Statement of Mission
The Ritual Movement is a 501c(3) non-profit collective devoted to queer animist community and spirituality. It formed in response to an increasingly volatile and nuanced world - one of changing climate, culture, and social dynamics. We feel the planet asking each of us to remember why we are here, to reach inside and find the gift that will nourish both ourselves and our communities.
Our mission is to create transformative spaces where queer community members and allies can connect with their innate freedom, authenticity, and belonging through embodied movement and ritual. Rooted in community care, creative self expression, and ritual reconnection, we offer dance, workshops, and animist rites of passage to foster resilience, embodiment, and collective liberation.
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Statement of Vision
The Ritual Movement is dedicated to the change makers, the culture makers, and the creative rebels. We imagine a world where queer individuals and allies live embodied, liberated lives rooted in self-expression and community resilience.
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Our Story
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We met working at a small, queer treatment center outside of Asheville in 2021. In November of that year we started running a five rhythms inspired dance group with another colleague. The clients we served stayed in the care of the facility for three to six months, and over the course of their stays, we watched the dance space we facilitated have a significant impact on their recovery journeys. It was a confronting group; five to nine people in size, dancing for an hour once a week in a small basement room, setting intentions, sharing about their experiences, bringing their joys and sorrows to the group each session. We were deeply impacted watching their process.
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When the treatment center closed due to a lack of funding in 2022, we decided to take the group out into the community. We chose to follow the Major Arcana of the Tarot, anchoring the dance rituals to the archetypes of the Fool's Journey. Each dance we created playlists, altars, and generated teachings in correspondence to the archetypal lessons of the Arcana. Over the first two years of the project, we grew a diverse community of dancers, creatives, activists, and seekers.
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In tandem with our dance offering, we deepened into a path of study and experience that centered rites of passage. We sat for days at a time in ritual fasts, surrounded by community, learning the ins and outs of initiatory practices. We studied and trained with the School of Lost borders, and dreamed of bringing queer rites of passage to western North Carolina. In April of 2023 we held our first week long wilderness vigil, taking a group of our community members to Panther Town to mark and honor various life transitions. This experience cemented our calling to do rites of passage work.
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In 2024 we filed articles of incorporation to become a non-profit spiritual organization. We wanted to expand the financial structure of our project to bring in more crowd sourced and federal funding, to lessen the burden of financial responsibility on the individual, while growing our capacity to transition to this work full-time.
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We dream of making a school that elevates creative, ritual based community projects, centering queerness and trauma recovery. This dream is community inspired. We seek to create a culture where queers and their allies can become more embodied and more alive, finding and connecting to deep meaning, elevating the unique gifts that we are each here on earth to cultivate and offer in this lifetime.