Ritual is as old as human life on earth. Our earliest ancestors conducted rites and ceremonies, making art in dark caves, constructing stone passages, circles and structures to memorialize those no longer physically with us. Because we exist at many energetic levels, including the spiritual, psychological, astral, ethereal, and others, not everything dies when our physical body does. This is where ritual and memorializing help us to deal with the pain of physical loss, by honoring and connecting with this deep and older part of our psyche.

Ritual and ceremony often mark the most important stages of life – like birth, marriage and death – and it also serves as an important container that helps us connect with our deepest feelings. The metaphor of ritual accesses and honors the psyche and has profound healing properties. When events and passages are important to us, we seek to imbue meaning and specialness through ritualization. The cry for ritual is so keen that even Stanford University has created a lab to design rituals for a secular age, as more people attempt to make meaning and find connection to their objects and devices.

At Rituals for the Living, we show you how to create your own rituals to help you deal with grief, loss, and pain stemming from various circumstances. We offer specialized workshops for learning to cope with different types of loss, led by Founder, Dr. Patricia Danaher.  

Dr. Patricia Danaher is a writer, scholar and mythologist who has been practicing ritual for decades. An established Grief Counselor and Certified Pet Bereavement Specialist, she founded Rituals for the Living during COVID, when public rituals were banned, and grief was often stymied and handled in isolation. Now, with more and more environmental issues causing unmanageable fires as in her current home in Los Angeles, ever more destructive floods due to rising sea levels, tornadoes, and other natural disasters causing unbelievable death and destruction, the need for handling all kinds of loss is more apparent than ever. 

Danaher holds a Doctorate Degree as well as a Masters’ Degree in Mythology and Jungian Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she studied ritual and was awarded the Joseph Campbell Scholarship. She completed her doctorate in Ecopsychology, where her focus was on ritual and mourning for babies who died before birth. Her thesis, The Cry for Ritual, was about pioneering new spaces for grief, with a mission of restoring ritual to cope with the tragedies of modern life.

Patricia has herself suffered miscarriages and has had unsuccessful IVF treatment. Through her experience and studies, she came to understand the importance of ritual and recognized the need for a special kind of counseling. Developing the practice and tools for Rituals for the Living, she now helps grieving families around the world cope with loss.

 A long-time writer and traveler originally from Ireland, Danaher has lived in Japan, Thailand, and Argentina, and now calls Southern California her home. In her travels she has studied various Christian, Buddhist and secular rituals in Asia, Europe and South America, blending elements from different traditions from each to formulate spiritual rituals that will resonate with people of all faiths and beliefs.