Yearning For A True Initiation

On alchemizing the most painful experiences of my life into medicine to bring the world.

I reached a peak of internal discomfort with my own life after the birth of my second child. Laying in bed with my perfect baby, I felt so alone. Just like every other part of my life, I thought I’d done everything “right” to set myself up for a perfect home birth and a supported postpartum time. Instead I was disturbed by my birth experience and felt lonely and defeated. I had so many of the things I had always wanted in my life—a loving husband, beautiful and healthy children, a well respected career…and yet, I felt unfulfilled and disconnected from my true self.

Here I was, at the threshold of initiation, but struggling to come out the other side. This was not the first time I’d been at this potent threshold; I’d also been there after the death of my father and in my recovery from amphetamine addiction. In all of these experiences there was a maturity, a state of radical responsibility that I was still resisting. My string of suspended initiations left me striving for outer world success and acceptance, while I continued to play out the adolescent threads from earlier parts of life. I was so good at being a good girl, at following instructions, trying to be perfect. Steeped in conditioning and unprocessed childhood trauma, I created a life that was safe and comfortable and acceptable. I was really good at being someone that I thought I was supposed to be.

When my husband returned to work after the first few weeks of our son’s life, I found myself overwhelmed and home alone with a newborn and a 2 year old. This was not what I expected motherhood to be. I was unsettled at home, but also dreading going back to work. I knew I’d grown out of my job and was no longer in integrity with the career I’d invested so much into. In the years before, I had tried so many things to revive the fulfillment I’d once felt with my work, but I was confronting the undeniable the truth that I’d grown out of it and was ready to move on.

My house of cards was crumbling.

My Soul was screaming for attention.

At this point in my life, I had been on a spiritual path and deeply devoted to my own inner work for nearly a decade. I had cultivated an embodied connection with the Divine, awakened a powerful flow of life force energy within me and witnessed first hand things I never would have believed possible—mystical experiences, physical healings, manifestations, and mystifying synchronicities.

My life was indeed filled with so much light, so much goodness. I knew what it was to be fully present and had carved a well-worn path within me to that state of being. I was so often filled with wonder and awe at the world around me, seeing the divine perfection in all of Life. Even with all of the tools and practices I had, I felt so unsettled in the unbecoming of early motherhood. I was being transformed from the inside out, thrust into the greatest period of unpredictability of my life.

I was also deeply uncomfortable with the way early motherhood had uprooted the shadow within me. Fear, anger, sadness were all cycling through me, to degrees I had never been in connection with before. I had a story that negative emotions were bad and wrong, rejecting and pushing away all thoughts and feelings that I didn’t believe were acceptable. Admitting that I was struggling with an overwhelming feeling of darkness, much less accepting it or diving deeper into it, was something that I had never been willing to do.

I lingered in this very lost place for well over a year. When I re-connected with an old friend he said: “Perhaps falling apart is exactly what you need.” I’ll never forget that. Something unlocked in me and I knew he was right.

In a culture that’s forgotten it’s initiatory rights of passage, nobody will be guiding us towards initiation. We don’t have elders around us, tracking our internal stirrings, showing up and saying “it’s time.” Without intact cultural holding, we stumble through major thresholds in life and often emerge on the other side more fragmented than before. Which in turn leads to anxiety, depression, addiction - all which I have had my own journey with.

Instead, our own soul will nudge us towards initiation—confront us even—most often through pain and discomfort until we’re willing to wake up and listen.

In the Colorado high country at the peak of summer, I participated in an initiatory wilderness-based vision fast. Throughout human history, there are stories of people going out to the land in search of vision, yet this archetypal human experience is missing for so many in the modern western world. It certainly was for me. After a series of suspended initiations and my own discomfort with my life at such a peak, I ached for the opportunity to complete my own initiation. To meet my own soul and the truth of who I am. I found the psychospiritual initiation I’d been yearning for, and it was a missing piece in all of my transformational work up until that point.

The first two days of our quest were spent at a retreat center deep in the Rocky Mountains. Within hours of arriving I already felt myself cracking open. Falling apart. The difference this time was that along side falling apart, I felt held and supported. Supported by my guides and by the Earth, I was no longer alone. I was supported too by the connection to oneness that I had spent so many years of my life cultivating—a resource within me, and all around me, that I knew I could return to at any moment. Now, I was finally willing to go into the depths of my own shadow, into the darkness. Into the places I’d been too scared or ashamed to go. And I trusted that I would come out the other side.

On the second afternoon, we were offered a prompt to write letter to someone in our life. I set out into the woods to write my letter, feeling frustrated with the assignment. It brought up things I’d never been willing to look at, much less share with others. Later that evening, I read my letter aloud to the group, feeling the deepest pain arise within me. Weeping for the little girl and all she went through. As I wept, my group held me in loving witness as my own core wound was rising to the surface. Having people to reveal our darkness to and to have love reflected back is one of the most important parts of the healing process.

It’s so important to have spaces and relationships where you can reveal the most unacceptable and unlovable things about yourself. Because when you do, you’ll realize that they don’t actually make you so flawed, defective, unlovable or unworthy. We all have those things and we just feed them more when we keep them in the dark and continue to believe they are true. Darkness cannot survive when we shine light on it.

We headed into the back country, set up basecamp as a group where we stayed for the first two nights.

We wandered in nature, building a connection with the land and courting our own souls.

We welcomed our wildness, noticing the urges and sensations stirring in our bodies.

We sat in ceremony, witnessing each other in their process.

We worked with our dreams, paying particular attention to the parts that disturbed, frightened and aroused us.

We ate our last meal, and began our extended water fast.

We said our goodbyes, and departed on our solos.

Alone in the wilderness without food or comforts, I settled into an embodied flow with the natural world. My body and nervous system were in a slow coherent resonance with the Earth, my heart full of grief and love and joy and pain, and my thoughts in clear communication with Life all around me—with the trees, the trout, the stones. As the days unfolded, the layers of my ego peeled back further and further, all of my conditioning and identities set aside.

I spoke the story of my life to the valley.

I wept for my father.

I placed stones in the 4 directions and called in my wholeness.

I shared my shame with the trees.

I rested and slept, dancing in the dream world.

I marveled at the sunset, and the overwhelming beauty all around.

I watched the stars emerge.

I spoke to the moon and felt the divine feminine rising within me.

I ached for my husband and children.

I spoke aloud the stories of my children’s births, and how they changed me.

I laid on the warm boulders, opening myself to the valley.

I sang.

I offered wisdom to my younger self.

I enacted a death lodge ceremony, and laid to rest the little girl in me who was never enough.

I dreamed of fruit trees.

I slept under the stars and welcomed the sun with song.

I worked with the content of my own life in the same way the alchemist works with a base material. My own pain, discomfort, traumas and wounding were the material for the alchemical vessel. One of the principles of alchemy is modulating heat, so I created a nurturing holding space for my deepest wounds to keep them warm. This warmth allows for movement, ripening, and ultimately transformation. So much of what we were doing in the group experience leading up to the quest was creating heat, creating the perfect conditions for an elemental shift.

We all returned to base camp, and together we broke our fast. Then we gathered in ceremony, each person sharing what happened on their solo. We laughed and cried and revealed the deepest and most tender parts of ourselves. We saw the truth in one another, and the truth within ourselves.

We emerged from the back country, said our goodbyes and I drove the 4 hours home. The summer sun was just beginning to set as I pulled up in front of our home. I wore a long white linen dress, a ceremonial outfit to acknowledge my journey and my return. My kids were already asleep, and inside our home my husband had lit many candles. Opening the door, he welcomed me into loving arms and we sat down on the couch together. In full loving presence he said “so, tell me what happened.” It still brings tears to my eyes to remember, this welcome home was one of the most important parts of my journey. For my beloved husband, the person I have chosen to weave a life with, to witness and acknowledge my transformation.

Community is at the heart of a soulful life, and community holding is an essential component of any successful initiation. It’s not the community that does your work for you. You do your own work. But community is essential for us to complete our initiations—to be witnessed and celebrated for the depths we have traversed in our own becoming.

In initiation, who you are, dies. In many traditional cultures, when someone goes out on an initiation, the family back home has a funeral ceremony. When they come back, it’s acknowledged they have returned changed, as someone reborn.

It is such an essential part of the process to have enough people around us to tell our story too, and to have them affirm something truthful about who we are. This was one of the biggest pieces that was missing for me in all of my suspended initiations, and something that made my quest so potent and transformative. Many of the other people from my quest have become lifelong friends, and we support one another in the continued integration and enactments of bringing our soul gifts in the world.

There’s a mutually entangled blessing that the more we drop into our essential soul nature, the more we have to bring back to the community. Traditionally, initiation was never about the individual, it was about the collective.

My own childhood left me with a deep imprint of believing I was less than, and also a pattern of taking on a disproportionate amount of responsibility within my family. Something within me chose to focus on all the things I didn’t have, and I couldn’t see all the things I did have. There was not enough love and connection, not enough resources, not enough opportunities. Many of my earliest childhood relationships reinforced this belief, and I made up a story within myself that I would never be as good as them, creating a desperate need for external approval. My reaction was to withdraw and disconnect from my body and emotions. Amidst chaos and disconnection, I found a way to functionally dissociate to keep myself from feeling the pain…from feeling much of anything. Withdrawing has been a tendency as long as I can remember, which I see now as a beautiful defense mechanism for a little girl who was completely overwhelmed.

When we tend to our core wounds, they transform into sacred wounds. That was my greatest work on my quest, and continues to be my work as I integrate my soul initiation. In confronting my core wound, I alchemized the most painful experiences of my life into medicine to bring to the world.

To nurture and align with the blueprint of Thriving Life.

To speak truths, and open minds and hearts to new possibilities.

To attune to the group field, to the energy of the collective.

To hold it all: life with death, pleasure with pain, joy with sorrow, expansion with contraction.

To embody the wholeness of the Mother.

Through this journey, I also found a really important balance that I’d been missing in my experience of the sacred. There are two ways to access the sacred, and we need both. One is upward, into oneness and the light. The other is downward, into the pain and suffering and darkness. Welcoming the darkness has unlocked a tremendous capacity within me to be present with all experiences, and to hold others in that journey. We access and embody our wholeness when we invite all parts of us to be present.

As I’ve oriented more towards embracing my darkness, I’ve done so with great intention and thoughtfulness. With ritual, with structure, with support. And perhaps most importantly: with community. Without this scaffolding, it can feel too overwhelming to bring out the parts of us we’ve never welcomed, the parts that feel safer to reject. Creating support for myself through Somatic Experiencing in particular has allowed me to continue to unpack, integrate and embody the many layers. The more I’ve made this part of my own practice, the more I’ve expanded into doing this work on my own. But it didn’t start that way. At first, I needed the holding that I’m now able to provide for others.

The quest was undeniably one of the most important experience of my life. I met the truth of who I am, and I know myself in a way I had always longed for. And, the integration has been a slow unfurling, an ever expanding spiral. I still dance with self-doubt, and have been humbled by the recognition of how much more there is to understand and integrate about myself. I am very much still in the tender metamorphosis, gently and patiently making my way through the greatest becoming of my life.

After all, this is the work of a lifetime.