What is Initiation?
Initiation is the first time we learn something for ourselves.
Initiation is an embodied crossing, past a threshold from one way of being into another.
It is a memorable and marked moment of transition.
In initiation we are witnessed by our community and witnessing ourselves through the stages of a rite of passage, exploring the trials and celebrations of transformation.
Initiation is the blessing and acknowledgement, from self and community, that we are on the right path.
In my experience, initiation is a process of meeting death and surrendering to rebirth.
In the ancient wheel, initiation is in the phase of adolescence. This is a time we are meant to be initiated into adulthood, however there are many forms of initiation throughout our lives.
This stage of a rite of passage is considered the bear cave where we are confronted with our emotional waters. It is where we must go inward and face our wounds and shadows; We've got to “feel it to heal it”.
The adolescent represents our creativity and loss of innocence; we begin to separate ourselves from innocence into the shock and acknowledgment of pain and suffering in this world. We are experiencing an extreme and delicate metamorphosis, navigating between worlds; not yet adult, not quite child. It is where we descend into the underground depths of the soul, where our shadows, grief, fears, rage and discomforts lie.
This stage requires initiation to survive and thrive.
You may have experienced or noticed in teen-hood where we may become reckless and rebellious.
We typically go through a phase of pushing boundaries in order to build trust with ourselves and the world. This is a normal part of the process of transformation from youth to adulthood because there is an instinctual readiness and deep need for initiation. Adolescence/teens are huge teachers in our culture because they remind us of what our culture is lacking or missing.
Their rebellion against the usual “way” of doing things is helpful in breaking through old structures that no longer serve the future or are stuck in limiting beliefs. It is a way of exploring ones Self so we discover who we truly are.
As adolescents, we deeply desire to understand death and life, so we look for ways intuitively to face death head on. However, we are extremely afraid of facing our fears and feeling our feelings as a culture, and do not typically have initiation rites or teachers that hold us safe in the process of facing death (spiritual death or death of the ego).
We see in adolescence there is a recklessness and unique expression, and we deem it unhealthy, unsafe, unnatural. Yet, it is the way and role of the adolescent to explore and stretch the ideas and beliefs and structures of our times. It is the only way they begin to understand themselves in the duality of this wild world.
As a culture and community, if we do not hold our teens (inner and outer) with respect, responsibility and sovereignty we become stuck in addictions and depressions.
If we continue to isolate our youth out of fear ~ if we continue to dampen their aliveness, we miss an essential opportunity to learn what they need and what is missing in ourselves.
Adolescence teaches us the juiciness of LIFE! Our passion and DEEP feeling. We cannot skip this part of the journey to adulthood.
When I speak of adolescence, I am not just talking about age; we each carry an adolescent Self within us that acts out or may be stuck in adolescent behaviors. Getting to know this side of ourselves and how we are influenced as a culture is a way of liberating ourselves. We can consciously take steps to be initiated at any age in a way that is supportive of our truth and purpose in adulthood.
A friend once said to me, “The most dangerous man is an uninitiated man.”
Our culture does not value initiation; the feelings and boundaries necessary to experience death (metaphorically and spiritually). We are taught to fear discomfort or anything that arrises from the depths. We are taught to fear our emotional waters and therefore fear the ways of women.
This cuts us off from our sexual nature, our feminine nature, our primal nature, our intuitive nature.
When we are cut off from our life source, our true nature is suppressed and we seek to find outlets for these qualities to be met. However, like anything that is trapped, it seeks out of fear or rage and resentment. It is a hungry animal that will not stop until it is fed and will do anything to eat out of survival. This expresses itself in ways like sex addiction, substance abuse, dissociation, depression, isolation, anxiety, workaholism, materialism. We are stuck in immediacy to fill a void that can only be filled through conscious initiation, held by community and integrated step by step back into our daily lives.
In our culture we have lost intentional initiation rites held in community. Especially for our youth. Due to this misfortune, we can get stuck in risky behaviors to try initiating ourselves in ways that are not supportive of our growth and wellbeing, and become destructive to ourselves and those around us, as well as the Earth. We have accidental initiations or we try to initiate ourselves through harmful behaviors; we look for sexual attention, we seek the thrill, we wreck our parents car, we steal, we consume a smorgasbord of drugs, plant medicines or mind altering substances, we shop for things we don't need, we work non stop, we over give without taking care of ourselves, we get a severe injury or illness, or we attend ceremony after ceremony after ceremony without integrating the lessons.
These are all attempts to initiate ourselves.
It is a part of our nature to push the boundaries of our capacity to feel death… to look death in the face even though we are terrified. We have an instinctual drive to hunt for the thing that we are scared of most. And when we do not have the proper container to be initiated, the soul will find a way to initiate us by showing us what we don't want to look at within ourselves, or by lending us a powerful experience (usually traumatic) to WAKE UP!
Or we may go the other direction ~ we may have been instilled with fear and control that we stay within the confines of our parents, education system, or any system that feels like we are in control so we do not reflect or resemble any kind of risk at all. Yet, unknowingly, this too is a date with death as we slowly kill our soul and in a different way.
Being witnessed is also an important to the process of initiation, transformation and rites of passage because we are held accountable to stay the course of the path we are choosing, or what path has chosen us.
When the community is in understanding of the initiation everyone must go through, we are all then holding a space of acceptance and awareness of the one being initiated, and what they must go through in order to earn the wisdom of initiation. When our elders are standing before us, also having been through initiation, they understand what it takes to earn this crossing into deeper embodiment of Self. When youth and peers are standing beside us and behind us, they learn to prepare for their own initiation and have allies to look to for support.
When we do not have this community support, we look for initiation in all of the wrong places (sex, drugs, money, material gains, workaholism, marriage, etc etc) and spiral in the same stuckness for years or a lifetime without passing through the full cycle of transformation.
As adolescents, when we truly go deep within to face our shadows, we come out on the other side holding our gifts. This is initiation... when we find the roses which come from our thorns. The wounded healer emerges.
What ways have you been initiated in your life?
Were the initiations planned, unconscious or accidental?
What were the lessons gathered from this profound time?
What did you shed/leave behind and what did you birth within your life?
How did you integrate the lessons into your life now?
Who was there to support you? Who did you want there to support you that was not?
Where were you? What environment?
What sensations do you remember; smells, tastes, bodily sensations, visuals, sounds, feelings/emotions?
What age were you?
What was happening in your life during this time of initiation?
Was there a way you would have liked to be initiated throughout your life but did not get the opportunity to?
Like the caterpillar willingly creating its cocoon to dissolve into the butterfly it already is… we each have inside us the ability and readiness to become who we are.
The caterpillar teaches us of transformation because it instinctively knows it has to go into the darkness. It has to create this home of depth and solitude for itself to receive its wings.
And like with any initiation, we must go deep inside ourselves to meet the shadows and uncomfortable parts of Self before we can find self love.
I hope this spring you take the time to rise from the depths of winter with wide wings. That you walk with your gifts humbly and with care. That you honor your wounds and share them as medicine for the world.
Wildly,
Hannah
