Designing Your Own Ritual (Bruce Feiler)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Lemonada Media

Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New York Times–bestselling author Bruce Feiler is back after just a few years with another great one, A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us. Today, he reveals what he’s learned about the rise of reinvented rituals. He shares some incredible stories of people around the world who are creating rituals for all kinds of moments—from celebrating professional and personal milestones to honor walks for organ donors, miscarriage rituals, and Taylor Swift divorce parties. He also guides me through a ritual design class in real time, showing how simple—and powerful—it can be to create a ritual of connection in our own lives. For the show notes, head to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonado.
0:05.7	Hi, it's Elise Loonan host of Pulling the Thread.
0:08.7	Today I'm talking to the prolific best-selling author, Bruce Filer, about creating our own rituals.
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1:40.2	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of pulling the thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.
1:50.0	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
2:00.5	Here is today's guest, Bruce Filer, talking about the rise of reinvented rituals.
2:05.9	I ran the numbers on this.
2:06.8	You ran up births and deaths and marriages.
2:08.7	The average person in 1800 had 80% more ritual occasions than we have today.
2:14.0	So it took us essentially 100 centuries, that's 10,000 years, to create these
2:19.9	collective occasions around moments of instability, to mark them ceremony, celebration,
2:24.6	retro, whatever you want to call it. And it's taken us 25 years to abandon them. So that would
2:28.8	be depressing if it weren't for this other side, which is what you hinted at, which is that alongside this recession,
	...

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