Ritual and the placebo effect (public)

This lesson is about the placebo effect and its connection with ritual. If you've never heard of the placebo effect that's fine, I'm going to explain it briefly. If you have, then let's think about it in a new way or possibly be open to understanding the placebo effect in a new way. Basically, at the onset of the pharmaceutical industry and the modern way that we test medicines, and create medicines and pharmaceuticals, and say they're safe or not to give to humans, the placebo came up as those studies were developed.

The placebo is a sugar pill or a non-treatment, there's no active treatment that should affect a person, in a placebo. The experimental treatment is the one that contains the active compounds or the drug, the treatment, that is meant to change a condition or change something within a person’s system. What's ironic or interesting is if you look into the placebo effect, there are several diagnoses, especially anxiety, depression, gut issues that are highly responsive to the placebo effect… And what that means is that just with a sugar pill and the ritual of taking a daily sugar pill, these people’s symptoms got better, their suffering was less. So, just let that simmer for a second… just the sugar pill, the ritual of taking a sugar pill, has that ability to change someone's condition, to relieve symptoms, to improve their condition. When I think about this reality that's proven by science, it leads me to believe that this is capturing our power of our consciousness over how our body functions.

The placebo effect captures the fact that ritual is powerful and that ritual has the capacity to change our bio chemistry or our neurochemistry and improve our health. I am not a believer in the manifestation culture. I think things just happen in life and suffering is part of the human existence. I want to be clear that if you believe you manifest anything good that happens to you, then that means that you are so manifest anything bad that happens to you, and I just can't go along with that line of thinking. I think things happen in our life and what we are in control of is how we respond to it and how we integrate suffering. So, the difference between manifestation reality and ritual, is manifestation reality basically says that you're gonna attract good things to you, good things will happen. That's not what I'm teaching here. To me, ritual is about self-care and about connecting to your consciousness in a way that gives you an opportunity to heal, to grow, and to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

Ritual will not take away suffering, ritual will not prevent anything bad from happening but what it can do, is get your system in a place where you can respond instead of react to situations. So, in summary, I encourage all of us in the Current Ritual community to reclaim the placebo effect, reclaim our power by believing that our thoughts matter, our behaviors matter, how we treat our self matters, how we treat others matter, how we treat the earth matters.

Anything can become a ritual if you focus your attention and your belief on a specific event, a specific desire, and then be open to what life brings into your awareness after that. Thank you for being here, thank you for taking the time to learn and to consider new ways of seeing yourself and seeing the possibilities in life. Please talk about this if you're interested in this, please share this idea, this concept, this post with friends and family and have these discussions together.

If we keep talking and if we keep creating open, safe space for sharing about ritual, about consciousness, about the power of our own consciousness over the function of our body, then I believe we will walk together into a brighter future. So stay hopeful. Stay vigilant and continue to invite the power of ritual into your daily life. Thanks for being here.