I just spent 4 days with hundreds of women dancing and praying for the Feminine principle. It was nothing short of breathtaking.

I feel called to keep much of my experience private but what I am leaving with is the importance of ritual and containment to honor the transitions and ever-changing phases of a woman’s life.

Rituals and rites of passage are designed to recognize and honor significant shifts in our lives: becoming fertile, becoming a psychological adult, getting married, the passage into elderhood, etc. These are all physical and relational transitions that carry with them significant psychic weight. It’s not just our bodies that change at each gate: it’s our entire identity and what is required of us

Our ancestors knew that walking through the thresholds of life required some kind of externalization/dramatization/celebration to really take root in our psyches. Not too long ago our lives as human beings revolved around these rituals. They were not always elaborate but marked a significant shift in the psyche of the individual. They say to the individual, “Something is now over and something new has begun”.

The ritual created distinct psychic walls: a before and an after.

These practices and rituals were essential containers to let the person know this is who you are now.

I know a lot of people, including my past self, downplay the importance of ritual in our current culture. Why does it even matter?

I used to think getting married was a sham. Why does the government need to stamp and seal a union that already felt so alive and true?

But sure enough, when my husband and I decided we would get married, we were met with Goliath-like problems, physical ailments, and emergency surgeries.

Being “carried over the threshold” into life as a wife changed many things in marriage; triggered psychological tension we had never even considered pre-wedding?

Why?

Because rites of passage change us. They change our trajectory. They psychically initiate us into a new stage and create the containment necessary for psychological growth and maturation.

As women we have clear biological initiations: even without external ritual our bodies reveal the shift that is occurring. Our first bleed, pregnancy, birth & motherhood, and menopause are all biological rites of passage. If we menstruate, we can imagine each cycle as a mini rite of passage in its own way, containing the stages of birth, death and transformation.

Our bodies provide clear physical markers of change from one stage to the next but the psychic component in our society is all but lost.

How many of us experienced guidance, support, mirroring, witnessing and celebration in those pivotal moments?

Apart from a baby shower or maybe a bachelorette party, how did the culture prepare us for the dramatic shift in identity that was upon us?

Without the psychic support, many of us - and understandably so - feel altogether lost entering a new stage of life and what it will require of us.

Without some kind of initiation to demarcate a before and after, we will often straddle between two identities, not knowing what needs to be left behind and what should now be embraced.

What once was a naturally evolving, visible gradation of roles and responsibilities for a woman within her community is now a fucking maelstrom of identity crisis, surely compounded by the cultural notion that women be porously all things to everyone at all times.

I see this in nearly all the women I work with, spanning all stages of life.

The loss of feminine initiation rites are part of greater travesty that is the devaluation and denial of the Sacred Feminine.

Without the containment of feminine rites and rituals, we as women often experience confusion, shame, separation from our bodies and the natural processes of our body (the blood of our menses, pubic hair, pregnancy weight, wrinkles, etc.)

Most of us went through the moments that should have shaped us as women alone and scared or worse - with a male authority to tell us how it should be!

Where are the aunties and the grandmothers and the sisters to hold us, to wipe our tears, to orient us in times of egoic dismemberment and reconstruction? To hold us in the darkest hour and assure us that the sun will rise again, we will rise again.

Well, many of them are also bearing the cost of their own incomplete initiations, unable to be the guides that we so desperately need.

The devastation we are all confronted by now is that we are generations and generations of women living incomplete initiations.

We are generations of women at all different stages of life, confused about who we are and the innate power of our particular stage of life.

We look to Instagram and TikTok for the answers.

Is it any wonder that we’ve drank the Koolaid and hope to ‘bounce back’ after pregnancy?

Is it any wonder that we spend billions to hide our wrinkles and sunspots?

Is it any wonder we pedestalize youth and admonish aging and becoming?

Is it any wonder that the 20 year old lifecoach in a bikini will have as much credibility as the 80year old midwife or the indigenous grandmother?

At its core, initiation is sacrifice. It is a giving up of who we once were so that we can become who we are meant to be.

The root word of sacrifice is ‘sacer’ - to make sacred.

Initiations are a sacred offering of what needs to die so that we can live what is ours to live.

Sacrifice requires courage, faith and discipline. Growth through sacrifice is hard earned.

You can feel it in a woman.

What we have lost without conscious rites of passage is truly immeasurable.

The bitterness of an 80year old uninitiated woman, living, thinking, behaving like a 20 year-old maiden is a painful thing.

Every initiation is a descent—a sacrifice laid upon the altar of transformation. So many of us are searching- sometimes without even having the words for our longing - for practices that initiate us and ground us in the reality of our flesh because even unconsciously, our body stores our rites of passage as women.

Every journey into the body is a descent journey and therefore an opportunity to re-meet an incomplete initiation: to meet the shame that has followed us since our mother refused to acknowledge our menstrual blood; the pain of mothering as a maiden; the rage of having your peri-menopause symptoms dismissed or pathologized.

The task of initiating ourselves may feel impossible. And sometimes it genuinely is.

Sometimes we need the community, the repair, the actual holding of a person/s to make it through the gate of wherever Soul is guiding us.

But let’s not forget that the body is an altar, too.

And Soul, the very thing that meets us and moves us in times of descent and initiation, is always listening and guiding.