Curse Breaking Ritual
Curse Breaking Ritual
a work in progress
Whether we think about it in magical terms or psychological terms, we all have curses, or harmful and untrue narratives and beliefs holding us back in our lives. We can form these beliefs from trauma, from our family of origin, our culture, society, or religion. They prevent us from achieving our dreams and ambitions, from connecting deeply with others, from breaking harmful patterns in relationships and other endeavors, and from generally living a fulfilling life.
These narratives may say that we’re cursed to never find success and fulfillment in our work, in romance, in friendships. They may say that we’re doomed to turn out just like one of our parents, or that we can’t escape our ancestral trauma. That there are limits to what we can achieve because of our gender, race, class, or sexuality. That we can only get validation and worth from external sources, that our own internal love and support can never be enough. That the only way to achieve anything we actually deserve is to suffer greatly for it. That we are not enough and the only way to be loved or find success is by pretending to be something we’re not. That we can never have what we most want, so we should always aim lower. These beliefs are our invisible prisons that we may have been placed in by external forces, but that we subconsciously maintain ourselves.
In this ritual, I invite you to put a curse, a harmful narrative, into a piece of clear glass as a symbolic conduit, and to break the glass, and with it the curse. Once the curse is broken, I take the broken shards of this old belief and pour them into a ceramic mold, along with gold metal salts, in an iteration of the Japanese kintsugi practice of mending with gold to make the object more beautiful and valuable than before it was broken. These shards and the gold are melted down in a kiln to form a new object and a new belief. The heat applied to the chemical elements turns the clear glass into a warm raspberry color. At peak temperature (1600 degrees Fahrenheit) the mold is removed from the kiln, and the melted glass is pushed down in the center and sculpted with a tool to form the shape of a cup before it is returned to the kiln to cool slowly.
This cup is the physical form of the new beneficial belief, a blessing formed from the shards of the broken curse. You can ceremonially drink from this little cup every day or as needed to continually imbibe and reinforce this transformation.