Over the past two years, I have experienced more transitions than I can count on one hand. There have been big transitions in my family structure, including separations, deaths, house moves and huge shifts in interpersonal relationships; I’ve experienced transitions related to my own identity; and left my day-to-day job at the non-profit I co-founded five years ago.

Throughout these transitions, I found myself coming back to the rituals and traditions I grew up with. As William Bridges mentions in his book, ‘Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes’, we often come back to old patterns and ways of being when everything feels in flux, and for me this return was to the culturally Jewish context of my upbringing. I found myself back in my childhood synagogue, seeking comfort and council from my childhood Rabbi, lighting the shabbat candles, and marking significant moments in the liturgical calendar over challah and bowls of (vegetarian) chicken soup. And then in September 2022, whilst in New York to celebrate my grandmother’s 90th birthday, I experienced my first mikveh.

Mikveh is a Jewish immersion ritual - a chance to purify, cleanse, reset and mark big and small moments of change. I had never considered the mikveh as a space for me -a queer, gender non-conforming, non-religious Jew- but the fact that a ritual existed that could specifically support me to mark, process and move through the transitions I was facing felt too good to miss. And it was.

But the experience got me thinking about those of us who don’t have a religious or cultural context that gives us instant access to centuries-old rituals designed to support and nurture us through life’s inevitable changes. It got me thinking of many of the women I have met through my work with Routes, who are facing the hostile UK asylum system and the constant, destabilising changes it forces on people who have been displaced; I thought of the many LGBTQ+ people I know who’s relationships with the families or communities they were born into are tense or even non-existent, and so for whom access to ‘old ways of being’ is not possible. And I wondered how we might make space for rituals in these contexts too…

And in thinking about this, more questions bubbled to the surface: in the absence of religious leaders, without bricks and mortar places of worship, and in a society where access to public space gets more squeezed with every passing year, who are the people and what are the spaces that can hold these rituals for us?

These are the questions I am trying to explore, supported by a Churchill Fellowship. By speaking to community leaders and healers, storytellers, singers and activists, and visiting places where rituals old and new are held, I want to better understand how we can use rituals to support us as we attempt to navigate life’s transitions, regardless of our cultural or religious backgrounds.

And I would love your help. I am looking to chat to inspiring people to help me build up my research, especially people who work with religious or cultural rituals, people who work with storytelling, music, dance or other embodied ritual practices, and anyone who supports others through life’s transitions.

Please reach out if you’re interested to chat to me, or if you can connect me with an inspiring person that you think I should speak to!

You can keep up to date with my research on my blog! I’ll be sharing thoughts, reflections and musings at the end of each research day. They won’t be polished pieces, but instead a way to track and share the journey I am on. I hope you’ll join me.