“Your culture has failed you.”
These words, reverberating bone deep through wounded child parts, through ancestral memory, through to the farthest recesses of my soul.
These words spoken to me during a dreamwork session, in the midst of a wave of grief about not having known how to effectively guide my intimate partners in how to best to love and care for me. Feeling the grief of how they wanted to get it right. How I wanted to get it right. How we felt we had failed. Perhaps because of a sense of disconnection from Soul, as the part of us that, as Francis Weller says, doesn’t care about getting it right, but only wants to participate in the world.
I feel my own grief-longing and witness that of so many children and uninitiated adults struggling to love and feel loved. To see and feel seen. To remember how to orient ourselves to time, space, and transformation in these human bodies on this cyclical life/death/life journey.
So many of us are striving to feel wholly and interdependently human in a modern culture that has in so many ways lost connection to the ancient practices of rites of passage – those ceremonies that mark the pivotal transition moments of the stages of our becoming. Like the damselfly or snake, we are creatures that grow through incomplete metamorphosis. That is, through a subtle, gradual, at times imperceptible shedding of skins that reveals an evermore mature version of who we are.
Choosing to spend twelve days in the desert in a vision fast ceremony with fifteen other women was, for me, a choice to intentionally slough off any old skins that had been waiting for me to rub my naked body against a hot stone, in the company of others intending to engage in a death ceremony, informed and celebrated by millennia of ancestors who have also given themselves to the soul of the world in this way.
The culminating experience of the vision fast ceremony was four days abstaining from food, with three days and nights spent alone in communion with one small piece of land in the world that specifically called each of us into relationship with it. The choice to fold myself into this lineage of soul work has been one of the most powerful experiences of remembrance and connection that I’ve been blessed to receive.
It’s easy to forget the constantly offered invitation to slow down and fold ourselves into a vibrantly pulsing piece of Earth’s body, a body that can both shake and cradle us as we move between the worlds of beauty and forgetting.
On the morning of April 9, 2021, in the vast, alive desert of Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona, I was shaken. I was wracked with sobs and swirling feelings of the beauty and forgetting of love… loss… loneliness… longing.
And then, like a bomb, like a balm, like a cradle of memory: “You’re culture has failed you.”
The affirmation of a multi-generational pain point.
These words, an invitation to not be alone in my grief, but to be held in it.
And also, in that moment of feeling seen and held by an initiated woman who had undergone these same initiation rituals, while being held by desert ground that has witnessed so many initiation rituals, it was an invitation to celebrate the re-emergence and reclamation of rites of passage that is happening as we speak.
These words were spoken for me and for you by Mary Marsden, one of the Vision Fast guides of the Animas Institute, an organization that is re-weaving rites of passage work into the hearts, souls, and communities of the western world. Started by Bill Plotkin in 1980, and following on the heels of School of Lost Borders (another organization that guides Rites of Passage), the Animas Institute has programs that span a wide range of soul exploration, including The Animas Quest, which “is a ceremonial descent to the underworld — a modern rite of initiation — where seekers die to the familiar way of belonging and return with greater clarity of their soul’s purpose and place in the world.”
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Rites of passage work has roots in indigenous cultures from all over the world, from the more recent and often still intact indigenous cultures of the Americas, to long forgotten and slowly remembered practices of indo-European cultures. Animas quests are grounded in the same fertile soil from which all human wisdom has arisen: direct experience, communion with the natural world, and attunement to our own innermost longings and devotion to the Mystery.
I find it impossible to speak of initiation rituals without speaking of longing; both the longing to encounter aspects of my soul that have not yet revealed themselves, and the longing to viscerally remember the ways I am woven into an interdependent eco-system of both human and other than human beings.
It is a longing to move from an ego-centric view of the world that believes the ego is at the center of the psyche, to an eco-centric worldview that acknowledges that the human psyche is a fractal conglomeration of wind, water, weather, butterfly, rattlesnake, mountain lion, bobcat, hummingbird, cardinal, horse, javelina, coatimundi, Saguaro, mesquite, cottonwood, jasmine, sand, stone, whispering ancestors, radiant star families, angels, fairies, sunshine, moonlight, black sky, white light, memory, prophecy, profanity, sacredness, liminality and delight.
I went to vision fast to sit with other women in a circle and pour our hearts into the soil of grandmother’s lap using poetry, story, song, dance, riddles, rattles, dreams, rituals, and trance.
I went to sit by the creek and drink from it, and in receiving its plentiful sustenance, to realize that in many ways, my mind wants food more than my body needs it. And also to remember, through the first taste of an avocado after four days of an empty belly, the preciousness of the bounty that Gaia blooms for all beings in her constant and abundant generosity.
I went to revel in watching the damselflies dance in circles on the surface of the creek, and to laugh at the coatis tumbling gaily down small hills in their spring chase play.
I went to cry that I could not hug the prickly cacti, and to praise their lessons about touch, trauma, consent. To introduce myself to them slow enough to find the openings where my hand might make contact with the smooth flesh underneath and between their needles. The skin who’s primary lover is the heat of the sun.
I went to remember that my primary attachment figures are the Earth below my feet and the Sky above my head, and to feel the central channel of my being between my these two celestial parents, holding me always, inviting me deeper into sovereign exploration of the relational experiments of Earth School.
I went to feel the safety and clarity of a container of fellow sisters, who in their presence and holding, allowed my soul to find the dignified strength to channel loving rage through my central channel into one powerfully thunderous roar of an ancient NO! An invocation to all cosmic war forces that proclaimed, like a booming bell for freedom, “We are not your prey!!!”
I went to remember that when I am healing, I need not be the agent of my own healing. That it is ok to let transformation be gentle. That it is ok and encouraged to ask for and receive help from stones and angels, ancestors and friends.
I went to free myself from the illusion that I need to battle in order to be taken care of.
I went to learn that receiving is giving.
I went to die to who I have been taught I should be.
I went to remember who creation is calling me to become.
I went to remember that I am an intergalactic being.
I went to synchronize my body’s waking time with the sunrise.
I went to pray for Beloveds through all space and time, making prayer ties, per the wise suggestion of Gma, who attuned to me through the ethers after months without verbal contact, in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, and sent a text to ask about my rituals. And reminded me that there are elders who are tracking us through time even when we are busy with the matters of the material world. Which reminded me that this is such a large part of what we are doing in rites of passage work: we are preparing to be true and initiated elders so that we may remember how it feels to be truly and deeply seen, held, and guided.
And finally, I went to reclaim a connection to a human experience that is so beautifully named by Francis Weller:
“For the vast majority of human history we have lived in a tribal or village context. That’s where our primary satisfactions took shape. From the moment we are born, we expect to be a part of a tribe; to step out of our enclosure in the morning and see many pairs of eyes looking back at us; to find those people there to meet us and to affirm us; and to go and gather food with them and build a fire and perform the rituals the community needs. When that doesn’t happen, we feel a great emptiness, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. And then we blame ourselves for the emptiness, asking, What’s wrong with me?”
I went to remember that there is nothing wrong with me. And there is nothing wrong with you. It’s simply that our culture has failed us.
And yet, even in that, I know that there are necessary evolutionary movements towards a particular multidimensional kind of sovereignty that has been the gift of these rite-less times. A way of knowing how to hold ourselves that has perhaps prepared us for something.
And still… and still, we each long to be held and witnessed.
When I emerged from the four day fast, I had barely cried, except for a few small moments while singing. But when my flesh touched the flesh of one of the guides in the ritual threshold crossing coming back to the middleworld from the underworld, everything in my physical, emotional, energetic body released into a ecstatic wave of tears. I can feel you. This is real. I am real. You are real. We are real. It’s still happening.
When I listened to everyone’s stories from the land, I watched how layers of my own story revealed, clarified, and integrated into my being. We are weaving a story together.
When I shared my gratitude in our final council, I realized that I had felt safe and held enough by this collective to release the contraction of holding myself enough to birth a part of my soul that had been a long time coming. And as I looked around at each woman who was a part of that holding, I saw fifteen sets of eyes in this small temporary village, greeting and receiving me, in delightful wonder at who I am, who I will become, how we will dance together, and what magic will we create today.
And I realized that also, there is no failure. Not really. There is only this joyful moment in time when, from a place of newfound sovereignty, we get to recreate our rites of passage experiences together, and discover something new about who we are, and who we are becoming, together.
Ashley Berry
Gold Soul Coaching
Social, Emotional, Sexual & Spiritual Guidance for Healthy Relationships
