On Initiation

how the holy dismantled and put me back together during my sabbatical

For those who are new here - welcome to my free monthly newsletter. Some months are more devoted to abuse of power and others to ritual, non-coercive spirituality, and the living world. Most months blend the two. I’m Rayann, I’m a spiritual abuse researcher and a ritualist. AI did not write this.

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A traditional diviner told me last summer that a period of initiation was coming. I imagined myself in the sauna with my dearest ancestors on a deep creative dive together. How cozy! Perhaps I would have some bumps on a writing project, or the writing would be initiatory, taking me to some unknown place. The diviner said I might need human support. “It will be okay, I think,” I told him—Projecting my then state of wellness into the future.

I only realized that initiation was underfoot when I noticed the most recurring thought in my mind was “What the fuck is going on?!?

Not knowing what is going on is a hallmark of dismemberment and confusion as something deep is getting reorganized. Of course you don’t know what’s going on. That’s the point. We get to make sense of it later, not while it’s happening.

My first huge initiation that took place outside of any tradition began with one of my ancestors appearing at an unexpected moment (dance class!) and asking cryptically for my consent.

“For what?” I asked.

She didn’t say, but relayed with gravity that if I said yes everything would change and it wouldn’t be easy.

I said yes, for no reason the conscious mind can understand, but simply because I love her and trust her, and the soul recognizes a gateway when there is one that is honestly presented. No marketing, no hard sell. Just a pointed finger at a gate saying, “Want to go through?”

Within a few weeks, I had a concussion that came with a death experience and the strongest awakening of my life. It poked holes in my relationship with my then spiritual teacher, meditation practice, tradition, and everything I knew.

The following years were rough going. Grueling and grief filled, magical, and above all, liberating. There was no traditional village, no council of elders to hold me through it, but there were my own ancestors, my loving partner, and healing colleagues who showed up with their gifts. A patchworked village of sorts–made threadbare by capitalism and cultural loss, but still powerful with love and healing hearts and hands.

This time I also had a heads up, which I realize many people do not receive before a period of non-traditional or rough (to use Frances Weller’s language) initiation. The turn you upside down kind of thing that could be an illness, a scandal, a death, a war…the kind of stuff that puts you into a state of everyday dying. Changing shape, and being changed, never sure if you’ll make it. So I had a headsup, but I didn’t believe it–I couldn’t imagine myself inside the initiation, because you just never know how these things are going to go.

I was a few months into my sabbatical when it all really got going. Thank goodness, goddess, and the intelligence in me that created a sabbatical in the first place that I wasn’t seeing 1:1 clients at the time.

I was being honed as though a stone was working my body and mind, pressing into the edges, not because they wanted to be reshaped, or because in any way I thought this would be a great idea, but simply because it was time. The movement of initiation is a naturally greater connection with God, creator, soul, ancestors, something beyond the small self, so that you may be of service to the community and inhabit your adulthood in a good way. Like a river flowing into the ocean, there is a momentum to it.

I dragged on through my studies, trying to focus my brain into linear time while my spirit was traversing strange terrain. I spent a lot of time contemplating evil, tracing it back through history, searching for the hot spots when patriarchy got new moves, became swifter, stronger, and more twisted.

I was sick and on precarious precipices. I rode inspiration whenever I was well enough, working furiously on research until the clarity and energy were gone. I watched time and friends and the outer world drift further and further away.

The difference this time from the last period of intense initiation I was in is that there was a little bit of, “Okay, I know how this goes even though I also know nothing.” Some basic pointers were in my psyche and eventually they came back to me. Like:

The worse you fight, the harder it gets. This includes fighting to understand. The more intensely you demand answers, the harder it gets.

Recognize death and grace are in the room, do not try to scare them away. Befriend them and your own not knowing and you become an active participant in the wild happening.

Hold what you can see and what you can’t with equal reverence.

This time around my dreams were more vivid, and I knew how to unfold them and ask for more. One day at a time, one dream at a time.

When I realized doctors couldn’t help with my mysterious illness, rather than falling into the never ending wheel of healers, I sat and listened to my body—intuiting my own medicine one herb at a time and taking my findings to people who could follow the thread. A slow collaboration of body—god(s)—plants, with occasional invitations to others for their wisdom, ensued rather than a rescue mission.

I also remembered something I once heard from Sandra Ingerman,

“If you knew you would make it through it, it wouldn’t be an initiation.”

This is also what transition is like in childbirth, the most intense time when the cervix opens to full dilation for the baby to make it through. It’s cosmic madness. One long timeless shriek. As the baby approaches the portal of their birth canal, the person giving birth is in their own portal, and who they were before doesn’t get to come along for the ride. The body is a gateway between the worlds, and the only way through is to let go and to stay all at once.

I can see how many people I leaned on at different points in this initiation. As I cycled through pain, illness, healing, burnout, and a general thorough reshaping, I remembered that there were people who cared, even if I was mostly not seeing them, which made a huge difference. At one point, I tripled my therapy. I had a social media manager doing outer world communication while I cycled through the “what the fuck is happening to me” smash and grind of stone tool making. A wise colleague held steady presence for my hope and despair. When I wallowed in despair for too long, my own ancestors shook me awake and reminded me not to forget my own skills.

Now I’m in the space of return. As though I’m peeking up from a dark cave, looking around, recognizing my family and my daughter, anew. I am so grateful just to be alive and well and to be able to do simple things like have a long conversation with a friend by the fire, dance, enjoy food again. I am aware that there is no circle of elders to offer me new clothes upon my return or hear my story by the fire, as we once did, or, in our culture, even to say, “Hey, I see you really went through something and you’re different now.” Our culture is so initiation-resistant, stuck in suffering aversion and dismissal, stuck in the horror, perhaps, that hard things happen to people rather than in the reverence for how people come back and what they can bring us.

In Martin Shaw’s newest book, he says that people return from initiation with two things: a limp and a gift. I can feel the limp with me as I tenderly set foot back into the world. As my exercise instructor asks me where I’ve been for 5 months and I stumble for words.

The gift is there though and I couldn’t tell you what it is in the space of any substack essay. It’s a joyous thing to stand in a gift and simply feel the mystery of it all, happy to be standing at all.

“You are going to get stretched, deepened, walloped by the ghastly, redeemed by the holy. There will be moments when it appears all hope is lost and you have to experience what it feels like to continue to exist within that hopelessness.”

-Martin Shaw

As I write this, I think about the passages of your lives, the ones that went unnoticed, that perhaps were overly medicalized by secular culture that forgot what initiation is all about, and how it benefits the whole when processed and integrated well.

I think about journeys that have been rough and prolonged because there was no framework, no village, no resources for help, or because no one prepared us for how to do this in the first place. And I think of all the quiet trials and dismantlings that so many of you have lived with, no one at the fire asking,

“What did you learn? What was the gift?”

And I wonder if you have asked yourself,

“What is the gift I bring back?”

and let the colors and textures of it move you, precise or imprecise as they may be.

Maybe it’s just the ability to sit close to death in other people without losing your seat. Maybe it’s contact with some wild joy that only comes from having befriended grief. Maybe it’s your newly discovered wings or scales, sharpened senses, or something clear, like the newfound ability to spot a predator and say NO.

Whatever gifts you have brought back, and wherever you are in your own rough rides, my heart is smiling that even in the face of losing our old myths, rituals, and ways of knowing, initiation still happens and sometimes we get to see and hold each other in it and on the other side.

Thank you for reading.

May you and your beloveds be well,

Rayann

Whiteboard from thriving roots wilderness school - where they create ritually held initiation spaces for teens supported by loving grown ups.

PS. Here is a video of Ben Kilner making a stone axe by hand - perhaps you will find it soothing if you are being reshaped as well.

PPS. If you are a client wondering when my sabbatical will be over, I’ve extended it to mid-June.

BIO

Rayann Gordon is an educator, writer, ritualist, and cult researcher. She is in the second year of her MSc Psychology of Coercive Control program at the University of Salford and works at the University of Victoria as a research assistant on the mental health needs of cult survivors. For the last nine years of providing spiritual care to clients, she has walked alongside people through grief, loss, initiatory experiences, spiritual abuse recovery, deconstruction, and rebuilding relationships with self, place, and ancestors. She draws upon research, client work, and her own lived experience to support people in reclaiming their freedom. Rayann co-facilitates Tending the Writer’s Flame and is a member of the Right Use of Power Institute, International Cultic Studies Association, and the Association for Spiritual Integrity. She lives in Victoria, Canada, on the ancestral lands of the Songhees first nation. Chest Full of Stars is a free monthly, human written newsletter.