Closing of the Bones is a ritual and living practice for honouring rites of passage and life transitions. One where you don’t have to hold everything on your own. It’s a space to be rocked, wrapped, and witnessed as you journey through change.
This ceremony is about honouring everything you’ve carried – grief, birth, loss, transition, endings, and beginnings, and giving yourself permission to be held in return.
Traditionally used for postpartum care, Closing of the Bones is now also embraced for personal transformation, enriching self-care, replenishment and rejuvenation. It’s a ritual that’s powerful for any time of change – grief, healing, or stepping into something new.
The practice involves gentle rocking and wrapping using a rebozo (a length of beautiful cloth lovingly handwoven by Mexican artisans), warmth, and deep care. It helps you reconnect with yourself, process emotions, and feel supported in body, mind and spirit. Some come to it for closure, others for grounding. Everyone who experiences the ritual has a different story to tell of its unique benefits.
The gentle rocking and wrapping helps to:
- Create a sense of containment, safety and reconnection.
- Process on energetic, spiritual & psychological planes
- Release emotions stored in the body
- Encourage movement in the joints, muscles, tissues & fluids
- And so
- Return your organs, tissues, pelvis, muscles, tendons & ligaments back into optimal positioning
- Shift you from a stress state (fight/flight) into deep rest, where healing happens
- Mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another
- Welcome a time of transition
- Support mind, body & spirit
Grief, change & transformation ask to be witnessed. This is a way to do just that.
The Origins & Living Lineages of Closing of the Bones
It’s no coincidence that birthing and postpartum traditions from around the world share striking similarities. Across cultures and lineages, a woman’s innate needs during birth and around the first 40 days postpartum are the same. Community support, warmth in the body, warm nourishing foods, intentional bodywork, and an extended resting period form the five foundational pillars of postpartum wellness. These needs are universal, rooted not in geography or ancestry, but in the innate physiological needs of the female body(1).
For those wishing to explore this further, the work of Innate Traditions offers valuable insights into the universal needs of women during the first weeks and months postpartum, including after pregnancy loss.
Ceremonies such as Closing of the Bones have long been passed down through generations, shared between grandmothers, mothers & daughters, midwives and apprentices.
The cloths used in these rituals hold many purposes throughout a woman’s life: they support her body during labour, carry her babies, transport food and belongings, and mark significant rites of passage. A woman might be gifted her special cloth at an early stage in life, cherish it through decades of use, and eventually pass it on. In some societies the rebozo serves as a burial shroud (2).
In many parts of the world, postpartum wrapping and closing ceremonies remain an integral part of community care. Though each culture has its own expression, the shared intention is to hold the new mother, honour her threshold crossing, and help her return to her centre after the profound and expansive work of pregnancy, birth, and pregnancy loss.
In Ecuador a Manta is still used for the Closing of the Bones.
In Morocco, the ceremony called ‘Al-Shedd’ (pulling) is practiced using the traditional kourziya cloth(1).
In Russia, ‘Seven Locks’ continues as a form of postpartum wrapping, with a rushnyk as the ritual cloth(1).
In Somalia a Garbasar shawl is used in a similar ways to the Mexican rebozo during labour & postpartum care(2).
In many villages of India, Pakistan & Sri Lanka, elder women continue to visit new mother’s homes to offer postpartum wrapping and closing rituals(3).
Far from being relics of the past, postpartum wrapping and closing ceremonies show us how cultural traditions adapt, while also holding true to their essence. They affirm that the physical-psycho-social needs of women are enduring, and that the wisdom of ancestral practices still has profound relevance today in supporting recovery, resilience, and renewal across female rites of passage.
References
1 Garcia Seliga R. Innate Postpartum Care [blog]. Closing of the Bones – A Cross-Cultural, Postpartum Practice. 2021 Feb 23. Available: https://www.innatetraditions.com/blog/Closing-of-the-bones-rebozo.
2. Messager, S. [blog]. The background of the rebozo. Available: https://sophiemessager.com/the-background-of-the-rebozo
3. Kaur, J.R. (Dr). [website], What is ‘Closing the Bones’ and who is it for? 2022. Available: https://www.shuniya-yoga.org/closing-bones-ceremony/
