This Is Real (1): Tisha B'Av

The Soul Stretches Out to Contain Itself: A Map (pp. 3-4)
You are walking through the world half asleep. It isn't just that you don't know how or why you got here. It's worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream.
Then the walls of the great house that surrounds you crumble and fall. You tumble out onto a strange street, suddenly conscious of your estrangement and your homelessness.
A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.
Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth creaks upon. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.
But you don't know which one.

Tisha B'Av and Teshuvah pp.41-42; p.50; p.53
Tisha B’Av comes exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, beginning the process that culminates on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Tisha B’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives—in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others.
Teshuvah—turning, repentance—is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at-one-ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives.
...
Tisha B'Av is the beginning of Teshuvah, the process of turning that we hope to complete on Yom Kippur, the process of returning to ourselves and to God. And the acknowledgement of the unresolved in our lives, as individuals and as a people, is the beginning of the sacred power the Days of Awe grant us.
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The walls come down and suddenly we can see, suddenly we recognize the nature of our estrangement from God, and this recognition is the beginning of our reconciliation. We can see the image of the falling Temple - the burning house - that Tisha B'Av urges upon us so forcefully, precisely in this light.

Taking Responsibility for Ourselves pp.40-46
[T]he tendency to telescope calamities around this date served to give form to a significant spiritual form, the sense that the same thing was happening over and over again but in slightly different form, and the corresponding feeling that our unresolved tendencies - the unconscious wrong turns we keep taking - carry us back to the same point on our spiritual path again and again... [W]e can regard the 9th of Av as a time when we are reminded that catastrophes will keep recurring in our lives until we get things right, until we learn what we need to learn from them.
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[S]piritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?
When things go bad, there is an enormous temptation to blame it on externals, on the evil of others, or on an unlucky turn of events. Spiritually, however, we are called to resist this temptation, no matter how strong it may be...
Our power in the world is considerable but also very circumscribed. It is only here and now, in this moment, in this place - in the present - that we can act.
We cannot act in the past, we cannot act in the future, and most certainly we cannot act through someone else's experience.
So from a spiritual point of view, we need to ask, What can I do here and now, in the present reality of my own experience?
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What is the recurring disaster in our life? What is the unresolved element that keeps bringing us back to this same moment over and over again? What is it that we keep getting wrong? What is it that we persistently refuse to look at, fail to see?

Letting the Walls Come Down pp. 60-63
...Who am I really? What will be left when the walls of constructed identity come down?...The time has come to get off it, to drop the mask. After all, in seven weeks we will stand before the one who sees through all masks. The time has come to turn.
So the Torah tells us seven times. V'neifen, u-finu—and they turned, now you turn. What is required of us at Tisha B’Av is a simple turn of mind, a turn toward consciousness, a turn away from denial, from the inertia, from the passive momentum of our lives, a turn away from those things that continue to happen unconsciously, and a conscious decision to change. A letting go, letting the walls of identity crumble, and turning toward that which remains...
Tisha B’Av has a hot tip for us: Take the suffering. Take the loss. Turn toward it. Embrace it. Let the walls come down...
The walls of our soul begin to crumble and the first glimmerings of transformation—of Teshuvah—begin to seep in. We turn and stop looking beyond ourselves. We stop defending ourselves. We stop blaming bad luck and circumstances and other people for our difficulties. We turn in and let the walls fall.

“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that.”
- Byron Katie, Author
Byron Katie is an American speaker and author who teaches a method of self-inquiry known as “The Work”.
All the suffering that goes on inside our minds is not reality, says Byron Katie. It’s just a story we torture ourselves with. She has a simple, completely replicable system for freeing ourselves of the thoughts that make us suffer. “All war begins on paper,” she explains. You write down your stressful thoughts, and then ask yourself the following four questions:
Question 1: Is it true?
This question can change your life. Be still and ask yourself if the thought you wrote down is true.
Question 2: Can you absolutely know it’s true?
This is another opportunity to open your mind and to go deeper into the unknown, to find the answers that live beneath what we think we know.
Question 3: How do you react—what happens—when you believe that thought?
With this question, you begin to notice internal cause and effect. You can see that when you believe the thought, there is a disturbance that can range from mild discomfort to fear or panic. What do you feel? How do you treat the person (or the situation) you’ve written about, how do you treat yourself, when you believe that thought? Make a list, and be specific.
Question 4: Who would you be without the thought?
Imagine yourself in the presence of that person (or in that situation), without believing the thought. How would your life be different if you didn’t have the ability to even think the stressful thought? How would you feel? Which do you prefer—life with or without the thought? Which feels kinder, more peaceful?
Turn the thought around:
The “turnaround” gives you an opportunity to experience the opposite of what you believe. Once you have found one or more turnarounds to your original statement, you are invited to find at least three specific, genuine examples of how each turnaround is true in your life.

“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.” - Byron Katie
https://theageofideas.com/byron-katies-four-questions/
https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/

Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects helps people discover and experience their innate connections with each other and the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action.

Among other things, the website houses an evolving resource database including many wonderful rituals and group practices.
https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/practices/
One practice, the Truth Mandala, I have found to be perfectly suited for contemporary Tisha b'Av ritual, where the earth itself is the temple that is being desecrated.
https://workthatreconnects.org/resource/truth-mandala/
In the Truth Mandala people sit in a circle, surrounding an area divided into four quadrants.
In each quadrant is placed a symbolic object: a stone, dead leaves, a thick stick, and an empty bowl. In the center is placed a cushion or small cloth.
After placing the objects, the guide picks up each one in turn and explains its meaning. Here are some words we use.

This stone is for fear. It’s how our heart feels when we’re afraid: tight, contracted, hard. With this stone, we can let our fear speak.
These dry leaves represent our sorrow. There is great sadness within us for what we see happening to our world. Here the sadness can speak.
This stick is for our anger, for our outrage. Anger needs to be spoken for clarity of mind and purpose. As you let it speak, grasp this stick hard with both hands. It’s not for pounding or waving around.
And here in the fourth quadrant, this empty bowl stands for our sense of deprivation and need, our hunger for what’s missing—our emptiness.
Maybe there’s something you’ll want to say that doesn’t fit one of these quadrants, so this cushion in the center of the mandala is a place you can stand or sit to give voice to it – be it a song or prayer or lines of verse.
You may wonder where is hope? The very ground of this mandala is hope. If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t be here.
After introducing the objects, present the guidelines for the Truth Mandala and make clear that the inner circle is sacred space—made sacred by our truth telling.
The text goes on to give clear, step-by-step instructions for how to hold people in this profoundly powerful ritual of witness and acknowledgement. Check it out: https://workthatreconnects.org/resource/truth-mandala/