This is a Thing?

Pssst . . . have you heard about this? 

Contemporary Wilderness Rites of Passage. 

A contemporary wilderness rites of passage experience is a real and time-honored practice that is undertaken to mark a major transition or change in a person's life. The pan-cultural form of this ancient ceremony harvests what is common to ceremonies enacted by human beings for ages, and makes a new 'ceremony' relevant for modern people.

I do (and I love) this work, and I believe it is a powerful support for anyone who is here to be the change they want to see in the world.

It goes like this: The guides (that would be me and my co-guide) create a safe and sacred space for a small group of people to be out in relatively wild landscape for nine (or so) days — each participant seeking their own wisdom and direction. As guides, we offer support, build community, and help clarify intentions. Everyone gradually sheds the busyness and stress of normal life and we drop down together into the world behind the world and into our indigenous selves. {Separation Phase} 

Then participants spend three days and nights in solo time on the land, fasting. {Threshold Phase}

Upon returning, the tribe spends the remaining days listening to everyone's sacred stories, being witnessed by our now tight community. We are stripped bare of pretense and fear. And then we prepare to enter back into the world, newly born. {Reincorporation}

This modern-day ceremony is not the actual initiation. Life is the initiation. This ceremony makes the initiation life gives us conscious, makes it real, makes it holy. Its healing and holding can be the difference between getting lost or getting found, being alone or being held, maturing for real or staying forever small.

I'm guiding a rites of passage trip in early September in Northern Utah. Check it out.

Other guides doing this work in the USA can be found here.