Phoenix Rising With Dr Z: Conversations About Grief and Loss
Aug 11, 2026 · 34 min · 8 segments
Ritual & Grief: Creating Sacred Containers for Loss Dr. Zampitella welcomes back grief counselor Gyani Richards to discuss how ritual supports the grieving process. Gyani describes grief as a rite…
So I think a lot of people think about rituals and sometimes the word ritual even kind of gets people a little like, what is that? That sounds woo woo.
But no, actually, we have a lot of personal and societal functions of rituals.
And those rituals are an essential component of being woven into how we experience, express, and engage with our grieving process, with some cultures being more highly ritualistic, others being lower, certain religious orientations maybe having more rituals than others.
So I'm just going to go ahead and, well, first of all, everybody, I did my dissertation on nature-based rituals.
So If I start getting a little like spurred up, it's because this is like a real big passion of mine.
And I was just telling Gany before we got started, I don't know a whole lot of people I can talk to about all this.
When we talk about rituals in grief, what do we actually mean by that? Any thoughts about that?
So certainly for me, the two phenomena of ritual and grief certainly belong together.
But when I think about those, what came to me this morning in sort of preparation for our conversation was, I hold grief as a rite of passage.
And any rite of passage obviously has the traditional three pieces, right? There's the separation, there's the middle part, kind of the liminal unknown space, and then there's some sort of recombination or revisiting.
And grief for me, that's one sort of map that we could, or one lens through which we could view grief.
And certainly the function of ritual fits quite relevantly in the midst of that.
in my own life, I hold ritual is it's a way of creating a container for something that gives me access to parts of myself that without a ritual, I don't have access to.
And the ritual could be as simple as you and I have discussed before, a simple lighting of a candle, just me alone.
Or a ritual could be a much larger, more collective, communal, tribal event.
So I think a lot of people think about rituals and sometimes the word ritual even kind of gets people a little like, what is that? That sounds woo woo.
But no, actually, we have a lot of personal and societal functions of rituals.
And those rituals are an essential component of being woven into how we experience, express, and engage with our grieving process, with some cultures being more highly ritualistic, others being lower, certain religious orientations maybe having more rituals than others.
So I'm just going to go ahead and, well, first of all, everybody, I did my dissertation on nature-based rituals.
So If I start getting a little like spurred up, it's because this is like a real big passion of mine.
And I was just telling Gany before we got started, I don't know a whole lot of people I can talk to about all this.
When we talk about rituals in grief, what do we actually mean by that? Any thoughts about that?
So certainly for me, the two phenomena of ritual and grief certainly belong together.
But when I think about those, what came to me this morning in sort of preparation for our conversation was, I hold grief as a rite of passage.
And any rite of passage obviously has the traditional three pieces, right? There's the separation, there's the middle part, kind of the liminal unknown space, and then there's some sort of recombination or revisiting.
And grief for me, that's one sort of map that we could, or one lens through which we could view grief.
And certainly the function of ritual fits quite relevantly in the midst of that.
in my own life, I hold ritual is it's a way of creating a container for something that gives me access to parts of myself that without a ritual, I don't have access to.
And the ritual could be as simple as you and I have discussed before, a simple lighting of a candle, just me alone.
Or a ritual could be a much larger, more collective, communal, tribal event.
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