What makes you beautiful closing ceremony

Enter another age-old adage: Love, and the loss of it, makes you do crazy things. Breakups can lead you down impulsive, seemingly irrational paths. My experience is the perfect example of this. Shortly after packing everything I owned into a stuffy 10x10 storage unit, I decided to leave the country for three months to work with an eclectic artist in Central America. It was nothing I imagined for myself, and yet it was everything I needed. Everything happens for a reason.

As cheesy as it sounds, I do believe that. As part of my journey through emotional healing and self-exploration in Central America, I immersed myself in the practices of conscious, countercultural communities.

At a trance music festival in Guatemala, I met a couple who had held a beautiful closing ceremony to end their long-term partnership. I was intrigued; I had never thought to end a relationship in such a conscious, intentional way.

Every life event, I mused, could be ceremonious, including breakups. While at the same music festival, I met a man who changed my life. He was everything: smart, driven, spiritually awakened.

We cultivated a beautiful connection that lasted long after we left the jungle; me, back to the Bay Area, and him, across the country in Washington, D. For six months, we maintained a long-distance relationship and it was magical. Until, as sometimes happens, the connection no longer made sense for us to continue. How did it take me this long to discover this? I wondered. Everyone should know about and practice closing ceremonies!

The basic premise of the closing ceremony involves co-creating special rituals to honor the end of the relationship. Think of it as planning a funeral which, in a sense, it is.

But the end of a relationship, no matter how long or short, warrants a mourning period, just as a death does. And like a funeral, a closing ceremony might have speeches, songs, laughter, tears.

Perhaps close friends and family. What better place for the British pop sensations to join forces again than London? A post shared by Victoria Beckham victoriabeckham. The performance in London had the audience singing along while waving their arms back and forth.

By the end of the song, attendees were holding hands with one another relishing in the special moment that kicked off the Summer Olympics. Overall, Paul McCartney gave a youthful performance, despite being 70 years old at the time.

He performed the composition at the opening ceremony, which was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. As he played the theme marchers entered the stadium carrying white Olympic flags.

Caitlin Vincent caitlincvincent July 21, The group kept the crowd singing along while riding around the stage set up like a fair. When the vehicle stopped, the boys hopped off and jumped around the stage before leading the audience in a clap-along. The performance concluded with a group of drummers lending percussion using sticks and trash cans.

Sure to be regarded as a wonderfully chaotic treasure trove by some and a hot mess by others with a taste for more regimented spectacle, it was an exuberant afterparty to 16 days of international athletic competition. Most of all, it echoed the fun, freewheeling spirit and quirky humor established by director Danny Boyle in his divisive Opening Ceremony. The artistic director of the three-hour closing show was former ballet dancer Kim Gavin , who larded the event with dance-troupe interludes — some more inventive and seamlessly interwoven than others.

Does anyone still need to see the Stomp ensemble punishing trash-can lids at this point? But the driving force in a show titled A Symphony of British Music naturally was the music itself. And while purists no doubt will cry sacrilege about a game Russell Brand covering The Beatles, this all-star mix of live and prerecorded music was a major crowd-pleaser.

A Day in the Life of London then unfolded, from morning rush hour through nightfall. Many typically playful touches registered as just the briefest of throwaways, notably the performers wielding jackhammers to kick off the British national anthem.

Prince Harry and Kate Middleton were an appropriately youthful choice for royal duty at the ceremony. With gymnastics-dance troupe Spellbound and other performers bouncing all over the arena like a Cirque du Soleil training camp, plus color-coded partiers bopping along, there was invariably too much on which to focus.