Devotion, Grief, Connection: Portals to Ritual with Tracee Stanley with Tracee Stanley on “This is not Tea” Podcast hosted by Tamika Caston-Miller and Ashley Rideaux

ITracee Stanley — post-lineage teacher, former Hollywood film producer, and bestselling author of Radiant Rest and The Luminous Self — joins Tamika and Ashley again, this time to talk about her new book, Living Ritual : Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit (Sounds True, August 2026). The conversation moves from grief and devotion into the difference between habit and ritual, why AI can imitate wisdom but never the soul, and what it takes to walk away from a life that no longer fits.

Tracee traces her own path from Hollywood producer to ritual teacher — including a formative trip to Bali in 1994, the moment devotion became distinguishable from discipline, and the example she had of walking away from a secure career to build something of one's own. Ashley and Tamika bring their own recent thresholds into the conversation, reflecting on grief, self-parenting, and the rituals we build (often without naming them) to hold ourselves through change.

Topics Discussed

Grief , sadness and gratitude in loss

Ritual as the antidote to disconnection, distraction, and the illusion of separateness

What separates a mindless habit from a devotional, sacred ritual

Devotion as an "open hand," not subservience — and why culture resists softness

Losing someone you were devoted to, and learning to self-parent afterward

Micro-rituals: how five minutes a day builds a felt sense of certainty

Why pandemic-era ritual (sourdough, slow mornings) didn't carry over — and how to reclaim it in small ways

Friction as a signal of an approaching threshold

The question Tracee always asks: "What in me is dying, and what in me is waiting to be born?"

The power and permission of saying "I don't know"

Tracee's journey out of Hollywood: trying to marry spiritual and commercial filmmaking, and why it didn't work; and the example she remembers she had to pivot with audacious belief

Titrating change: how to leave a misaligned path without cutting everything at once

The disappearance of elder wisdom and AI's attempt at soul work

Shared ritual, belonging, and the modern epidemic of loneliness

The Purusharthas (four aims of life) as a framework for Tracee's book

The prominence of spiritual bankruptcy and inner poverty

Reclaiming rites of passage — menopause, grief, the ceremonies and family rituals that quietly disappear after loss.