ASM235 Casper ter Kuile on The Power of Ritual

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[Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarg the science mike from the title and this week's gonna be a little different as i will be the one asking the questions and uh it's an interview show so uh really excited about our guest this week i think you're gonna love it if you're a fan of especially a little podcast called harry potter and the sacred text this is going to be an interview that you will simply love but even if you aren't familiar with harry potter and the sacred text stick around because um well this is a a conversation that i think is going to be useful and relevant and applicable to all people i mean this is a really really great conversation uh but we'll talk about that in just a second i do want to let you know um that as always we need your questions on the program so uh if you'd like to have a question submitted to be a part of the program just go to asksciencemike.com that's where you can send an email question or a voicemail question into the program uh where we pick you know usually four questions a week most weeks to respond to on the program so without further ado let's get into our conversation this week [Music] well friends i am delighted today um you know some of my favorite episodes are the episodes that i get to bring in people that i respect admire and let's be honest that i just like and today is one of those situations i i literally can't believe it uh we are going to talk today with casper to kyle today of none other than the world world-changing wildly popular podcast harry potter and the sacred text which casper co-hosts with vanessa zoltan and it is like one of my absolute favorite podcasts there are not many podcasts i listen to every episode of but harry potter and the sacred text is one of them not just because i love harry potter but i just love the work that casper is doing and helping people find meaning and do meaning making work in this age where kind of all of our organizational and institutional meaning making systems seem to be falling by the wayside uh casper's doing this amazing work and of course today there's something special to talk about right on that note um and that casper has a new book coming out called the power of ritual which we're going to learn all about together today and why you should pick up a copy and that will be available in bookstores everywhere june 23rd 2020. it is my pleasure to welcome to the program my hero and friend casper how are you mike so good to see you thank you so much i i really appreciate it i was gonna say like doing the harry potter and the sacred text podcast isn't just for other people it's only mostly for me you know it's uh we've been going for years at this point and it's still it's still a joy every time we sit down and uh and dig into the text which which is probably you know has more to say about the text than me but and you know it comes across that way when i listen to your program you can hear that joy and that enthusiasm i think that's one of the reasons why the program has remained so popular and so steady uh which let's be honest is pretty exceptional in media especially podcasts there's not a lot of podcasts with a multi-year arc uh behind them so uh yeah that's that's great i you know i'd love if we could to start uh a little personally you know these are these are very difficult times that we're in they're very overwhelming and uh how are you doing well um i mean it's every day is a roller coaster um at least on the inside um i'm a huge extrovert so i love being around people and my work involves a lot of travel you know so i'm i'm i miss people intensely um so that that's that's been tough i live in brooklyn new york we moved here nine months ago so we're still very new to new york city and obviously this has been the epicenter um so it's it's been strange because we're also in clinton hill which is a lovely neighborhood kind of pretty pretty central to brooklyn and of course the impacts of covert 19 have been so aligned along class race you know privilege lines that uh me as you know a white homo uh i'm still in the in a in a pretty you know comfortable place in life uh i'm i'm protected from so much of the the worst impact so um one of the things that has changed is that i bought myself a game of mario kart and it is now the thing i look forward to at the end of every day is to uh is to is to wear my mario kart hat and and play some uh play some games so i'm trying that mario kart 8 on the nintendo switch by chance it it is indeed honestly what i really wanted was like an n64 with the mario kart of my childhood you know all of these newfangled things uh i'm noticing that i'm getting old because i'm like just give me give me the good old stuff you know i i guess the the larger point is trying to find new rhythms right because how do we mark time how do we you know i count every day um to to have some sense of where we are within this bigger story but yeah trying to find new new ways of uh feeling at home in time as well as in the place that i'm living you know i'm a um a former extrovert i had a brain injury from a motorcycle accident and gosh 2015 and it turned me into an introvert and it reduced my cognitive capacity enough that my symptom presentation for autism spectrum disorder became apparent and uh i've really moved into a very introvert lifestyle other than all the constant travel yeah and so it's been strange for me um the way in which life didn't change that much yeah yeah other than like my family my wife and children are literally climbing the walls of the house desperate to go somewhere and i'm like what's the problem we got like our furniture and the dog like what else could you want and um it's it's uh i imagine for people you know neurologically there are there are differences in introverts and extroverts based on the amount of stimulation required to kind of maintain a baseline level of activity in the brain introverts uh stimulus tends to be overwhelming extroverts their brains are desperate for stimulus and i can't imagine having that kind of extroverted neurological uh bias and being physical distancing it sounds very very hard i mean it's it's definitely led me to be creative i've had some weeks where i i don't want to get out of bed and then other weeks where i feel this sudden creative energy um one of those bursts happened when i was like well i love singing let's just sing online um so i started doing this like sunday corona choir um which which we ran for about two months every sunday and you know had like 100 folks join on zoom and my husband and i would teach songs line by line and everyone else was muted and and one of the interesting things i think about this experience is that there are some things that we're now able to do that we couldn't do before one of them being folks who maybe had been told that they you know they should mouth the words rather than sing them or that they didn't feel confident in their singing voice um we had a bunch of folks join and and sing along with us and of course everyone was muted so they could sing to their heart's content and it was uh yeah it's just i think it's definitely interesting to to see what are the new things that are going to be developed right in both new technologies but also new ways in which we maybe we listen to each other better if we have to mute and unmute ourselves um and uh yeah who's who's speaking up who's who's uh who's taking up less space now although i can't imagine that it would be true it is it is possible that there is maybe one or two people who listen to ask science mike who aren't familiar with harry potter and the sacred text would you mind kind of catching up those folks who are a little behind in their media awareness kind of what's going on over there and and just just briefly the arc of that show before we kind of hop into your latest work yeah well first of all it it sounds like a weird name so i'm with you if you're hearing it for the first time i i know people like harry potter and the what sacred what [Laughter] you're trying to create a new potter religion okay moving away you know backing away slowly um so the the idea is you know for centuries for a millennia human beings have turned to texts to help make meaning of our lives um if you think of of the passover story right that that jewish folks tell and retell every year um during the passover festival it's the exodus from from egypt into israel and and every year the story is the same um right there's the ten plagues but every year we interpret those ten plagues differently or we interpret the need for liberation differently and and we might ask ourselves you know who who or what is a pharaoh in my life right now and and that simple exercise of meaning making from a text is exactly what we're doing but instead of using the bible we're using the harry potter books so for the last four and a half years we've been reading uh each chapter of harry potter through a particular theme so we might be looking for love or we might be looking for revenge or honesty um and then we practice some traditional either christian or jewish practices that help us engage a specific little piece of text maybe a sentence or even an individual word and ask ourselves some reflective questions that aren't about the story so it's not trying to figure out the plot or you know why did jk rowling do this or that but it's really asking questions about our own lives and how do we want to live what's important to me how do i want to be in the world and we get to use those characters and those stories as a mirror really in which we get to see ourselves and we have a new understanding of of our own experience and so the text is always new because our lives are always changing mm-hmm that's such an essential thing that i think um people who grow up in earnestly religious homes uh that's such a valuable thing people get from their faith tradition you know i remember when i i thought that the bible was like literally god talking to me right right and then every time i would read it something would speak to me in that text and uh that was framed in really socially regressive ways which is a problem very problematic and i derived incredible comfort and meaning in my life from that kind of living text and as i've gotten older and as i've had a faith transition or 12 um and uh and there's more coming yes more coming um i've become aware that uh we can have this kind of vibrant relationship with any text which has a narrative that cap captivates us yeah and um you know i you know it's uh as a lifelong bible reader i the only set of books that have the same kind of mileage on them in my life is actually the harry potter series and that's why i just thought it was so brilliant and so clever that you engage people uh in this meaning making work around this this mega best-selling series of novels because it helps people understand what are the mechanisms that bring text to life what are the ways in which we do craft meaning what are the ways in which we can find inspiration from something that's seemingly inadequate a collection of words on a page or uh even words we hear through a digital recording in an audio book um it's just it's such great work you know here's the thing mike we we didn't even have to make this up i mean people i mean the harry potter books are now 20 23 years old oh my gosh i know i know i know let's not dwell on that point uh and i'm pretty much the age that harry was you know during the 90s and then into the 2000s but the the the thing that we discovered is that we so many folks were already turning to these books in in a ritual way right maybe it was after a breakup or after the loss of a loved one or you know maybe it was like every new year in january i reread all seven books right so so folks were already doing this and that's that's so much part of it's become so much part of my philosophy to think about you know what what what are we already doing in our culture that hints towards meaning making that that points towards deeper connection and then how can we you know bring the gifts of religious traditions and help us do it better so we're we're centering those eternal longings and those eternal human experiences and then we're giving you know we're giving some structures some guidance some tools from you know whether it's a practice like lectio divina from christianity or pardes from judaism that like those are amazing practices that we can then apply so it's not really like teaching people sacred reading it's like revealing that what we were all already doing was kind of sacred reading you know it's interesting like you bring that up um full disclosure your new book the power of ritual i have my copy on order uh but i haven't read it yet so i'm i'm going off kind of the the the press materials as i kind of think about where to take the interview but even in the summaries i've seen you list out crossfit and soulcycle the harry potter series gratitude journals uh breaks from technology all these kind of things as new means of people trying to find belonging and meaning um so let's let's talk a little bit about that what as as you sat down to write the power of ritual what was your motivation and what are people getting right um and what are people missing as they try to form rituals in their lives yeah so i want to say i grew up with no religious background i grew up in the uk both my parents are dutch and i think next to denmark holland is like the most secular country in the world so i i didn't know anyone who went to church like god was this you know this absent idea that felt mostly irrelevant honestly and then certainly when i came out i was like well religion's either irrelevant or cruel so screw you you know like it was just so absent um and yet still you know had its impact uh in terms of making me feel not great about myself so i i have never considered myself as like a religious person but here's the thing what i have always wanted is to feel deeply connected to other people um i went to a boarding school when i was 13 and you can imagine a kind of house full of 50 testosterone-fueled teenage boys with you know half-naked supermodels and sports cars and then next to my bed there's like glitter gel pens and lots of i got the christy novels like that that was my experience as a teenager and so i was like i was desperately lonely you know as a teen and so just hungering for that for that sense of belonging and connection and what i've learned as i've grown older and and through my studies at harvard divinity school are that there are these amazing strategies that help us feel connected right these practices and not just to other people but to ourselves uh the natural world and the transcendent right whatever language or framework you you think about that kind of essential divinity um that all of us have those connections and these practices remind us that they are true and so when i what i wanted to write about was to point to the places in our culture right now within the story of you know less more and more people are less and less religious we're leaving religion behind to say actually no where religion is happening is changing so if you look through that kind of lens at what's happening in a crossfit community right this this intense fitness community where people aren't just working out together but they are celebrating each other's birthdays they have drinks on a friday night they have a talent show where someone plays the cello for the first time in 20 years they raise money for each other if someone's diagnosed with breast cancer um they they honor the dead by naming specific workouts after people who've died in the line of service um right all of these things when you start to see them as a whole they're getting married they're having funerals in their crossfit spaces when you start to look at that as a whole you're like wow this looks a lot like a congregation and there's all of these little rituals that help people feel connected to a community um or if you think about you know that the kind of self-care industry that's that's kind of massively grown this well-being world of journaling and um you know retreats and face masks and all of these kind of things that are supposed to help us reconnect with with our authentic selves with our with our sense of our soulfulness um even though none of them are ostensibly religious i think what they're doing are pointing to the same things that the traditional religion tries to point us to and so my hope with the book is that readers will kind of reflect on their own life and be like oh wow i didn't realize that you know snuggling my kids before bedtime or um the moment when i you know light a candle on a saturday morning to create a nice atmosphere when i'm having a lion or whatever it is that each of those can become sacred rituals if we if we just bring a little bit of the wisdom of tradition to them i think about that so much in my work you know um here we are social primates and in the united states um there's a tough thing in being a person and one we're incredibly socially oriented and two community formation is fraught with peril and risk of rejection it's this terrible push-pull instinct we have we desperately want connection with other people we desperately don't want to be rejected and for a long time in the united states and europe social institutions often with a religious focus became the fabric in which people did a common set of activities together um you know i remember when i was a kid there was this strange phenomenon we went to church all the time we went on wednesday nights we went on sunday mornings we went on sunday night sometimes there was a budget meeting tuesday night there was a it's not the third and all the time i couldn't figure out like why do we go to church so much and um the culture of the church i grew up in the southern baptist church started in rural communities where let's be honest other than working your fields there is literally nothing to do and so churches became these social institutions like the reason there was a budget being tuesday night was so people could see another human face and the church budget was an excuse to do that right sunday nights happen because sunday morning was kind of a more formal time of gathering sunday nights in churches tend to have a wildly social focus and so we have these institutionalized ritualistic practices that not only helped us find meaning individually it helped us find a sense of belonging collectively and you know as we look at the the de-institutionalization of religion across the world um europe and canada and australia have taken one path they have become less religious and people actually identify as being less spiritual in those cultures in the united states people are definitely identifying less and less religious but no one is identifying as less spiritual atheism is not really growing in the united states the way it is in other countries and i have wondered how much the spiritually kind of homeless nature of the united states plays into some of our cultural woes as people still have social longing they uh were frankly explicitly harmed by the institution that wants prayer the meaning i'm not sitting here writing a defense of the horrific things that church across the world especially in the united states has done uh and yet there was also something lost um in your book um you i love you talking about how we're bringing in this this intention from these wisdom traditions and bringing in the sacred into moments in our days do you also speak to the collective action of ritual making yeah absolutely i i just want to emphasize something that's so important because we we can look back at these you know i just see like the 1950s and some sort of like movie reel right um and and there may be you know beautiful things there but also many many troubling ones um not least right like i i just wouldn't have been able to be myself um so i i i i don't want to celebrate something too too much but what i what i do think is so important as we think about those shifting sands of how these these trends are playing out is one of the biggest conceptions that we have in the united states and generally in the western world about religion is that it's about what you believe right that it's about the classic do you accept jesus christ as your lord and savior right this is the classic classic question and and for so much of the majority world outside of really protestantism because even catholicism has a different orientation it's more about what you practice it's about what you do do you venerate elders right do you perform these rituals do you participate in these community activities you can you can hear so many folks who are jewish in america who might say you know i'm an atheist jew which just illustrates that that you can be jewish in many many ways that are far beyond just your belief in something right it's about the food you eat it's about the the holidays you celebrate the people you you connect with so one of my interests is to think about when we think about religion uh to think about them in terms of practices and what you do together so to answer your question when we think about community rituals there are so many right uh we we mentioned working out together i think it's one of the most powerful ways and we in which we get to practice kind of making sacred together because our culture is so cynical and so brain-oriented so much of the time that it takes us to become physically exhausted sweaty and disgusting to open up our kind of vulnerability and really open our hearts and so um you know the the growth in obstacle courses and uh long distance running and all all sorts of you know double dutch clubs whatever it looks like part of why we love these embodied practices is because they help us feel connected to one another at a physiological level in which we don't need to use language and we don't need to rationalize what's happening because you feel that sense of at soul cycle they talk about writing as a pack right so you're kind of de-centering your individual self and you're centering a larger collective and exercise is a powerful way of doing that and another way that i talk about in the book is is simply eating together um right we have so many rituals around the dinner table whether it's about clinking glasses or toasting or literally you know having food from the same larger bowl to make sure that no one gets poisoned right those kind of old traditions but they illustrate a connectivity um that that nora ephron says you know what makes up a family is people who eat the same thing for dinner which i think is so lovely because it's it's one of those daily things that we do we do anyway but nonetheless over time become these um you know these totems or these hallmarks of what makes us us and not them right it gives us a way of feeling like we're connected in in our home or in our community [Music] ask science mike would be impossible without the support of our amazing sponsors and one of our most long-running sponsors is kiwico kiwico is um like a physical steam learning service i'm it's it's almost hard to explain but amazing what kiwico does is first of all steam is science technology engineering arts and math and kiwi co helps people of all ages from you know young children their first year of life all the way to senior adults learn more by doing these are hands-on practical learning exercises that are incredibly fun uh that help us work through engineering principles and and art style and and craft work and and the dexterity that goes along with construction along with the theory that goes behind it they are a delightful company um and you know right now when a lot of us are spending more time at home a delightful way to spend a few hours that does not involve a screen uh so you know they've got a lot of different client lines beginning with the panda crate for children 0 to 24 months all the way up to the maker and eureka crates for people ages 14 to 104 these things are designed right in california they are sustainably produced you get one every month and of course you can change to any of kiwi coastlines anytime you want and you get a different line every month if you'd like they are simply a wonderful service and they have a special offer for listeners of ask science mike if you go to kiwico.com ask science mike you'll get 60 off your first month of any line so why not try it today kiwico.com ask sciencemike [Music] the collective exercise thing um um i'm so there and it's so intimidating for me to exercise around other people i hate it i hate it so much i can't tell you like for as part of research for my work you know i joined a bunch of crossfits i suck at it i hate it and and i think you know for me this is part of the the usefulness of thinking about these different levels of connection right to ourselves one another the natural world and and the transcendent because as we talked about i'm super extroverted so i find plenty of ways to feel connected to other people and so exercise isn't necessarily one that's that's a big one for me the ones i suck at are feeling connected to nature and like actually making time to feel connected to what i really want i'm an enneagram three so we're great at not noticing our own feelings and just doing whatever is going to make other people happy um and or at least impress them more more importantly and so it's it's the it's the discipline for me of you know separating myself from the world or intentionally introspecting those are the ones that that that are much much harder for me that i need lots and lots of help with yeah that makes sense um what are in your own life hmm what are some of the rituals every week that are the most meaningful to you yeah i'll share i'll share two of them um one that that ex you know explicitly tries to do what i find hard to do is my my weekly tech sabbath so um on a friday night i turn off my phone i turn off my laptop as it's getting dark and i literally have to hide them because if i can see them i'm gonna want to use them so i put them like underneath books i hide them in my bookshelf and then i light a little candle and i sing a song to myself from summer camp with you know when i was like 11. which is a it's in dutch so i'll spare you the singing but it's basically saying like it's it's saying good night to the sun and you know that that uh it's been it's been a good day um and honestly mike it feels every time that i do it now it feels like going on vacation because it gives me a respite um from from the kind of the demands of the world but also my own like striving um because i literally can't do the things that i'd want to do you know in terms of oh let me search that on google oh let me write down that idea and and i'm very inspired by abraham joshua heschel's a wonderful jewish theologian of the 20th century about his his writing about the sabbath he has a wonderful short book called the sabbath if anyone's interested in checking it out and the thing that i took away from it which is so different i think from how our kind of general culture talks about rest because most of the time we talk about rest as being a time of preparation for work right that we center our identity in achievement and uh and productivity and and heschel tells us that no the sabbath is the apex like the point of the work is for the rest so it it it makes the the sabbath this moment of delicious delight i mean there's even a commandment that you're supposed to make love on the sabbath which you know hooray so it's let's let's try and find time for that but it's there's there's an orientation that you're supposed to just delight in the goodness of of being alive you know eating delicious food um and so for me i i love i love that time and it's become ironically uh also a time when a lot of my most creative thinking comes up because i might try and write a poem or i might draw something or i might sing to myself and it it just it just allows space for so much of my life that i i just i don't prioritize during the rest of the week so that's that's become a really important one um the other small one i'll mention is it is a daily ritual where um i broke both my legs in a in an accident i fell off a pier more than gosh long time ago now 12 years or so um and uh um when i was recovering i had to kind of relearn how to walk and you know all that kind of stuff and so i had to do these ankle exercises and every morning i do them in the in the shower just turning my ankle clockwise and anti-clockwise and um i'll say to myself now and then just i might die today which sounds super gruesome but it's it's a little memento mori right that tradition of of reminding ourselves of our mortality um you'll see it sometimes in renaissance painting a skull is hidden away somewhere or um it's a reminder that you know use this moment use this day as if it was your last and it again it sounds cliche and it sounds silly but if you if you start to do it every day it it's an amazing reframer uh from i have to do this i have to do that to i get to do this i get to do that and um you know my husband probably doesn't agree that it makes a huge difference to how i am but it feels different for me [Laughter] i was just struck by something as you said um it sounds silly it sounds cliche and i don't know if maybe my cynicism muscles are all worn out now and don't work anymore but that did not sound silly or cliche to me at all just not at all um i've been so struck with that right now um the newscasts saying how many people were lost today every day it's never become a number for me i cry every day um and i think there's such value in recognizing the fleeting nature of our lives and you know establishing one thing that ritual does is it sets up boundaries that's right you know i i delight in all that smartphones off of the world you know i think about like how someone carrying an iphone using voiceover can do something as simple as point the camera at a at a piece of currency and know what bill they're holding like the that is not a genie i want to put back in the bottle no give it to me and and these things have had this like really significant impact on our mental health and our social functioning and i have had such a valued ritual i put my phone to bed for hours a day i get up in the morning the phone stays it sleeps in so kind of after i've gone outside and uh meditated a bit and done a little writing in the morning then i go get my phone i wake it up and i say good morning to my phone and we have a couple hours together then about lunchtime it goes back to bed for a few hours and mike do you have do you have like a little sleeping bag for it is there a physical there is a little cradle it sits in about like uh it's a comfy space it's a very it's got a charger there and it's just it's like a phone spa uh it's a great space for my phone to hang out and and and for us to have time apart as we need it gets to run its software updates and i get to be a functioning human being and then but i you know but this is so much of my work is on a computer um so that's harder to set a boundary with because i also have pretty severe um learning disabilities and handwriting is wildly difficult for me uh so for me to journal i need a keyboard and so what i've learned to do because the problem is less my smartphone and more this smartphone puts the internet in my pocket is i put my laptop on airplane mode and i open up a full screen text editor and uh so if i need to journal if i need to have some creative time uh if i switch over to safari kind of compulsively nothing will happen because it's in the airplay mode that goes you're not connect the internet i go oh yeah and that that ritual reestablishes to me i'm in this time of focus and in this time of creativity and i was i was asked recently from the launch of my book in an interview like do you experience writer's block and i said not really and it's because for me writing and podcasting frankly are rituals i have these little routines i go through to get myself mentally into each of those spaces and um i might be an extreme presentation of that because of autism but all of our brains work that way all of our brains are guided by space and routine but let's but let's be really precise here because this is one of the things that i really had to grapple with in the writing of the book we use the word ritual kind of similarly to habit or routine or uh you know the pattern of our everyday and i want to be a little careful with that because for me a ritual is always going to be an external uh change of an internal change right that there's there's some meaning beyond the functionality so brushing your teeth every day is a habit because you want to have you know good healthy gums uh and healthy teeth that doesn't make it a ritual now if you if you brought to the brushing of the teeth an intention to say you know i want to um wish health for you know my family as i as i brush my teeth that would change it because then you're doing an external action for an internal you know change or an internal uh desire and so i i love that you have the little physical place for your phone because it's it you know it's it's a it's an action that expresses an intention and i i i want to ask you is there anything that you do because i'm sure that you do beyond the airplane mode like do you sit somewhere different do you like what else happens when you're when you're writing creatively and not you know i'm not allowing yourself to have that sweet sweet wi-fi access you know um yes one thing i would say i am i'm autistic and so um i think maybe the the delineation between habit and ritual is harder for me to make um if i brush my teeth at a different time of the day or someone interrupts me while i brush my teeth my day is it's ruined yeah like i can't function and for me habit has a wildly therapeutic effect a wildly grounding effect a while there's nothing i do that i do every day that doesn't it doesn't doesn't cultivate profound internal change for me and um you know i um i do curate my space differently well one i have a i have a feelings chair so i have the chair i sit in to to work in my office and since i work from the home my my space is somewhat limited compared to people who work in a more traditional office space so i have my office chair at my desk and then i have my feelings chair over by a sliding glass door where there's some great natural light and my feelings chairs where i go to have feelings i go read in my feelings chair and if i'm gonna go just think i think and my feelings chair because it's a more open-hearted place and then i will take the six steps over to my office chair with my work my uh full screen text editor open and i will write what i've just thought and then when i kind of like run out of steam i get up out of my work chair and i go back to my feelings chair and i see what grows and expands out of my heart and i just walk back and forth in those times uh giving my brain kind of delineation because what you know and i also like i can write a lot of words that don't mean anything i'm good at the mechanics of writing and when i become aware that like i'm just performatively pressing keys together to hit some arbitrary word count i get out of the office chair and i go back to the thinking chair and i kind of cultivate an inner space from which i can communicate something of value to the reader uh something that's coming from the deepest part of my feelings and my lived experience yeah yeah that's i mean this is why we create sacred spaces right we we create a um a physical place in which we can receive whether it's inspiration or we can make a place of devotion or memory um or you know and i love that language of memory actually especially because so often we talk about rituals as like achieving something or or helping us get somewhere that we wanted to go um and i really try and remember that it's really about opening to something that's already true right so it's about remembering the connection that already exists it's not about establishing it in in a new way [Music] i want a feelings chairman it sounds great it is great yeah and i mean this is this is the the lovely thing i think about talking about this kind of stuff is that we start to see oh wait i do this and that's kind of like a ritual or wait i have that place and that person maybe a tree that i go to with you know on a dog walk or i have that picture that i like looking at when i want to feel connected to to my family you know all of these things are kind of already in our life and it's it's just about noticing them and giving them some some space and intention casper is our as our time together this morning starts to close is there is there anything else you'd like to let the listeners of ask science mike know either about the power of ritual or about life and work or anything at all well i'll say that i still don't fit into a spiritual box you know i i i don't have a congregation that i belong to you know if you ask me what god is depends on the day and and i guess that the thing that i'd invite all of us to to do is to to try and claim a little bit of spiritual confidence um you know i think we're all journeying right we're all we're all figuring things out we're all experiencing new things meeting new people and my hope is that we don't do it alone and so one of the things that i write about in the book is is the power of having a small group or in my life it's called my confession group so it's you know small group of people three others that i get together with every month and i admit all the things i've done like i've screwed up like i've not been the person that i wanted to be in my work in my marriage and my finances you know where have i fallen short of the values that are important to me and that has a very spiritual dimension for me and so you know finding even just one friend or maybe it's a mentor or a a teacher or a you know a pen pal um with whom you can share the kind of questions and longings and explorations of life's biggest questions um for me that's that's something that's so important because it centers our our life journey in a very different orientation from the one that our dominant culture pushes us towards so i hope i hope that we can find one another on the way through life the book is the power of ritual turning everyday activities into soulful practices it'll be available as a hardback audiobook and ebook starting june 23 2020 in the united states the united kingdom australia and canada you can learn more about the book as well as connect with casper's other work by visiting caspertk.com casper it has been such a pleasure for me to talk with you today and thanks for taking the time to be a part of ask science mike thanks mike so grateful for you take care [Music] ask science mike is created by the most amazing team in media i'd like to thank greg nordine for production and sound design caitlin hermstad for production management i'd like to thank tanner hearn and the team at inverse for logistics support victory palmisano is our producer and uh let's see jeb botteford wrote the ass science mic theme song andrew galucki handles pre-production of course don't forget my patrons who pick the questions every week and make the show financially possible thanks for listening everybody and i can't wait to talk with you again next week