The Ritual Toolkit
Creating Meaningful Practices for Spiritual Direction & Companionship
A 4-Part Webinar Series from SDI
Presenters
Christina Miller
Em Louise Berkey
Rev Michelle
Dates
October 30, November 6, 13, 24, 2025
Time
Duration
6 hours (total)
Webinar will be recorded.
“Ritual is the way we carry the soul through the in-between times, the thresholds where the old has gone but the new has not yet arrived.”
Step into a guided journey where ancient wisdom meets modern practice.
In this immersive four-part series from SDI, three seasoned ritual practitioners will walk you through the art of designing transformative experiences—whether you’re helping a client navigate a life transition, marking a milestone, or simply inviting sacred presence into everyday moments. You’ll discover concrete frameworks for crafting rituals that honor the body, mind, and spirit, and learn how to tailor these ceremonies to the unique narrative of the people you serve.
Each session will offer a ritual experience, and teachings to help you add aspects of ritual to your spiritual companion toolkit. From selecting symbols and sensory elements to orchestrating space and timing, you’ll gain hands‑on techniques that turn intention into lived experience. We’ll explore how to recognize the pivotal moments in a client’s life—birth, loss, career change, or personal awakening—and transform them into intentional rites that amplify meaning and foster lasting growth. By the end of the series, you’ll have a repertoire of adaptable rituals ready to be woven into any therapeutic or pastoral setting.
Beyond serving others, this program invites you to embody the very practices you’ll teach. Through guided practice, live demonstrations, and reflective exercises, you’ll cultivate a personal connection to ritual, deepening your own spiritual resilience and authenticity. Join us to expand your creative toolbox, enrich your professional practice, and become a catalyst for sacred transformation in the lives of those you accompany.
Rituals mark transitions, newness, cycles, and holy remembering, as a way of honoring our individual and collective experiences.
- Participants from all religions, spiritual traditions, and vocational orientations are welcome in this webinar series.
- No experience is required to attend.
- Each session runs 90 minutes.
- All sessions will be recorded and be viewable for at least 12 months after the last session goes live.
By meeting our own innate ritual intelligence, we uncover our individual gifts, open a doorway to accompanying others in their exploration, and to co-create meaningful ritual containers for spiritual direction.
Session Outline
Session 1: Meeting Ritual Intelligence Where You Are (Rev Michelle)
In this session, we will explore how to incorporate ritual intelligence into our spiritual direction contemplative practice. By meeting our own innate ritual intelligence, we uncover our individual gifts, open a doorway to accompanying others in their exploration, and to co-create meaningful ritual containers for spiritual direction. Tapping into a deep source of creative connection, we’ll explore how we relate to ritual, the guidance and support it can offer, and how to nurture this profound relationship.
Session 2: The Art of Spiritual Ritual (Rev. Christina Miller)
Ritual can be a unique way to offer a tangible response to intangible experiences and can create a place to hold meaning amid ambiguous or subtle transitions that are often profoundly significant to our process of growth. In this session, we will join in Presence, creating a ritual together as way to practice these embodied skills. Together, we’ll pause and reflect to identify such transitions in our own lives, helping us to better recognize them in those we accompany spiritually.
Session 3: Part One: The Art of Ritual Design (Em Louise Berkey)
Rituals mark transitions, moments of newness, cycles in the year, and holy remembering as a way of honoring our individual and collective experiences. In this first interactive webinar session of two, Em Berkey will guide us through the art of crafting ritual that invites connection to self, to others and to the divine or all that is, reminding us that our very being is inherently sacred.
We’ll begin with a grounding blessing or song before exploring what ritual is and how it works. This first session will focus on what makes a meaningful ritual and how it can offer healing for ourselves as spiritual care practitioners and for those we serve. There will be opportunity to connect in small groups to start to imagine/craft a ritual of your own with some gentle workshopping and discussion to follow. Participants will be given a homework invitation to design their own ritual, which we will deepen into in Part Two.
Session 4: Part Two: Bringing Ritual to Life (Em Louise Berkey)
In the second session, we will build on the foundations of Part One to then imagine what facilitating ritual can look like in a trauma-informed and caring way. We’ll have another opportunity to share, in small break-out groups, some of the harvests we gleaned from the ritual design assignment and from the previous workshop.
As a larger group we’ll be able to identify some key takeaways that will serve as practical tools for creating and integrating ritual into your practice—both personally or for those you serve. We’ll close as we began, with a blessing or song as we take our learnings out into the world.
“Ritual is the language of the soul. It gives form to the invisible, order to the chaos, and voice to what is beyond words.”
When
The webinar series will run 3 consecutive Thursdays and one Monday: October 30, November 6, 13, 24 2025: 1 PM Seattle/Los Angeles.
Find your own local time here.
But if that timing doesn’t work, you can enjoy the webinar any time you like.
Each session is recorded so you can watch at your convenience.
Presenters
Christina Miller
is the writer, spiritual guide, and healer of Ordinary Liturgy. She creates sacred spaces and practices that support spiritual growth, offering tools for reflection, ritual, and presence. Christina’s work invites individuals to encounter the sacred in everyday life and to deepen their connection with themselves, others, and the divine. https://www.ordinaryliturgy.com/meet-christina
Em Louise Berkey
is a politicized healer, spiritual guide, and ritualist dedicated to fostering connection—back to ourselves, to the Divine, to each other, and to the more-than-human world. Rooted in Jewish principles of time, cycles, song, mysticism, and relationship, Em offers spiritual accompaniment that honors the fullness of each individual.
With a framework of disability justice and a commitment to collective liberation, Em’s work is informed by their own spiritual lineage and enriched by experiences as a spiritual leader, ritualist, herbalist, songwriter, teacher, and community organizer. They find great joy in witnessing others on their spiritual path of re-membering, grieving, and wrestling with All That Is.
Em is currently studying davvening (the art of Jewish prayer) and prayer leading as a cantorial student at the ALEPH Ordination Program. They live in middle Tennessee with their dog, on the ancestral lands of the Yuchi, Shawnee, and East Cherokee peoples. https://squid-cinnamon-brjc.squarespace.com/
Rev Michelle
(she/her) is a deathwalker, shamanic practitioner, and a contemplative ritualist dedicated to guiding others through grief, transformation, and soulful living. Her journey began in 2005, when she accompanied her husband through his end-of-life transition. This profound experience led her into shamanic practice, Reiki training, and an apprenticeship with sorrow—a path that has allowed her to deeply embody grief and cultivate a life of curiosity, gratitude, and joy.
Rooted in her lineage as a descendant of enslaved Africans in the southern United States, Michelle lives in Central New York, in the Appalachian Uplands, ancestral homeland of the Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy, alongside a four-legged companion. Her work invites others to listen deeply—to the wind, waters, and mountains—while awakening ancestral gifts and tending to both personal and collective grief. https://soul-cartography.com/about
Additional Information
- Everyone is invited to participate in SDI Webinars.
- Each session will run 90 minutes. We understand that the timing of the seminar will not be convenient in every time zone on the planet. For those who have trouble making this time, a recorded copy of each session will be made available to all those who sign up.
- CEU credits are available for all those who participate. SDI will provide a certificate of completion for self-reporting to agencies. More information can be found here: continuing education units (CEUs).
- Cost: $99 or less for SDI members. Non-members please contact [email protected] for your pricing
- Scholarships are available for those facing financial hardship. Please apply here.
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