A Culture of Initiation
“Her ultimate place is identified not by any social forms or roles, but rather, by the symbols, stories and archetypes unearthed from the deep structure of her psyche and by the way the world invites her to belong to it.”
- Bill Plotkin (1)
A culture based on pervasive violence has eroded our once mystical and everyday connection to the web of life, to sacred life and to soul-led culture. This includes the loss of a culture of soul initiation, where initiatory processes and soul community help to grow us into adults who can act on behalf of all life, with wisdom and love. Both Bill Plotkin, in his book Journey of Soul Initiation (2), and Francis Weller, in his collection of essays, In the Absence of the Ordinary, describe the cultural need for processes of initiation, to ripen us into adults who can serve the communal soul and the whole web of life.
“The immediate need of our time is for ripened and seasoned adult human beings to take their place in our communities; individuals who carry a deep and abiding fidelity to the living body of this benevolent earth, to beauty, and to their own souls. Traditionally, these were the ones who had successfully crossed a series of initiatory thresholds and had come through as protectors and carriers of the communal soul. They were the ones whose artistry and wisdom kept the current of culture alive. We live in a society that has all but abandoned rituals of initiation. Consequently, we are languishing from the absence of mature and robust adults.”
- Francis Weller (3)
Both personal and planetary initiation is vital if we are to survive the fiery threshold of these precarious times. Yet the current culture of trauma, as Francis Weller describes it, is a huge challenge to creating a culture of initiation. Whilst the remarkable body of work around trauma over the last decade offers effective pathways for healing from trauma, I think it is important to consistently name violence as the cause of widespread trauma. Thus, I prefer to name our current culture as one of both violence and trauma. This naming of violence helps direct our attention to the deep underlying causes of trauma and to the social change needed to address and prevent this systemic violence. Importantly, violence and trauma arise from a culture that denigrates both nature and soul, leading to a culture of uninitiated adults.
Yet some people wake up. How do we become initiated adults? How do we become seasoned adults who live not from a sense of entitlement but a sense of our wild entanglement with the whole earth community? How do we become humans with authenticity, wisdom and heart, who work to reweave a culture based on love, and live from this love that is entangled with the whole web of life?
The pathway of personal initiation includes a time of severance from the everyday world we know, to dislodge our old identity and evoke a radical alteration in our sense of self. Weller describes how in traditional cultures there existed adolescent rites of passage that included intense rituals over weeks or months, in solitude, in nature. In modern Western culture, we need contemporary soul initiation processes based in nature, such as those offered by Animas Valley Institute, as described by Bill Plotkin in his book the Journey of Soul Initiation. (4)
Contemporary journeys of soul initiation involve nature based soul practices designed to take the individual to an edge of themselves of great vulnerability and longing. At this edge, there is a dying of an old life, an old self, that urges the individual to call for help from something deeper within, from something beyond. This edge becomes a mystical threshold between an outgrown self to a self unique and authentic.
Like the Australian wattle and banksia seeds that need heat from fire to germinate, the heat of soul encounter cracks open the seed of the soul-self. As Bill Plotkin describes, a soul encounter is an experience of one’s deepest unique essence, of a deeper, truer identity, that may be expressed as a mythopoetic identity. In this cracking open to reveal the soul, the illusion of the seperate self is also cracked open, for this is not primarily a psychological or individual process, but a return to deep belonging and place within the web of life. The individual may return from this threshold encounter not only with a heightened sense of sovereignty and sacred purpose, but also a deepened sense of love and responsibility for the whole earth community.
As a result of soul initiation, Bill Plotkin writes, “our identity undergoes the transition from fundamentally social, to fundamentally ecological and soulful..we die to an old, familiar identity and are shape-shifted into something previously unimaginable to the Ego..The revelatory world view and transformed identity give rise to moments of intense aliveness and a sense of having pass through a veil into a strange and unfamiliar world, yet one that feels more intimate and personal than any previous moments in life.” (5)
I want to clarify here, as described by Bill Plotkin, that soul initiation is a process that usually takes many years. Rituals, such as vision quests, can evoke profound, life-transforming soul encounters, but cannot evoke full initiation. A soul encounter sows soul-seeds, but it then usually takes years for us to grow these soul-seeds and fully embody the vision and gifts of the soul-self. Through ongoing soul-based and nature-based practice we grow into the ecological niche that our soul reveals. We claim our soul gifts and powers. We slowly become true adults. We become initiated. Soul initiation is a homecoming, a return to a life lived from the wider and wider circles of belonging. Soul initiation shows us our contribution to the ongoing creation story of this participatory, inclusive and sacred cosmos.
Devastatingly, violence and trauma have become the default initiatory rites of passage, for so many across our planet home. Often this violent rite of passage is inflicted on children and teenagers, especially with the current global epidemic of domestic violence. By definition, trauma is any encounter that overwhelms the capacity of the psyche to process that experience. This encounter could be acute or prolonged. Weller describes prolonged, developmental trauma, as slow trauma, the slow erosion of safety and worth from prolonged physical, psychological, sexual or emotional violence such as neglect, abandonment or shaming.
What makes an experience traumatic, alongside the pain of the experience, is the absence of support and an adequate caring, holding environment. When we experiences violence as a child, we need at least one compassionate witness, an attuned and attentive individual who can sense our distress and offer assurance, safety and help in processing the violent experience. Without this compassionate witness, we are left alone with an overwhelming experience that we cannot process, leaving us isolated, exiled and often with experiences of shame, unworthiness, a feeling of being outside of the circle of welcome and belonging.
Weller describes the experience of soul encounter as a “contained encounter with death”, where an old self dies. The individual experiences an alternate reality, outside of mainstream or consensus reality, that can bring forth the potential for a radical alteration of self. We sense that there is no return to the old life. We are radically changed by the encounter. The containment, or safe, held space, is provided by mentors, elders, soul community, ritual, soul-based practice, and by the deep container of mother earth and the web of life.
In contrast, Weller describes violence and trauma as “an uncontained encounter with death.” There is no support, loving family or village to adjust to the traumatic devastation of violence. Similar to a soul encounter, when we experience violence as a child, we also experience the loss of an old self and an alternate reality, outside of consensus reality. For example, the child who experienced sexual abuse and is threatened into silence or a child experiencing years of neglect is in an alternate sense of reality. Their known existence is shattered. This leads to a radical change in the sense of self. We sense that there is no return to the old life. We are radically changed by the encounter, but there is no loving guidance or witness of this change. We might feel like the black sheep of the family. We carry this traumatic devastation, alone, unsupported, often in silence. This radically changed sense of self can too often carry deeply internalised shame, self-blame and unworthiness.
Here Weller draws a powerful parallel between the genuine initiatory experience of soul encounter, held within loving, witnessing community and what he calls the “rough initiation” of trauma and violence, without the holding of a witnessing and loving community. I would describe trauma as a devastation rather than use the term ‘rough initiation’, to make clear that the experience of trauma and violence, when experienced in isolation, often at a young age, is not true initiation (though the core wound can become initiatory when as an adult we have support to process and learn from the core wounding).
How do we heal traumatic devastation and restore the psyche after trauma? To heal from trauma, we need to recreate in adulthood the significant missing pieces from our childhood. First we need loving support, witnessing and guidance. A compassionate witness holding space for our healing is a potent way to move through often engrained patterns based on shame, unworthiness, self-blame and so on. We need to turn to our pain, to our feelings, the emotions that we were unable to process as children. We need to feel to heal. To feel pain, that may have been buried for decades, is one of the most courageous and difficult steps on any path of healing from childhood violence. There will most likely be deeply internalised conditioning that prevents us from sharing our pain with another. Being witnessed and supported is a powerful way to unravel the script of isolation and return to safety, belonging and human connection.
For soul initiation, we need supportive, loving and contained initiation processes. We need: loving witnesses as we emotionally process our core wounding; mentors who can guide us; community that can hold us; and soul-based and nature-based practices and rituals that can help us reclaim the deeper soul-self, within the profound holding and love of Mother Earth and the web of life.
Through healing and souling, we draw to us the specific medicine that we need to understand the violence that we have experienced. The aim here is not so much to resolve or remove the core wound, but rather to be ripened by the wound. Being ripened by the wound is to understand the place of the wound in not only our life journey, but also within the deepest mythical unfolding of our soul’s path. Being ripened by our core wounding is a powerful initiation process itself. We work through the ways the wound has conditioned us and the ways it brings forth our specific, unique gifts. The core wound can show us both what medicine we need to receive to heal and the unique and specific medicine that we have to give to the world. Then our core wound ripens into the sacred wound and a sacred initiation at the threshold between violence and love. The sacred wound is a sacred and potent gateway into our soul gifts and contribution to the world.
When our wounds are ripened, as soul-initiated individuals, we know that we are not bearing open wounds any longer. Instead we proudly carry our scars. As Clarissa Pinkola writes: “Be proud of your scars. They have everything to do with your strength and what you have endured. They’re a treasure map to the deep self.” (6)
Injustice, exploitation and violence are often carried out by individuals who have experienced violence and who are uninitiated adults. If we can replace the cycle of global cultural violence with a culture of soul initiation, we can connect with the unshakeable love that is intrinsic to our soul essence. Then may our path show us the love we always were, the love we always will be, the love we are. May our love ripen and bear fruit and transform the world.
Anahata Giri
September 2024
Footnotes
(1) Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, New World Library, 2008, p. 252
(2) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021
(3) Francis Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary, WisdomBridge Press, 2021
(4) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021. www.animas.org
(5) Bill Plotkin, Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library, 2021
(6) Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Rider, 2008.