If You Don’t Initiate the Young, They Will Burn Down the Village to Feel the Heat” – African Proverb
Next program coming April 20-27, 2021! Reach out now if you feel the call.
At our core, young and old, all of use need to know our identity, purpose, and who our people are. Vision fast and rites of passage programs show us this more clearly than most existing systems used in our society today. While we attend school and bodies age, becoming fully ourselves, someone that has vision, wisdom, and living fully in our identity and purpose does not just happen automatically.
While it is true, some young (or old – as we all have a young one within us) will act out and burn the village down when they don’t know themselves, what we see most often are depression, isolation, failure to thrive, and just being unhappy and disgruntled with life.
Rites of Passage and initiations exist in our society already, but they are incomplete. Getting a driver’s license, graduating high school or college, getting married, promotions in the work place, giving birth to a child, becoming legal age to vote, or drink alcohol, etc… are all common Rites of Passage many of us experience, but on their own, what do they give us? Any rites of passage marks a severance from an old stage and a stepping into a new phase of life, a new way of being, a new identity, using new abilities, or an endorsement to use new skills or knowledge.
What is missing from our existing rites of passage in the west? Often, they have a lack of intention, a lack of containment through process or community, and a lack of welcoming the new initiate and recognition by the community. Further, in our society most rites are bestowed on an individual from an external authority sometimes without the understanding, consideration, or desire of the individual undergoing the transformation to choose to take on these new attributes. And finally, life goes on as normal without the people in the person’s life -friends, family, treating the individual differently, choosing instead to keep them in their old identity because it is easier to relate to how they have always been.
Utilizing the ancient cross cultural practice of a vision fast – sending someone out alone in the woods for a few days without food and with minimal belongings or shelter empowers the individual to look deep inside to find and claim the parts of them that are there and ready to be brought forth into the world in this new phase of life. And this practice is done in the container of a community that forms, for preparation, support, welcoming back, and affirming this new person and their newly found gifts.
Who would want to undertake such a quest?
Vision fast is an important ritual for all people at all stages of life. This ceremony is for questioning, seeking, finding, learning, discovering, re-discovering, or claiming a new identity or parts of your identity and marking change or transition in life. A perfect ritual for beginnings, endings, or lost somewhere in the middle – of life, career, relationship, identity, family, school, and more. . .
The most commonly thought about time to undergo a vision fast is transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. Sometime between age 16-25 depending on the personality and maturity of the individual. However life has many transitions, such as graduations, beginnings and endings of jobs, careers, relationships, and roles. Further, changing from teen to adult, college student to independent adult, individual to parent, parent to empty nester, adult to elder, changes in decades, and more are all important milestones that can be marked with a rite of passage. Marking these milestones with a deep intention and ceremony such as vision fast can help you get the most out of the transition, and almost everyone learns and experiences things way beyond what was expected and would not have gained any other way.
Every Rite of Passage is thought to have three main phases:
Severance: Severance begins when the initiate decides that they intend to pursue a Rite of Passage to mark their life transition. Severance can begin six months to a year before the actual “threshold” experience. Severance includes reflection on life past, planning and preparation for the ordeal, preparing to leave behind old ways of being, and intention setting for what the person hopes to gain from the experience.
Threshold: The threshold time is the time of the ceremony itself. A time set apart from ordinary life with its schedules, routines, and habits, so that the individual can be immersed in a non-ordinary state that can be explored on their own. Free of expectations and old patterns, threshold time is the time in between the old and the new where discovery, learning, and creation are possible.
Incorporation: Once the ceremony is complete, the lessons are shared, reflected on, affirmed, and put into practice. Incorporation is about embodying and living the new role, stage, and lessons of the rite of passage. One of the most common failures of modern retreats and personal growth opportunities is a failure in incorporation. The lessons are real, and it is the job of the guides and community to support and assist the initiate with incorporating and living the new ways of being learned and experienced in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
Are you ready to step more fully into your whole self and the next phase of your life? Check our calendar to see coming dates for programs. And contact us as soon as possible. Severance begins the moment you commit. And the longer you have to prepare the better your experience will be.
The Invitation
Have you heard the call at some point in your life to a vision quest? Who are you? How do you stand in this world? How are you connected – to yourself? To others? To community? To things beyond yourself? Are you lost, confused, or grinding through life feeling exhausted and wondering what’s the point? Or are you stuck and can’t find direction or energy to move forward with your dreams? Do you know who you are and what you want, but struggle to step fully into it? Or has the dream slipped away? Or has it never been seen?
Through council, solitude, poetry, song, mindfulness, fasting, ritual, instruction, and more you will reconnect and rediscover your relationship with yourself and the world. All genders, ethnicity, and beliefs are welcome. All of you is welcome here. Especially the parts of you that you don’t yet know.
Using the natural world as our teacher, this ceremony is for questioning, seeking, finding, learning, discovering, re-discovering, or claiming a new identity or parts of your identity and marking change or transition in life. A perfect ritual for beginnings, endings, or lost somewhere in the middle – of life, career, relationship, identity, family, school, and more. . .
By choosing to engage in this ceremony, you will unplug from your stories, roles, routines, and habits to deepen your knowledge of yourself. You will have the opportunity to be witnessed in transforming these old patterns and healing old wounds. Paradoxically despite being alone, you will forge new community. Not with just ordinary people, but people who like you, have seen that to learn, grow, heal, and mature we need non-ordinary experiences. People who have chosen to create an intentional transformative ritual that has been done by many people in many cultures, from many faiths and no faiths, all over the world for thousands of years. And you will connect with a community beyond people. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people have done this, many think about it, many long for something, not knowing what is possible, but few today ever take up the call. Will you? All genders age 18 and up are welcome.
If you have heard the call at some point in your life, or are feeling a call right now, you are invited. You won’t get more of an invitation than this. Nobody will ever tell you to do it, it has to come from within yourself. If you have felt that call, reach out and start the process soon. The more time you have to prepare the better. We’ll help you be ready. Call or email grow@reconnectingtoournature.com today.
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