A blessingway is a celebration in anticipation of a life changing event such as a man or woman becoming an adult, a man or woman preparing for marriage, a woman becoming a mother through birth or adoption, women passing into menopause, or any other life event that one wants to bless or celebrate. A blessingway creates a rite of passage.

A blessingway is focused on a connection to the spiritual side of life's events. By taking time out to honor and bless life's transitions we sanctify our journey. Blessing ceremonies are lovely tools for transformation and to honor transition as it occurs in our lives.

Blessing ceremonies can be celebrated within the context of anyone's religion. Many religion's incorporate blessings into the main life passages - baptism, first communion, confirmation, bar and bat mitzvah, weddings, ordination, funerals. The secular world celebrates baby showers, graduations, weddings, and funerals as well.

A blessingway is a more personal version of these. A small group of hand-picked friends and/or family attend. The ceremony or celebration is not codified in any way. The attendees and/or the celebrant determine what will occur, and each one is different from the next one.

The focus is not religious oriented nor is it party and gift oriented. It is centered on the person going through the passage - their personality, needs, dreams, and desires.

According to Emma Restall Orr, ritual is "a pause in time, a break from the tumbling swirls and eddies of life's river. It gives an opportunity to check our beliefs, both those that are sound and those that need to be changed. It reveals the world as sacred, guiding us to relate more closely to its creativity and its essence, to understand more respectfully the spirit of nature, its power and potential."

Ritual, ceremony, blessing. These are the ways to make sacred the mundane.

Examples of blessingways I have attended:

When a friend got married for the second time, we gathered to honor her entering into a new type of relationship. She had three grown children and a profession. Quite different from when she married for the first time as naive, young woman. We all brought a written blessing to be put into a book form and displayed at the wedding. She chose her wedding dress with abandon - the one she had always wanted and didn't get previously. This second marriage was truly a rite of passage of a wise mature woman entering into a partnership with a lovely, sensitive and mature man.

When some friends of mine and I entered into our 50th year, four of us journeyed to a friend's mountain cabin and spent a weekend together. We made flower wreaths for our heads, danced to favorite music, swam in the mountain stream right outside the cabin. We drew beautiful designs on our bodies with henna and talked of our fears and sorrows and how we planned on living out our lives as elder women. We sat out on the bacony late into the night and watched as the full moon rose above the mountain nearby. On the last day, we waded out into the rapidly flowing stream and cast our flowered head-wreaths into the water and watched as they sped downstream.

When a friend's son turned 13, his parents camped out on a beautiful beach and invited every important adult in his life to bring a story, blessing, song, or other means of honoring this young man entering into adulthood. The variety and creativity of presentations was incredible. His boy scout leader gave him a backpack with essentials for his journey. His uncle wrote and performed a song. Others gave blessings. His father presented him with a cloak of wisdom. By the end of the ceremony, this young man knew that he had a network of committed elders to guide him on the road through adolescence.