Megan Sheldon: Creating Meaningful Rituals Without Religion

00:02 – Voice Over (Announcement)
This is Glass City Humanist a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger

00:11 – Douglas (Host)
We talked to Megan Sheldon, co-founder and CEO of Be Ceremonial, the world’s first guided ritual and ceremony app. She believes even the non-religious have a need for ritual and ceremony, and her app guides people to appropriate and, hopefully, meaningful activities.

00:30 – Voice Over (Announcement)
Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

01:02 – Douglas (Host)
With us today is Megan Sheldon. She is a co-founder of BeCeremonial.com, which is a website and an app. She is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, but the app and the website is available to all and thank you for joining us today, Megan. Thank you for secular people and I was really interested in what I saw. Can you tell us just a little bit about Be Ceremonial and what it’s meant to do for people?

01:40 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, I mean. It all, as it often does, starts with my own experience of going through a lot of grief and loss and not knowing how to acknowledge and honor what I was going through. My husband and I had recurrent pregnancy loss while losing a parent, so it was a really difficult time and we identify as secular we’re humanists. We didn’t really know how to honor those experiences, not only at the time but also moving forward, like, how do we walk with grief? How do we acknowledge it on a more regular basis? And I got really interested in ritual and ceremony.

02:16
I have a master’s in cultural mythology, so that’s my background. I’m a mythologist and I love looking at the intersection of story and ritual and culture and history and time. And I think I always thought I didn’t have permission or access to ritual and ceremony because I wasn’t religious or I didn’t belong to a certain institution. And I quickly learned that that was not the case and that there are lots of universal rituals around the world and I also felt free to invent my own, to create ritual that served me in that time. And so, yeah, that was about 10 years ago I started creating my own rituals, my own ceremonies, and then for friends of friends and beyond that.

02:55
And the pandemic hit and my husband, who works in tech, he got laid off and we thought how do we make these tools available to others? Because we had a lot of people reaching out at that point. So we started to imagine a way to bring technology and ritual together and make these tools more available to anybody. One of our founding values is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. So we’re not here to tell anybody what they should do or how they should create their ceremony. We just want to give them inspiration, place to start, kind of a structure to play with and then allow them to choose their own ritual adventure.

03:32 – Douglas (Host)
So so you said that you were doing this for friends and friends of friends. So it’s kind of like baking cookies. Eventually, everybody wanted the recipe. So what was the tipping point where you decided that you wanted to go and make this a business or provide a service for people?

03:52 – Megan (Guest)
I mean, it was the pandemic. Definitely, Three weeks into the pandemic, my husband lost his job. He was in a travel startup not where you want to be when a global travel shutdown happens and I had a marketing company and that was really slow going and we just really wanted to create something together. We wanted to be able to kind of leave our mark on the world and we started to just imagine this, rather than just a kind of on the side passion project, what if we were to turn this into a business and make it available to people around the world? So, yeah, I mean, it’s still.

04:25
We’re three years in now and it’s you know, we’re still finding our way and stumbling across it. I think we have a really different view of how to grow a business than the capitalistic model that we’re faced with, especially in the tech world. So we’re trying to grow slowly and intentionally and really work with people to understand where we’re most needed and how we can provide education and connection and community and all of those pieces within our business model. So it’s difficult but it’s wonderful, and we’ve got about 4,000 people using our platform around the world right now.

05:00 – Douglas (Host)
Cool, and in your materials on your website and in the app, you define ceremony as a string of rituals and that rituals for humans are important. Why do you think ritual is important for humans in general?

05:17 – Megan (Guest)
yeah. So if we imagine a ritual as kind of a standalone entity that we can do on our own, we can have a morning ritual or a bedtime ritual, but we can also kind of string those rituals together to create a ceremony to mark a time of change or a rite of passage. Both the ritual and the ceremony are helping us acknowledge something that we’re going through. They’re not fixing it, they’re not, you know, making it go away. They’re simply allowing us to bring it to the surface, acknowledge what we’re going through and then hopefully move forward without having to kind of shove stuff down. I think a lot of our culture is about you know, don’t ask, don’t tell. You know it’s business, it’s not personal, and that mentality has really hurt us. So from a mental health perspective, I think ritual and ceremony helps us bring things to the surface in a safe and contained way, feel it and then move forward knowing that we’ve given it some airtime right, we’ve validated it in some way.

06:11 – Douglas (Host)
One of my pet peeves. I’ve been in the humanist movement for many, many years and one of my pet peeves is that secular people tend to rehash and reheat theistic religious stuff like ceremonies and things like that. They like take out the God part but they leave everything else. They want to meet on Sunday and sing hymns and things like that. Would somebody like me that is totally turned off by theistic religion, would I be satisfied by using your services? I mean, could I find what I’m looking for? Put it, put it, put it down.

06:48 – Megan (Guest)
And I think that’s what we’ve created. We’ve created a really it’s like giving you a giant restaurant full of different meals and choices and you get to pick your own, you know, course, and you get to design what you want to eat and enjoy and experience. Obviously, I think that when a lot of the people that we work with we have to kind of dismantle our own view of what ritual and ceremony is, because if we look at Wikipedia and the definition that shows up, or if we kind of have been raised with an idea of what ritual and ceremony is, a lot of us feel like it’s not for us, but then we end up missing out on something. So I think back to when my husband and I wanted to get married. Neither one of us really wanted to do a wedding, because the institution of marriage was just something that we didn’t really connect with.

07:31
But there was an opportunity at that point. His father had just been given a terminal diagnosis and we wanted to bring his family from Sweden and my family here in Canada and do something that connected our families, and we knew this would be the only time that we would be together in, you know, whole form. So we threw out the wedding script, the wedding ceremony, and we started from scratch and we thought what is it that we’re actually doing here? You know, we’d been together five years. At the point we were common law. Legally there was no different. That would happen for us If we had just followed the kind of the regular path.

08:04
But we decided to use this opportunity to really define some rituals that we would continue. Every year on our same anniversary. We kind of come back to this ritual that we created during our wedding ceremony and recommit um on a yearly basis, rather than the kind of till death do us part language that can be quite harmful to people. So I think you will find what you’re looking for if you go in with an open mind and curiosity and also knowing that whatever you find, you can adapt to your own needs. There’s no way that everybody’s going to follow the exact same. That’s what we’re trying to get rid of is. Here’s the template and everybody follows it exactly. It’s more of. Here’s a place to start. Add in your own story, your own values, your own beliefs, your own experiences that you’ve. You know places you’ve traveled, the things that you like to do in your life.

08:55 – Douglas (Host)
Add that in and that’s what makes the ceremony your story and I was looking at some of the biography material on your website. You are a humanist celebrant and humanist celebrants are professionals. They’ve been trained, licensed, get certificates. Are you worried that you’re going to put yourself out of a job, since you know? That’s what you know? That’s how priests and ministers and celebrants make their money is doing these celebrations.

09:21 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, and I’ve had a lot of celebrant fellow celebrants kind of push back, and I’m still very busy in my own work as an end-of-life doula and a humanist celebrant and a ceremony and ritual guide. There will always be a need for people to want somebody to handhold them through this time, especially when it’s, you know, a grief-filled moment and there’s an opportunity for us to flex our ritual muscles and practice ritual on a more regular basis. So when something big or hard or complicated happens, we have a practice to draw from and, quite honestly, like we have ceremonies in our app around infertility, around organ transplant, around divorce, like all of these moments that are less visible in the public eye Most people think about ceremony. They think about birth, marriage and death, but there are so many moments in between that we can ceremonialize and we can bring attention to.

10:13
If you get fired from a job, you might not want to hire a celebrant to create a ceremony for you, but if you had the tools to do something yourself, what would that do for your mental health? To be able to acknowledge not only what you might have got from that job but also what you’re ready to leave behind and burn in the fire and let go of. So for us, it’s not about replacing anyone. It’s about using these tools to become more ceremonial in our day-to-day life.

10:37 – Douglas (Host)
Now, it’s a part of part of one part of your service, though you also do as you said you guide people, correct, you? You actually, you just don’t throw material at them and say here you go, good luck. You know, if they have questions, or if they need they have questions that they need answered, they can come to you and do that correct.

10:57 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, and not only can they come to me, they can come to our community. So we’ve built a really robust online community. We hold monthly gatherings that are free for people to attend, and I firmly believe I’m trained in something called the art of hosting and circle way, where I believe that everybody in the room has something to offer and something to learn, that I am not showing up with all the answers. I’m showing up with my experiences and I’ll share them back with you and you can share your, your story and your ceremony, and I’ll learn something from that and that will impact the way that we all move forward. So we really try to create that community place where people can you know, even in our online community.

11:33
This week somebody asked you know, a friend of theirs was having had breast cancer and was about to have a bilateral mastectomy and they wanted to know how they could support their friend with ritual, and I didn’t even have to answer Right away. Other people in the community were saying, oh, you could do this, you could do this, I’ve done this and this is how it worked. Or, you know, I’ve had a mastectomy and here’s what really would have helped me at that time. So that’s the storytelling part that we’re really trying to encourage is the. For a lot of us, we’ve been so removed from this world that we’re just getting our feet wet, we’re just stepping back into these waters, and it takes a village to be able to make the changes that we want to see.

12:18 – Voice Over (Announcement)
For more information about the topics in this episode including links used.

12:23 – Voice Over (Announcement)
Please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanistshow.

12:31 – Megan (Guest)
And what is like one of the most interesting or maybe strangest thing, that people have wanted to have a ritual for One of my favorites and most powerful ceremonies that I was a part of. I worked with a group of women in the US who were all about to turn the age their mother was when their mother died, and so that day had been seared in their minds forever since it happened. Right, I mean one of the women. She was two years old when her mom died. Her mom was 32. And here she was about to turn 32, knowing that was her mother’s death age. What do you do on that day? What do you do the next day, when you’re now one day older than your mother ever got to live?

13:03
For the most part in our secular kind of individualistic society, most people wouldn’t do anything, or if they did, they would hold it really close to themselves and they might not share, they might not let others know. Most certainly not a lot of people would be hosting a ceremony for themselves or their family or their close friends. So these group of women came to me and we all worked together on each individual story, on okay, what can this person do, what were the symbols and meaningful moments and memories that they can draw on and how can they create a ceremony to mark that day and the next day that they are one day older? And this woman over here, this was her experience. How do we curate and customize a ceremony for her that feels like something that will honor this transition?

13:44
A lot of us have negative and difficult stories with grief and death. When somebody dies, you might have a lot of anger and resentment. How do we acknowledge that within a ceremonial context? So for me, that was one of the things I did that in the midst of the pandemic, so it was all virtual and it opened us up to this idea that there are so many invisible moments that we have no idea how to navigate, and the magic and power of community when we come together and brainstorm and give each other support.

14:12 – Douglas (Host)
That was quite wonderful yeah, I kind of probably wish I probably would have had that too. My, uh, my, when I reached the age my father died. You know, I still thought about it. I didn’t do anything for it, but I still you know, got in my head and and I was thinking about it, so and my advice to you would be there is no time frame.

14:36 – Megan (Guest)
I worked with somebody who had an abortion 30 years ago and we created a ceremony for her now to honor that experience. There is no. There is no determinate time when you have to do something. You can still create that ceremony and reflect back to that day or imagine now it doesn’t have you don’t miss your chance, and I also do a lot of do-over ceremonies. So people will go to their you know, their parents’ funeral and it doesn’t feel at all like something that they would have liked or it didn’t bring them any kind of sense of peace or support another celebration of life, or they might redo that ceremony and get it right this time and knowing what they know now. There’s no time limit, there’s no maximum number of times that you can do this.

15:24
We’re in the wild west here a little bit. We get to just kind of define it for ourselves and I think that’s the beauty of the humanist movement and kind of moving away from the prescribed notion of what we have to follow. And I will say that, with that in mind, there is still very much a place for traditional, rich, historic ritual and ceremony and there is definitely a huge value within our framework, where we’re not appropriating from different cultures, we’re not taking things that don’t belong to us and trying to mask them and sell them back to people. We’re really mindful and respectful of indigenous practices from around the world and how we can look at ritual and ceremony and as a human experience, not just as a religious or cultural experience.

16:11 – Douglas (Host)
Now your your website, Be Ceremonial. It has some tiers, right. I mean, you have a free tier that people can try out and then, if you get benefit out of it, then you can go to other tiers. Do you have a lot of people that are paying money to be part of your community?

16:32 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, I think, in comparison to hiring a celebrant, which is quite a high end experience for a lot of people, our number one goal with Be Ceremonial was to make this accessible. We don’t own this material. This is something that is part of all of us. I always say we have ritual in our bones. We’re not here to teach you, we’re here to help you remember. So we want to make this accessible to people and, with that in mind, we’re also trying to build a business and you know we’re we’re very values, values aligned, and we’re trying to build the kind of business that we would like to see in this world.

17:04
I think the I’m in Canadian dollars here, but I believe that we have free, which we give lots of access to lots of rituals and ceremonies and workshops and gatherings and interviews in our app, and then you have a monthly or a yearly option and I think it’s $12 or $10 a month, us or $52 a year, so it’s really affordable.

17:27
That’s been a number one goal for us. We don’t want anybody to feel like they can’t join because of finances. The other magical part of when you have a membership when you have a subscription, either monthly or yearly, you can gift as many ceremonies as you want to other people. So with your subscription, if you have a friend who had a miscarriage, or a friend who lost their mom or a pet or is going through a divorce, you can quickly kind of create a ceremony and send it to them and then they’re invited for free to go through that experience and have that gifted, that thing that we do when somebody is going through something hard. We’re like, oh, I don’t know what to do. I should I get them food, I get them flowers. What if you give them the gift of ceremony, give them some rituals to kind of help acknowledge what they might be going through?

18:10 – Douglas (Host)
that, for me, is what I’d wished I’d had many years ago now, uh, earlier, you know, I had asked you about the most interesting ceremony that you participated in, what is the most popular? I mean, which which one do you get most call for?

18:27 – Megan (Guest)
yeah, it’s surprising maybe, and also not given, given our demographic um, I’d say 90 percent of our, our users, our community, are women, um, between the ages of kind of 40 and 65. And it’s the sandwich generation. Like myself, I’m raising young kids and dealing with aging parents, and so we have it kind of coming at us from all angles.

18:48
The most popular ceremony is the cronium ceremony. So crone is the third chapter in a woman’s life in mythology. So it’s about after you’ve had kids or if you never did have kids, and you kind of step into elderhood, you step into this third stage of life. Traditionally here in Western culture and in other cultures around the world, women are often kind of cast aside in this time of life. Right, we get too old, we get too gray and wrinkly and all of that. So this ceremony, the croning ceremony, is about how to celebrate this third chapter, how to acknowledge your wisdom and step into this with more awareness and power and knowing that you have these gifts to share. So we have a lot of people around the world really interested in that ceremony.

19:32 – Douglas (Host)
Is that kind of related to the old adage, the old crone? Is that kind of where it comes from or part of?

19:40 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, so before that, even before that old adage, the crone was this beautiful wise, you know, wisdom keeper, knowledge keeper. Within community we looked at a lot of pagan communities and you know the elder women were revered. And then came the kind of rise of patriarchal thinking and women kind of became cast aside and once they were past their childbearing years, the old crone, the narrative shifted and there’s some really fascinating literature that looks at this. But suddenly this old crone was all decrepit and you know teeth mizzing and hair and hunch and all of the ugly things that we started to associate with old age.

20:21
And I think, as an aging woman myself and raising daughters, I want to be able to shift the narrative of what it means to get older, because it is a hard thing. Of course your body changes, but it is also an amazing thing. So the more we can use ceremony and ritual to acknowledge the aging process we’ve also got a menarche and a coming of age ceremony in the app. So how do we help young people kind of step into adolescence, the same way as how do we help adults step into elderhood?

20:52 – Douglas (Host)
Just kind of change the subject just slightly. I just saw an article the other day that somebody was complaining that in the UK they don’t recognize marriages from humanist celebrants. Is it that way with Canada as well?

21:08 – Megan (Guest)
So very interesting topic and it could have. I know that I’m my humanist. Society of British Columbia is fighting things right now and every province in Canada is different, but here in British Columbia I cannot legally marry someone unless I belong to a religious entity. There is the Church of the Metaphysical that I can join and I don’t connect with that, so that’s not my place. So often when I do weddings I invite my clients to go to City Hall and for you know, $75, they sign the paperwork and then I create whatever kind of wedding ceremony that they want.

21:43
I’ve done weddings on boats, at the basis of waterfalls, you know, on the beach, swimming in the ocean. We’ve done all kinds, but I typically don’t focus on weddings, I typically focus on an end of life. I create a lot of living funerals. So for people that know they’re going to die, we create a ceremony that they can attend before they die. Here in Canada medical assistance in dying is legal, so I work a lot with the maid community on how do you create ritual and ceremony when you know you’re going to die that last day, those last moments afterward, how?

22:20 – Douglas (Host)
can families support themselves and each other during that experience? Yeah, I know, you know we have a lot of different laws concerning marriages here in the states and it just amazes me that they’ll accept somebody that gets a $20 internet certificate but not somebody who actually took classes and got licensed, and they just happen to be a humanist celebrant. It just boggles my mind sometimes.

22:44 – Megan (Guest)
It does and it doesn’t. I mean, I recently learned through the Humanist Society in British Columbia that there’s still six communities in our province who open their city town meetings, city hall meetings, with prayer. When I learned that it was just, I couldn’t help but shake my head. Here I think we live in one of the most progressive, you know, secular, neutral, inviting places, and yet that was still happening. And I think about all of the people that I know, and very few of them identify as Christian. And so what is that? What message is that sending? But yeah, it’s a. It’s part of why I belong to the humanist society, so I can help kind of shift that narrative and really remove that idea of church and state and stand up for what I believe in and for what I believe others probably believe in too what I believe in and for what I believe others probably believe in too.

23:39 – Douglas (Host)
So, looking into the future, do you have, like, big plans for Be Ceremonial? Are you pretty much set where you want it to be, or you plan on expanding anywhere or doing anything like that?

23:45 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, I am a dreamer, I am a big visionary. I will never be set, it will never be done. I’m a lifelong learner. I think for Johan, my husband and I, it’s just the two of us right now and we would love to build a nice small team and grow this. I have people reaching out all the time for different types of ceremonies and I’m a big believer and if I don’t have that lived experience, I want to create that experience with somebody who has been through it. So we’ve had a lot of people reach out around gender transitioning ceremonies. How do you support somebody who’s gone through gender transitioning and I haven’t been through that? And so I would like to find people out there who have and get their knowledge and their lived experiences to be able to craft and offer rituals. That would be supportive.

24:27
Again, it’s a choose your own ritual adventure so you don’t have to do all of these things. But, um, you know, we’ve had a lot of. I’ve been working recently with dementia experts, um, on how to create ritual around dementia. Um, so if you have a loved one and the first time you see them, when they don’t remember who you are, um, they haven’t died yet, so it’s weird to grieve, but you are grieving. You’re grieving the form of relationship that you’ve had with them, and how can we start to acknowledge those things on a more regular basis? So there will continually be more, you know, more ceremonies, more rituals, revising things. I’m a big believer of people share feedback within the app. If there’s something that’s triggering or upsetting or they’re not quite sure how to do it, they let us know and we get right in there to try to try to solve it and try to support them in different ways. So it is technology, but it’s very much hand and heart led.

25:16 – Douglas (Host)
so we’re we’re right behind the scenes supporting people with what they need all right, and megan, if somebody wants to check out your be ceremonial, how do they, how do they reach you?

25:29 – Megan (Guest)
yeah, beceremonialcom is our public website that you can kind of explore and poke around.

25:35
We’re doing a really great initiative right now, working with companies who want to add Be Ceremonial as part of their wellness plan, like their employee benefits and their group benefits. So if you’re a company that stands behind mental health and you want to make this available to your team, your volunteers, your staff, your contractors, we’re doing a lot of that right now. So most of the information is there. You can download the app in the app stores, set up an account for free and poke around and just get a sense of who we are. We also host monthly gatherings online, so you’re always welcome to join one of those and meet me and meet some of the other people in our community. And if you’re interested and always welcome to join one of those and meet me and meet some of the other people in our community and if you’re interested and you want to join, then come on in. We’re really excited to be. You know, I think we’ve got 14 countries around the world right now with people, so it’s been quite phenomenal to see the ripple effect of this work.

26:30 – Douglas (Host)
Well, megan, I really appreciate you joining us today and telling us all about Be Ceremonial and, like I said, I was very interested in it because, like I said, I’m always looking for ceremonies and rituals that maybe I hadn’t thought of, and it was really good that you were with us today.

26:46 – Megan (Guest)
Yeah, well, thanks, doug, and like I said, we need more men in this space. It’s part of what Johan, my husband, is trying to do too. I think, naturally, as women, we might do this in a. You know, our communities are kind of designed with this with ceremony in mind often, but I know from Johan’s experience of losing his dad like it’s really hard to find ways to create that ceremony for himself and for his friends and his community. So if you do end up creating a ceremony and want to share the story back with us, I would love to be able to highlight that, because I think we learn through through what we hear and the stories that are told.

27:21 – Douglas (Host)
so the more we share our stories, the the more normal it will be to acknowledge when we turn the age, that our dad our dad was when he died yeah, and and guy guys like me, we’re not that too far away because we have tons of rituals and ceremonies when it comes to sports, so it’s not that far, it’s like right across the street. Just gotta get it.

27:45 – Megan (Guest)
Gotta get it there yeah, you gotta bring that emotional piece in, I think, and just kind of, you know, bring it, bring it one step further the intentionality of it all. But yeah, you’re right, I mean, we all have ritual in our lives and I think that’s been a real big awakening for a lot of people. Yeah, so thank you for for inviting me and for sharing your, your story too.

28:07 – Voice Over (Announcement)
Thank you for listening. For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanistshow. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle[dot]org. At humanistswleorg, glass City Humanist is hosted, written and produced by Douglas Berger and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time.