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How Rituals Keep Us Connected
Description: We explore Día de los Muertos as a ritual that nurtures community, imbues loss with meaning, and helps us process grief while also connecting through shared joy.
Summary: We investigate how Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, rituals strengthen family ties and cultural identity, and learn about its evolution from a 3,000 year old practice to a global celebration. We look at key elements like the ofrenda and explore how commercialization—like Mattel’s Day of the Dead Barbie—raises questions about balancing tradition with modern influences.
This episode is made possible through the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation.
How To Do This Practice:
- Set an intention: Begin by reflecting on who or what you want to honor, focusing on connection and gratitude rather than loss. Let this intention guide the energy of your ritual.
- Create a space of offering: Choose a spot in your home and make it a place of remembrance. Gather meaningful items like photos, flowers, candles, or anything that holds personal or ancestral significance.
- Invite the elements: Bring in water, fire, wind, and earth in simple ways—perhaps a candle, a glass of water, a plant, or a piece of fabric that moves gently in the air—to represent balance and harmony.
- Add a personal touch: Offer something that carries memory, like a favorite food, scent, or song of someone you love. These gestures transform remembrance into a living connection.
- Gather in community: Invite others to join you in building the altar or sharing stories and food. Coming together in this way turns memory into collective celebration and strengthens belonging.
- Reflect and release: When the ritual feels complete, take a few quiet moments to notice what you feel. Offer gratitude for the connections that remain and carry their presence forward into daily life.
Today’s Guests:
MICHELLE TELLÉZ is an Associate Professor in Mexican-American studies at Arizona State University.
Learn more about Michelle: https://tinyurl.com/2ph3can7
MATHEW SANDOVAL, a.ka. "Dr. Muerte," is an artist and Associate Professor at Arizona State University. He is a leading expert on Día de los Muertos.
Learn more about Mathew: mathewsandoval.com
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
The Healing Effects of Experiencing Wildlife: https://tinyurl.com/bde5av4z
Who’s Always There For You: https://tinyurl.com/yt3ejj6w
How Thinking About Your Ancestors Can Help You Thrive: https://tinyurl.com/4u6vzs2w
Related Happiness Breaks:
A Meditation on Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/ye6baxv3
A Guided Meditation on Embodied Love: https://tinyurl.com/3dmpfam6
A Meditation to Connect With Your Roots: https://tinyurl.com/ycy9xazc
Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
SHUKA KALANTARI: I’m Shuka Kalantari, welcome to The Science of Happiness.
Día de los Muertos is, at its heart, a celebration of life — the lives of those we’ve loved and lost, and the communities that keep those memories alive.
Recently, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents came to the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, many schools — including my child’s — cancelled their Día de los Muertos celebrations out of concern for the safety of local families.
According to recent reports, almost 60,000 people are being held in ICE custody. Over 70% of them have no criminal convictions.
So today, in honor of our ancestors and the communities that help keep these traditions alive, we’re revisiting our episode on the power of ritual — and how gathering in meaningful ways can help us heal, remember, and stay strong and connected.
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: For me, Día de los Muertos wasn't something I necessarily grew up with. Thirty, forty years ago, when my mother migrated from our small town, Tomatlán, Jalisco, to Southern California, she didn't bring some of the traditions from the Pueblo. So, we didn’t grow up with Día de los Muertos. In this culture in the U.S., we don’t talk about grief. We don’t talk about death. There’s a lot of fear attached to it.
But when my father passed away suddenly when I was 20 years old, I realized I needed to find a way to stay connected to his memory. I think, in this culture in the U.S., right, we don’t talk about grief. We don’t talk about death. There’s fear attached to it. So I learned about the tradition through community members and started learning how to build an altar, what all the pieces of the altar signified. I was really trying to be thoughtful about it.
For me, it’s a reminder to balance mourning and grief with celebration, and continuously processing it every year.
DACHER KELTNER: Hey everyone, I’m Dacher Keltner. This week on The Science of Happiness, we’re exploring Día de los Muertos, a 3,000-year-old tradition that honors those we’ve lost and brings communities together through rituals that help us process grief and joy.
I’m joined by Dr. Michelle Téllez, a scholar of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona, whose family hails from Jalisco, Mexico—the same place I was born.
She shares how the tradition reconnected her with her cultural roots while strengthening bonds with her family and community.
We also hear about the power of rituals from Dr. Mathew Sandoval, aka Dr. Muerte.
MATHEW SANDOVAL: The cultural roots of Día de los Muertos are anchored in ancient Native American traditions in Latin America. But there are also roots that come from European Catholicism, European paganism, North African Islamic culture, and West African animist traditions. So, I tend to think of Día de los Muertos as a global phenomenon that’s becoming even more global in the 21st century.
DACHER KELTNER: More about Día de los Muertos after this break.
[ADS]
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Dacher Keltner. We’re joined by Dr. Michelle Téllez, who will share how Día de los Muertos creates space for healing by holding both joy and sorrow through communal ritual—and how these rituals can shape our understanding of identity, loss, and life. Michelle, thanks for joining us.
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: It's a pleasure to be here.
DACHER KELTNER: In our lab here at Berkeley, we’ve studied collective experiences, what we call collective effervescence, and rituals around the end of life. We know that rituals are important. Can you tell us about your personal relationship to Día de los Muertos?
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: It’s almost like the preparations for the ceremony allow you to re-invite all these people you love back into your life. For me, Día de los Muertos isn’t just about the actual day—it’s about the preparation, the creative outlet, the celebration, the memories. One thing my daughter and I like to do is remember the foods that people liked, and we’ll start adding those to the altar.
It’s a continual sense of spiritual and evolutionary growth. Every year, the ritual brings something new.
DACHER KELTNER: I would love for you to walk us through the basic elements of the ritual, and explain what an ofrenda is.
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: An ofrenda is an offering—it’s what you put out materially into the spiritual world as a way to connect yourself to this other realm. The central elements include photos or names of those who’ve passed, and the four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. We use papel picado for wind, candles for fire, and incense—copal is traditional in Mexico. We also bring their favorite foods to the altar. Typically, I make tortilla soup. I invite family and friends over, and whatever we’re eating, we also offer it to the altar, recognizing that we’re sharing this moment together.
It’s a way for my family and community to see the larger community we are part of. You want your intentions in the ofrenda, so it doesn’t have to be something specific—it’s about how you think about it as you place it on the altar.
DACHER KELTNER: The Western European view of death is all anxiety and loss. We forget how love persists. I remember the ways I ritualized my brother’s passing—visiting trees that reminded me of him, going to places we went to in the mountains. It brought back his generosity and love. How has this ritual added meaning to your grief over your father and mother?
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: Grief is a universal experience. Finding ways to cope and be in community after losing a loved one is so important. Grief lives in our bodies, and we don’t always have a place to put it. This ritual isn’t just about grief, though—it’s about celebrating a life, honoring them, welcoming them. But I can’t ignore that grief is central to loss.
In a society where we’re not allowed to face death directly, this ritual allows my family to have conversations about grief and mortality without seeing them as an end. My daughter has a connection to my father, despite never meeting him, because we honor him in this way. It’s a way of remembering that we don’t cease to exist because we’re shaped by those who came before us.
Instead of running from grief, we bring them to life through this practice, and it’s a collective practice that connects us. That’s really powerful.
DACHER KELTNER: Profound.
You’ve spoken about the collective feeling you get from this ritual. Can you describe a specific moment where you felt that higher sense of connection?
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: I live in Arizona, and I was three months pregnant when I moved here, alone. I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have a sense of community. My daughter was born in February, and later that year, I decided to invite the community members I’d met to bring something for the altar I was building. That was the start of this tradition. I invited colleagues, some of whom didn’t know about the tradition, and we gathered around the altar. Everyone brought photos, flowers, or candles. We formed a circle, shared food, and spoke about memories of loved ones. Everyone came from different spiritual backgrounds, but there was vulnerability in that shared experience. It was beautiful. That commonality brings us together in community.
DACHER KELTNER: You’ve talked about how this shaped your daughter’s sense of identity and culture. How did participating in the ritual impact her?
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: My daughter, from a young age, recognized that we did things a little differently, and she resisted that at first. She wanted to be like her friends, go to the mall, do things differently. But as she’s grown older—she’s 18 now and a first-year college student—she’s come to appreciate our “beautiful, wacky, ancestrally guided life.”
Now, she’s in a phase of questioning, exploring different philosophies and cosmologies, and that’s fantastic. She’s realizing the significance of the ritual and how it connects her to her grandparents, even though she never met them. A week ago, she said she was sad she wouldn’t be home for Día de los Muertos this year, but I told her, “Now it’s your turn to start that ritual in the place you are. And that’s okay.”
DACHER KELTNER: You’ve given her a platform to think about these big questions about spirit and life.
Michelle Téllez, thank you so much for this interview. You’ve made us think more broadly about grief and joy and how rituals help us grapple with these universal tendencies. Thanks for being on the show.
MICHELLE TÉLLEZ: It was wonderful to be here.
[Music fades out]
DACHER KELTNER: Up next, Dr. Mathew Sandoval—or Dr. Muerte as he’s known—shares his knowledge of the deep history of Día de los Muertos and its cultural significance today across the world.
MATHEW SANDOVAL: It's really about honoring one's ancestors. So not just the recently deceased and not even just your grandmother and your great grandmother, but truly, like, the ancestors who you've never known. The ancestors who exist only in ghostly traces in our DNA.
DACHER KELTNER: We’ll be back with more, in just a moment.
[ADS]
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Dacher Keltner, and we’re exploring how rituals like Día de los Muertos help us navigate grief, build community, and honor loved ones. Joining us is Dr. Mathew Sandoval, a leading expert on Day of the Dead. Mathew, thanks so much for joining us.
MATHEW SANDOVAL: It is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
DACHER KELTNER: I'm really interested in, and this is just a raw truth about cultural rituals, which is their transformation and their evolution. Dia de los Muertos started as a kind of an ancient ritual, and now it's celebrated all over the world in many different ways. How do you think about the cultural evolution of Dia de los Muertos?
MATTEW SANDOVAL: The cultural roots of Dia de los Muertos, or what we call Day of the Dead, are anchored, of course, in, ancient Native American traditions and rituals in Mesoamerica or Mexico, Latin America.But there are cultural roots that come from European Catholicism, from European paganism, from North African Islamic culture. And then there are roots that come from West African animist traditions. And all of these cultural roots really started to fuse and mix in a very hybrid way during Mexico's colonial period. So in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, as Spain is conquering and colonizing Mexico and the rest of Latin America. So I tend to think of Day of the Dead as like a global phenomenon that is becoming even more global, uh, now in the 21st century.
Day of the dead, as it's celebrated in Mexico and celebrated in the United States among Latinos and Chicanos. It's really about honoring one's ancestors. So not just the recently deceased and not even just your grandmother and your great grandmother, but truly like the ancestors who you've never known, the ancestors who exist only in ghostly traces in our DNA. It's a matter of honoring them on this holiday as well.
In part, why Día de los Muertos is becoming more popular for so many people, because just the interest in ancestry is becoming so much more profound, especially in the United States with, you know, all of these like ancestry.com, or, or just trying to find your lineage and your roots. And I think that these two things are tied together. The American search for one's ancestral roots is being tied now to Día de los Muertos in a profound way.
DACHER KELTNER: That's fascinating. I know you've written about this in your books and probably will feature it in your forthcoming documentary about, you know, just the, you know, Explosion of interest in the Dia de los Muertos, you know, I gather Mattel has a Dia de los Muertos Barbie of all things and you know, and you just see it in different, you know, corners of the world and how do you think about that?
MATTHEW SANDOVAL: If I'm being 100 percent honest, I'm of at least two minds of it, because of course the global popularity of it has also meant that it's become commercialized in very crass ways that it's been appropriated in ways that are, like, hurtful and problematic. There's no doubt about that. On the other hand, I have seen people who are not Latino, not Chicano, not Mexican, et cetera, who've approached Dia de los Muertos and started to incorporate it as a kind of cultural tradition for themselves, and it serves a real purpose for them, right? Because I think of Dia de los Muertos as medicine. In that regard, more and more people are starting to understand its medicinal nature. But day of the dead as a tradition is becoming fundamentally transformed by virtue of its global popularity. And so traditions that have existed in Mexico for several centuries are now becoming brand new traditions. And I'm thinking specifically of like, um, you know, everybody at this point, more than a billion people have seen the movie Coco, Disney's movie Coco, right? And so that tends to be the way many people know Dia de los Muertos now. But in Mexico, I'm thinking specifically of like Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico. Watching Coco on Day of the Dead is now a Day of the Dead tradition, even in Mexico. Like, that's how profound it's becoming. Or the Great Parade that takes place in Mexico City is a new phenomenon that was, a recreation of the Great Parade that was seen in the James Bond movie Spectre from 2016.
Music/sounds from opening scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk9KFiUEjI8
That was just a Day of the Dead parade that existed for the purposes of cinema. But Mexico City and Mexican government officials thought, Oh, wow, that's going to attract a lot of people. And so now there's an annual Dia de los Muertos parade in Mexico City that attracts more than 2 million people out into the streets. And this is now a day of the dead tradition.
Fade out music, slight pause
And I've been, you know, I've spent a lot of time being critical of the way that day of the dead is becoming this large spectacle event, as opposed to like a more quiet ritual or even like a more fun community festival. But I think on the flip side of that coin is the idea that maybe we want to see this traditional ritual blown up to the size of, you know, millions of people experiencing it. Millions of people dressed in Calacas with their faces painted like sugar skulls, because we want to engage with that level of collective awe around death almost as a deep transformative experience. And so as much as Day of the Dead celebrations are starting to become almost versions of like, a cultural burning man, it could also be serving these other ends, which are deeply profound and tie us into a sense of awe.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, I hear you. How do you describe the ritual of Dia de los Muertos, practicing it with others, what does it give to you socially?
Bring in music
MATTHEW SANDOVAL: Based on the interviews that I've done with people who celebrate Dia de los Muertos, both in Mexico and in the United States, I would say that That is one of the fundamental things that brings them out to celebrate is, is that sense of connection to a larger community. So that Dia de los Muertos becomes a way to carry collective grief because grief can be heavy. Grief can be very heavy. And I would say that grief can also be a very lonely process. And anybody who's lost people that are close to them and people who they love will know that the road of the grieving process can be a very difficult, long, challenging, and lonely road. And Dia de los Muertos, by virtue of it being celebrated collectively, allows the burden and the heaviness of that grief to be carried by a larger community so that you don't feel like you have to carry it alone, which in some sense I think is also why Dia de los Muertos celebrations tend to be filled with so much joy, because that grief is being transformed by virtue of community connections, and even if this community is temporary, i. e.gathering of thousands of people in the plaza, I think that the effects of having one's grief unburdened, for a day or for several hours really does do healing work.
I think if it didn't offer that medicine that this holiday, that this tradition would have died out long ago, I think it's staying power has everything to do with the fact that it continues to offer people an opportunity to heal in ways that don't feel so burdensome, don't feel so lonesome, um, and can actually make you feel connected to a larger sense of community and truly a larger sense of humanity.
DACHER KELTNER: A lot of your work looks at how rituals guide us through key life stages, like coming of age or facing the end of life. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the rituals of Día de los Muertos help children make sense of and cope with loss?
MATTHEW SANDOVAL: Yeah. I have a daughter right now who's 14 months old and I will be of course sharing the tradition of Dia de los Muertos with her. And so as I get older and start to teach her more about this ancestral tradition, I'm also preparing, really, truly, preparing myself to be an ancestor who's remembered on an altar, and simultaneously I'm preparing her to be able to manage to handle and deal with her father's death, right? So that it hopefully is something that is an easier transition for her because she will associate not with finality, but with a kind of eternal remembrance. So that, although losing me at some point in the future is going to be hard for my daughter, hopefully by giving her these tools that it will ease the transition.
DACHER KELTNER: It’s so fascinating how impoverished we are in talking about the end of life to our children and, and thinking about it ourselves. Within these cultural traditions, what does this practice of your daughter starting to understand that you, as a dad, will pass away at some time. What's it give them? What kind of understanding?
MATTHEW SANDOVAL: An understanding of death that isn't grounded in fear, right? I would love it to offer something like my daughter, I would love it to offer her the ability to deal squarely with death. That's my fundamental hope for her in teaching her this, this cultural tradition, that it would offer her a way to manage the reality that she will pass, that I will pass, that everything that we know and everybody who we love is impermanent. It's a deep and profound acknowledgement of impermanence.
I think that that can only help, somebody like my daughter or only help any younger generation to start to approach death, not as a finality, but as part of a life process, a significant and meaningful component of a life process.
DACHER KELTNER: And I know there's new research, you know, that is showing that this appreciation of the cyclical nature of life really helps people in terms of keeping perspective on stress and, and understanding, the purposes of their lives.
Matthew Sandoval, thanks so much for the conversation and opening our minds to this remarkable cultural tradition and ritual and uh, thank you for your work and for being here.
MATTHEW SANDOVAL: Absolutely. My pleasure. 100%.
DACHER KELTNER: Next time on our show, we’ll talk about forgiveness, how we can do it and why it could be good for us.
EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS: Making a decision to forgive, of deciding in your own mind that it is worthwhile for you to, endeavor to forgive. This involves using structures and pathways in your brain that enable you to assess the degree to which any choice or decision aligns with what is most important to you.
DACHER KELTNER: Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. Our research assistants are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. Have a great day.
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