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.

Womens Empowerment

Womens empowerment, this is such a broad topic I don’t think I can write about it in one post. So maybe I should call this blog womens empowerment part 1. There are many sources of power, we are surrounded by it. Many of us believe that to be empowered we have to find that power outside of ourselves. We search constantly for it over the course of a lifetime, outside of ourselves and we never really find it.

The story that we have been told by popular culture and the media is that power is defined by; how you look, how much money you make, who you are dating or married to and your trajectory in your career as defined by an external hierarchical structure.

This is an old model of power. It is a model driven by fear and comparison.

We worry about whether we are enough or too much. Am I pretty enough? Sexy enough? Am I too outspoken? Too loud? Too intense? If you have used your sexuality to get what you want then you would worry about getting older and no longer being attractive. In a youth obsessed culture like ours, that worships teenage maidens, we disguise our natural radiance with make-up, botox, facelifts, clothes. The list goes on.

We try to be who we believe we are supposed to be. We constantly pursue personal development to give ourselves permission to make change. Ever had that thought, 'Once I do this course then I’ll be able to make changes I want in my life’, or ‘When I hit this goal then I can do what I want to do’. We contort ourselves to fit an image because we have a belief system that we are not right just the way we are. Focusing on how we should be on the outside or what we should achieve makes us unhappy, crazy, disconnected from ourself and often just downright confused.

What if I told you that you have all the resources you need to empower yourself inside of you. That the new model of power is to connect with yourself, to discover all the different parts of you, to love and accept them even the ones you don’t like so much. That connecting with your pleasure, your sexuality, your authentic self and your capacity to love will empower you like nothing you have experienced before. That it is all there right inside of you, everything you have ever needed.

This is challenging to read and challenging to put into action. We live in a culture of always on, busy all the time, that leads to burnout. Organisations financially reward us for it. Who has time to lean into themselves? You will have to be brave and give yourself permission to not be productive. You will have to give yourself permission to bask in your own pleasure and doing this has not been encouraged in our culture. The cultural warnings we received about pleasure and your desires include ‘be careful what you want because you might get addicted’ or ‘you will just keep wanting more and more’. This carries into spirituality, beware of your desires, they are a bottomless pitt, never-ending downward spiral. Let’s be clear I am not talking about desires that are not healthy for you. I am talking about knowing what you really want in your life.

Women have been treated as second class citizens for thousands of years. We have been maltreated, persecuted and just not considered equal. This gets passed down through generations. Most women do not have a natural sense of safety in their bodies. The impact of sexual trauma, disconnection from our body and unfulfilling sex, because we have not been taught how to ask for what we want, has leaked out of the bedroom and into our daily life. It has shut down our voice. It has shut down a massive source of creativity and energy. It disempowers us in life. We shrink, hide, play small just to stay safe. We lose our voice and our capacity to ask for what it is we really desire in our life. We have become afraid to ask.

What if you could ask for what you want in life.

What if you could learn what a full body YES and NO felt like in your body.

What if you could ask to slow down or stop what you were doing altogether.

What if you could get really clear about what you do want and what you don’t want in your life.

What if you recognised that your sexual energy is a massive source of radiance, vibrancy, energy and creativity in your life.

What if you could pursue one pleasurable activity every day in your life and you used that energy generated from that to fuel you to create the life you desire.

What if you could learn the art of satiation. What it feels like inside of your body to feel satisfied and content and let yourself reside there for a few minutes and then for stretches at a time and it felt safe.

I don’t know about you but all of that sounds like a pretty empowered woman to me.

If you feel like this blog could help someone pass it on to them. If you read this and it resonates with you but you are not sure where to start hit reply and ask me I’ll answer your email.

PS - If you are super interested in this topic keep your eyes posted over summer. I’ve been recording podcasts that I am going to release over summer. There is a podcast on the topic ‘Orgasm as source of Power’, that I recorded with my friend and fellow coach Julia Lally, coming your way.