good. I’ll read a few more. I see ritual as a cue or road sign to point me in the right direction.

Laura Dawn: Oh my gosh, that is beautiful.

Day Schildkret: Ritual is a mini-journey, you start somewhere, sometimes you have a destination that you seek in the ritual and sometimes not. And the last one I’ll read here is, a ritual says I am, or we are here. And then I finish that with mine, to me, a ritual midwives us through transitions, helping us acknowledge the change and transform us from who we were to who we are now. That’s how I define it, as a midwife.

Laura Dawn: I love that. I love that.

Day Schildkret: Thank you.

Laura Dawn: Why from your perspective, is it also an act of doing, that we speak the words, that we break the branch, that we write the thing or rip it up, why does that have to be a real catalyst for the ritual?

Day Schildkret: Why does it have to be done?

Laura Dawn: Hmm-hmm.

Day Schildkret: Why do rituals? Well, okay. Change, transformation, we sometimes experience a lot of things internally, if you go through a divorce, a lot of that’s happening inside of you, a lot of the heartbreak and the separation, and the fear and the grief is happening internally. Sure, there are external things, you sign papers, you see a lawyer, you move out of the house, whatever, but those are really, they’re routine, they’re practical, but they’re not symbolic. And we are all mythopoetic people, we come from mythopoetic people, meaning that we come from ancestors who weren’t just interested in the practical, no matter where you come from, no matter who your people are, they all had ways of being that were based in symbolism, metaphor.

They did things that to a rational mind didn’t make sense, but they did it because the mythopoetic parts of us, it made a lot of sense. For instance, I’m thinking of my own tradition, my own culture, I come from a Jewish culture, I was born into a rich ritual tradition and I’m thinking of one of them, the marriage, it’s a ceremony, but there are many rituals within the wedding ceremony, a popular one that many people know is that we break a glass. Traditionally the groom breaks a glass, steps on a glass at the end of the ceremony and everyone screams mazel tov, and it’s the end of the ceremony, but what practical reason would someone break a glass?

What does that functionally do? It doesn’t do anything but symbolically it does a lot, and I can go into the reasons, I’m not sure.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, I’m kind of curious because in some ways it’s like we need something for the mind to use as a catalyst to make meaning out of.

Day Schildkret: Yeah. Breaking a glass, there are lots of interpretations, what I love about symbolic actions is that they don’t necessarily have to mean one thing, and most often they don’t, they’re interpreted, that’s the beauty of poetry, it’s not operating in a scientific, practical, utilitarian mindset where it means one thing, one truth. We’re operating in a realm of many things, many truths, many interpretations, wonder, and curiosity are the skillsets for the mythopoetic mind, not truth, it’s not a monotheistic way of being in the world, it’s more poly.

So, breaking a glass, for instance, for some traditionalists, it could mean the loss of our homeland, we’re remembering the place, to some it’s Jerusalem, we’re remembering the place where we lived, our ancestors lived. For others, it’s remembering the heartbreak in the midst of joy, or for others, it’s remembering the brokenness in the midst of wholeness, it’s taking a very happy, beautiful moment, and it’s also breaking something.

There are lots of interpretations of what that means, but it’s s