Everyday Rituals
The Liberating Power of Our Routines
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When we are in painfully difficult or confusing life situations, especially amidst ever-uncertain times, our minds grapple for structure: a funeral ceremony definitively lays the dead to rest; the exaggerated choreography of a surgical room confirms its sterility; and a daily schedule gives prisoners a sense of normalcy. These practices, these rituals, give us peace. Though it might seem contradictory, ordered rituals actually bring us freedom, creativity, and mental well-being. Rituals aren't a thing of history or belonging to elaborate ceremonies, and they aren't even confined to the most painful or confusing of times. Rituals can be at a family dinner table or in a morning bathroom routine. In Everyday Rituals, Pearl Katz shows us just how transformative rituals are, no matter what kind.
Unlike other titles on the subject in the self-help genre or in anthropological reportage, Katz applies her years of fieldwork and psychiatric study to tangible, everyday American life. She writes a thoroughly persuasive argument, using poignant case studies, to truly inspire readers. Specific hormones flow and brain paths open when artists follow their creative regimen, and mental health increases in patients under hospital directive; in contrast, young people suffer stress in unbounded undergraduate hookup culture. And after the coronavirus ripped many rituals from American life, the ill effects of a life without routine burn bright. It's in the ordinary that Katz discovers unlimited potential: mundane routine actually sparks incredible imagination. With scientific evidence, case studies, personal narrative, and guiding wisdom, Katz enlightens us as to how and why we can feel true freedom.
About this Author
Pearl Katz has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine since 1985. She teaches residents in Psychiatry about how culture and ethnicity influence mental illness and therapy. She also consults in their various inpatient and outpatient programs. She has been listed for ten years in Who's Who in The World; Who's Who in America; and Who's Who of American Women, and she received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. She has also held faculty positions at George Washington University (Anthropology), The University of Maryland School of Medicine (Psychiatry), The Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences (Psychiatry), Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (Military Psychiatry), The University of Toronto Medical School (Medical Education), and Tel-Aviv University. (Anthropology). She worked for the federal government as a Scientific Review Officer for the National Institute of Mental Health and as a Public Health Analyst for the Health Resources and Services Administration.
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Reviews
We rebel against customs and rituals, but Katz shows their liberating power, the freedom to create within the structures of the old. A fascinating story, well told, with memorable examples and astonishing surprises, from sex to science.
Every seminarian of every tradition should read this extremely insightful book.
Dr. Pearl Katz eloquently presents a compelling argument that rituals can transform everyday ordinary life to inspire imagination, creativity, innovation and change.
Her vivid descriptions of family routines, medical encounters, and death and dying illustrate how rituals enhance freedom of the mind.
Her interviews with young people about their sex lives and everyday family life during Covid reveal how the absence of rituals can restrict people's freedom.
Dr. Katz's superb ability to observe and analyze gives new insights about the role of rituals in our lives.
Katz's compelling book argues that rituals don't constrain us but free our minds to wander and create. Whether it's bedtime routines or 16,000 identical Starbucks, home births or the surgical suite, Drill Sergeant training or a raucous Irish wake, the emptiness of hookups or lonely death in the pandemic, she shows us in dazzling observations and interviews that rituals are as vital to modern life as to any traditional culture, and that we'd be far more trapped without them.
Filled with examples of how the structuring of life via rituals and habits frees the mind and spirit, paradoxically crafting freedom and creativity out of constraint, Everyday Rituals rediscovers Confucian and Taoist wisdom. It is going out toward others via organized social relations that creates the authentic self, not the American pop wisdom that we find the self within. This is the real lesson of life!
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