The developmental challenges for our rites of passage

As we go through life there are different rites of passage we go through. In days gone by, we used to celebrate these transitions and create community support around our friends and loved ones who go through these passageways. This is not something we’ve paid a lot of attention to culturally from many years and I can’t help but wonder how that impacts on the shape of how we grow?

For each stage has a developmental challenge that we must address. If we do not, it hangs around at the next stage of life. For some people it retards their growth, particularly into adulthood or into their second adulthood. This is one of the biggest challenges for most people going through these transitions and it is why many people can get stuck. Particularly when the haven't explored themselves in their teenage years or their early adult years.

The rites of passage we go through are our teenage years, our early adulthood where many of us become parents and put our creative energies into the world, our midlife and our elderhood. Another way some people write about these passages are Rite to Birthright, Rite to Adulthood, Rite to Marriage, Rite to Eldership and Rite to Ancestorship. The latter being the rite of passage that is death.

When we go through a passage, which can take a number of years, we go through a separation phase, then a liminal phase, then an integration or incorporation phase. For most of the people I work with in coaching, the liminal phase is often the hardest because our foundations are shaky due to our changing identity. It is in the presence of community that we are able to transition with greater ease through these phases as it offers support and our space being held by others.

For females, we sometimes refer to these stages as Maiden, Mother, Maga or Queen and Crone. The third stage, the Maga/Queen is relatively newer, really only having been talked about a lot in the last 15 years. It has come about because women are living longer and we can clearly see there is a stage that they go through in Midlife where they are really expressing their gifts to the world in a big way and being their most authentic self.

The developmental challenge for each rite is:

Maiden/Teenager - to explore the world and ourselves whilst being held in the container of the community.

Mother - to express our spirit in the world through our creativity to the world. Whether that be in the form of creating a family, creating our vocational gifts through our work and to receive recognition for that. To say yes to life with all of our energy and vitality behind us.

Maga/Queen - To discern your truth within you and to be radically honest with yourself, to stay present and to learn to be kind to ourselves.

Crone - to let go, rest, receive and trust.

When we don’t express these challenges or explore them they show up in the next phase. So the young woman who perhaps lives in a family where there is high control and she is not able to explore her sexuality in her teenage years, will do that in her twenties, in her next phase. For women in mother phase, many women are focused on looking after young children and don’t get to explore their life’s work at this phase. This can also happen to all of us. For many people in the late teenage years they explore areas of study that have been pushed onto them by their parents; it is not really what they are passionate about. So it is not surprising for many women and men, once they hit midlife to explore alternate career choices and hobbies that might be aligned to what they loved to do in their teens. This is very common now days. It requires some discernment on our part, as we squish a lot of stuff into our life at midlife and we can easily become tired and burned out.

At midlife, where radical honesty with ourselves is the challenge, it is not surprising that many people are faced with working through old trauma, slowing down because their body tells them through physical health issues or pain and learning to create a more grounded relationship with their emotions and how they express them. Come back to the truth of who you are is what our psyche whispers to us.

Finally in our crone years, as we wind down and really enjoy life it is hard for many of us to trust and receive when we have been in a constant spin of productivity for years. These are great years when we can offer mentorship to others and enjoy the flow of life.

So if your teenager is driving you crazy think back to your years and know that they are here to explore themselves in this stage in every way. Let them go, to a point. Our role is to keep them safe as parents but that doesn’t mean locking them up. When it comes to our midlife selves, it’s OK to reconnect to passions you had as a kid, explore it, it is normal. What is important is to acknowledge what is going on and speak about it openly.

How do you deal with big changes in your life?

How do you deal with big changes in your life and how do you learn? The way we enter into, navigate and exit transitions really matters because it sets us up for the next stage of our lives.

We all go through a midlife transition, regardless of gender. I think the unfortunate thing for menopause is that a lot the transition volatility of midlife gets blamed on menopause. They are two separate, but often parallel transitions.

One of the reasons I chose to pursue further study around relationship and sexuality coaching was because, at one time, I had so many executive coaching clients blowing up their lives, in particular their relationships in their midlife transition and I thought I need to learn to support these people better. Whilst I had studied adult development intensively and really understood, the shape of the stages of adult development I was unsure as to what the other factors were, that were getting in the way.

Here is what I know about our midlife transition. It is a HUGE opportunity.

Many people come to this time in life and they feel stuck. Maybe in relationships, in jobs they don't really like. They often reach this stage and don't like where they are, they don't know how to express how they feel about it and don't know how to get it out of it. Many people don't know where to go to find answers and they can often make really big changes and life altering decisions to get away from the pain of what they are feeling. They can't actually see that with everything they are feeling what they are actually crying out for is a transformation in their life.

A lot of pain from our childhood resurfaces to be healed. Many people at this inflexion point in their lives do a bit of an audit. There are hidden gifts within your wounds. Some of us are forced to address childhood trauma, wounding from early relationships in our teens and twenties. When you can face your wounding with compassion, from a different perspective, face the consequences of decisions in the past, when you can give your wounding space, you can come to terms with who you have become.

Old pain that resurfaces, needs time for you to release any grief that is accompanying it. This might mean letting go of long held hopes and dreams. This transition gives you an opportunity to really review you life, the road behind you and the road in front of you and align with your purpose. That is what this transition is really all about, moving from an ego driven early adulthood to a second adulthood driven by purpose and meaning.

It can get derailed really easily can't it?

Especially when you look for answers outside of yourself. Because you see, this transition asks you to dive deep inside of you.

The more you heal and release now, the more you make way for spaciousness, new beginnings and new opportunities in your life. Change does get hard as we get older because we do get a bit stuck in our ways. So midlife is the time to deal with it so we can live well in the second half of life.

If you don't deal with pain, unresolved trauma and wounding now, you step further into victimhood and continue to project this wounding outward and that is when a lot of relationship issues, conflict and unhappiness can occur in the long term. In this time in our lives we have more power to accept ourselves fully and take accountability for our healing. We did not have this power when we were younger but we do have it now.

We can rewrite our transition story at midlife. We can rewrite how we deal with this stage and approach it with acceptance and grace but it takes some inner work. When we can accept all the different parts of ourselves fully, we come home to the truth of who we really are. Don’t cling to the past, that is when you get stuck, heal the wounds from the past, accept where you are now. That creates space for the future.

As Carl Jung said, ‘when we look outside we are dreaming, when we look inside we awaken’.

Midlife Crisis

What is a Midlife Crisis all about and why is it so destructive in so many people’s lives?

The Middle passage is a time of transition in adulthood that can happen anytime from 30s through to our 70s. Most of us are familiar with it happening in our 40s and it is commonly known by the term ‘Midlife Crisis’. It is a time of internal upheaval that some handle well by going inside to explore their inner world. Others not so well when they project it outside. Outside projection shows up as trying to fight ageing, affairs, the new sports car, working out vigorously at the gym, recurrent changing of jobs, the list is long. Without a doubt there is an increased awareness of our mortality as our bodies start to show signs of age, not quite doing what they used to. For many women Peri Menopause is whacked on top of this and it can prove to be a really challenging time in life for them. It is also a time in life where health issues start to show up for many people. It is a time of absolutely huge transition and upheaval in our life that our society as a whole does very little to support.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst, describes it as the time where we transition to our second adulthood. Our first, which he believes is from about twelve years to forty, has been driven by ego. We don’t really know who we are and how to ‘adult’ so we just copy. Our sense of self comes via external validation. We copy our parents, external role models at work; it is a time that we are focused on establishing ourselves. At work by climbing the hierarchy of the organisation, buying property, cars, having children. Driven by the ego we constantly project outwards our unconscious parts of self we have not integrated, the parts of ourselves we split off from to survive. Our original essence that was squashed down to fit in with the demands of parents, family, culture, the world around us. Our childhood patterns created in times of overwhelm or potential abandonment to survive. There is no doubt that the cultural contexts that surround us, with their constant worship of youth, do little to support or encourage us to move toward this transition and see it as the step to emotional freedom that it is for most people.

Our second adulthood according to Hollis is about finding our purpose and realisation of who we really are. It starts when our projections start to dissolve and in search for an answer to the question, “Who am I?”. How do you know when this happens? My observation of coaching many people in this transition over the last 10 years is they start to question everything in their life. Their rose colored glasses have come off and they start to see life as it really is. They start to see through the politics and machiavellian behaviour in the workplace. They start to see side of their partner they haven’t taken notice of before. They actually start to recognise that their partner is human. They get a bit rebellious really. They yearn for change. Some people get depressed because they yearn for change but are so bogged down by the constraints of their current lifecycle they can see no way that they possibly can make changes to their life.

“‘After the Middle Passage, no one can say where the journey will take us. We only know that we must accept responsibility for ourselves, that the path taken by others is not necessarily for us, and that what we are ultimately seeking lies within, not out there’.
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— James Hollis

The turbulence is they psyche's way of pointing us towards integration of self and wholeness. Our bodies are strong and wise, they seek wholeness and healing always. They are constantly sending us messages to point us toward this. Our psyche is saying to us you know those childhood parts of yourself you split off, it is time to go bring them back. Those emotions you were told were unacceptable, go find them and learn to experience them. That nervous system of yours, it needs rewiring so you really know what safety, love and belonging feel like in your body. I describe my body as the home I live in. The home of my soul. Do you know psyche is the greek word for soul? Our soul wants to have a good second half of life, it is telling us ok it is time for you to sort this out.

I’ve spent years studying adult development through a development psychology perspective. If I look at it through a developmental lens it is a time where we grow the shape of our thinking and change the pair of glasses that we see the world through. We move from seeing it as shades of grey to a colorful kaleidoscope of colors that move constantly in and out of each other. Do you remember Kaleidoscopes we had when we were children? I loved them. We are now starting to see the complexity of life in all its color and it is hard to learn the skills we need to thrive because it requires some big changes in our life.

The turbulence is normal and it is ok. It is perfectly normal to start to question. The answers are not outside of you, they are within. Midlife asks of us not to look outside of ourselves but within. Into our inner world. The answers will not be found outside of us. Not in a new relationship with another, not in a new car, not in a new face or new clothes. They reside within us. We are multi-dimensional beings, it is about learning to love all the parts of ourselves and accepting them. The middle passage is a journey to our 'home' and finding the divine within it. It will be hard and challenging, you will lose some friendships along the way because you will simply outgrow people. That is OK, walk away gracefully.

What are some of the ways you can partake in this inner journey? Well there is coaching of course, this is a journey I guide people through. Some people need therapy because they have a lot of trauma in their body that needs to be worked with slowly and carefully so the nervous system can be rewired ( in particular those who suffer from C-PTSD and PTSD). Somatic Experiencing and EMDR are two modalities that work specifically with trauma in a slow way. Talk therapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be useful for some people. Embodied movement particularly for women, that brings them into connection with their Yoni, all their reproductive organs and connects them with their adult feminine power is an excellent practice. Feldenkrais, pilates and ecstatic dance are different practices that bring us back into our body. Breathwork is an excellent practice to work with trauma and unwind old habits and patterns. Mindfulness practices are excellent to start us on our journey to lead us on the journey inward. Traditional meditation where one sits very still are great, they are very masculine by nature. There are more dynamic forms of meditative practice like using a jade egg or kundalini yoga that uses movement, mantra and breath to expand conscious and create capacity in the nervous system.

Finally it is helpful to do this work in groups if you can. I know that sisterhood is a powerful container for healing and growth. There are womens and mens circles that exist everywhere. You can start one up. We move through rites of passage in a more supported and grounded way when we are supported by community.

The list is long. You can find something that works for you and it maybe that you work with a couple of modalities at once. The most important thing is that when you feel the turbulence, you start doing something to set yourself up well for your transition to your second half of life.

Please forward this onto a friend who may be interested. If you are interested in being coached through this transition please contact me for a free consultation call. I will be launching a course this year on Midlife transition for Women that supports transition through Midlife and Menopause. If you are interested sign up to my mail list so you receive information about it.

How culture can shape our narrative around transition

I’ve been watching Grace and Frankie on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it I can recommend it, it is very funny. The common complaint by the two female lead characters, played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, is that as women age they become invisible. Their needs do not matter.

When it comes to transitions and life stages, what is valued by a culture tells you a lot about how they think about it. What is said or not said, gives you implicit clues about how to behave during that transition. So in a culture like ours where no one talks about menopause, what clues are given to women about how to behave? Pretend that it is not happening, try to avoid it at all costs. Be quiet, stay invisible and try to ride it out. Would women’s experiences be different if we talked about it openly and embraced the transition supporting each other in community with each other? I think it would.

What about a mother returning to work from parental leave. When her Boss says I am so glad you are back, I have so much for you to do. With no acknowledgement of the monumental transition she is in the middle of, learning to be a mother, implying just be your old self. Well this is very challenging for many women because that old self does not exist anymore. She is a more expanded version of herself. Is the message yes lets just ignore the fact you have children and never talk about it? Many parents complain about the frowns they get as they rush out the door at 5pm to pick up children from childcare or after school care. Is it any wonder that so many women leave large organisations to join the world of small business working for themselves. Not only is this about flexibility but they can actually be themselves, care for their children and not pretend they do not have any.

What has a rite of passage you have experienced taught you about how to behave and how our culture values it?

What archetype of a woman is the most valued in our society? It is certainly not the wise woman, who is ignored and marginalised. I don’t think many mothers feel their whole self is acknowledged either. What is valued is the fertile 25 year old female. This is reflected in media, advertising, fashion, range of cosmetics and the list goes on.

Each transition women have builds upon the previous one. Motherhood goes for a long time and crosses over the midlife transition through Perimenopause which can go on for many years. The Perimenopause journey is an opportunity for rebirth and reconnection. The average age of menopause is currently 50-51 but it can occur earlier or later than this. There we enter the second half of our life, known as Maga time. This is a time of immense productivity and creativity for many women. The Crone phase which used to follow mother in the days when women only lived to 45, is now acknowledged to occur when women reach 70, this is the time for slowing down.

The Maga time is when many women really ‘hit their straps’ in terms of creating new businesses, birthing new passion products and for many finding their voice and using it. So let us start embracing this phase, enjoying our greying hair and the changes to our body and acknowledging the transformational benefits of this stage. Lets start supporting each other, transitions are easier when supported in the container of community

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about ageing. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

Susan Sontag (1972)

If you like this post forward it onto a friend. I’ve also published a new Resources page that you might like. I’ve listed books, podcasts and websites of different topics of interest. I am going to continue building on this website some keep checking in.

Maga Season

You have probably heard of the feminine archetypes of maiden, mother and crone but have you heard of the Maga? Maiden, Mother and Crone were created many years ago when women had babies at 15 and died at 45, so many never reached Menopause. Now that we live longer it has been understood that there is another major rite of passage that women go through in midlife, that is the Maga. This is the transition through midlife, through menopause to our crone years.

Maga is our Autumn season, our harvest season. Maiden is Spring, Mother is Summer and Crone is Winter. When you think about the seasons of our life and what we are doing in those years, that makes a lot of sense. In Autumn we reap the rewards of spring and summer growth, harvest crops to wind down for the winter. Trees in Autumn drop their leaves, they don’t need them anymore and they prepare to hibernate for winter before spring comes and they grow new leaves again. This is a good way to think about our midlife journey through midlife and perimenopause. In their book The Womens Wheel of Life, Elizabeth Davis and Carole Leonard break down archetypes into 12 sub types. The Maga season is represented Amazon, Matriarch and Sorcerous.

In Portuguese Maga means Sorcerous. She who practices Alchemy. Alchemy is transformation and Maga time is a very transformative time for most women. Think of the alchemy and energy that is required by the earth to create gemstones, the chaos that ensures when a star is being created in the universe. Think of the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Maga season is a time that may have all of these qualities. Where a woman learns to love all the parts of herself, dark and light. Where she can blossom into the full feminine expression of herself. Jane Hardwicke Collinges has introduced us to the concept of Maga which she learned from her teacher Dr. Cedar Barstow.

It is a time for review and reflection in our life. To review where we have over abundance in our life. Maybe there are aspects of ourselves, patterns of behaviour that were developed in childhood years as a strategy for protection or survival that are not going to serve us well going forward.

Many women birth and create businesses or new work in this time period. They feel a strong yearning to do work that has greater meaning and purpose for them, work that has a broader community impact. The great thing is they have the energy to do this. As their menstrual cycle starts to wane and finish, all the energy that went into that every month and was lost during menstruation or went into creating babies, is now available to use. It is not surprising that we see so many Maga Women who have an enhanced sense of vitality about themselves. It is time to harvest your knowledge and work experience gained so far, to create something for yourself in the second part of your life.

It is time to review and reflect your choices in how you exercise and care for your body. As you grow and shape your life through this time, your body may be giving you some strong signals in the form of pain and discomfort. Soothing emotional distress with wine and chocolate is not going to help in the long term. That just gives your nervous system a quick hit. We need to keep moving our body but we don’t have the energy we had in our twenties or thirties. As our hormones decrease, collagen production does too. You see the impact on your skin. Your joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments they need collagen to help repair at night. They also need good quality sleep. This means you need to choose wisely, exercise that honours where your body is now.

How long does Maga season take? It will take however long it needs to take. We can’t predict the onset of menstruation, it happens slowly over time; we cannot predict how long labor will take in birth and the same goes for menopause arriving. There is no magic pill to fix us in this time. You have to take a big picture view.

The little nudges that you are being given by your body. When we ignore them, say like hanging onto our youth, things start to happen that feel uncomfortable. This is difficult when we live in a culture, particularly in the western world, that is obsessed with youth. Where age is not respected and seemingly older women become invisible. You can change this by choosing to embrace it and choosing pleasure in your life. What brings you pleasure?

Where can I start my review? If you took a systemic view of your life and came from the bigger picture, looking at the whole and parts of it you might start to see some patterns. Look from multiple perspectives; emotional, physical, mental, sexual. What can you see? Look at the tapestry of your life.

Often this is a time when women want to spend a lot of reflective time on their own reviewing their life and being supported by other women in sisterhood. These are both vitally important. The alone time creates a space for us to really get to know ourselves and have a relationship with ourselves. The sisterhood is important because humans are social creates who need the connections with others. We all need connection and community, where we feel understood and appreciated. We need other wise women, the crones in our life, to help us through this path, through story telling. To help us understand how we can embody our wisdom to understand our passions and purpose. To help us understand how we can serve our communities.

If you would like to explore Archetypes further, I can recommend reading the Womens Wheel of Life. If you are interested in reading more about perimenopause transition, I can highly recommend “The Wisdom of Menopause” by Christiane Northup and “New Menopausal Years the wise woman way” by Susan Weed. Both offer a multi- perspective view of this transition.

If you are interested in the hormone and collagen relationship you can click on the menu above to go to my podcasts. Episode 2 with Sarah Smith is about physical changes to our body in midlife and we talk about this.