Initiations

18 June 2023

It feels like a rebirth, and also a vow. It feels like the shedding of skin, but also being clothed in fresh garments. Sometimes I went looking for initiation, but most of the time it found me. I would not recommend initiation, but I know of its vital role in guiding one towards truths – both sought for, and unbidden.

When I look back to locate initiatory moments in my life, it’s as if the closer I approach, the further they recede into dream. More often than not, an initiation feels like a coming-together of events, rather than breaking ground on some ambitious and novel venture.

What was the first initiation I can remember? It was witnessing one whose own initiatory role was to guide, protect and raise me, suddenly recognise that they could not see it through. In that moment, something of their vow passed to me, though I hadn’t the awareness or years to make sense of that. Nor did I understand what it would mean for me when the time came to shoulder those same duties.

Initiations, like all births, can be painful. They can kill. And whether we welcome them or not, they demand a reckoning on a soul level.

Often, initiations do not appear to be so until they’ve long passed. Once, as a teenager, I called down rain with an earnest prayer and a bowl of water in cupped hands. I felt frightened to experience the world respond so candidly, and to suddenly grapple with the implications of a living and participatory cosmos. But I did not at that moment think of it in terms of a threshold crossed.

Initiations often come as an invitation to harness the sacred flame, with burning as the price to be paid. A loud and foolhardy example of my own was when I gave over possession of my body and mind to a wrathful guardian of the three worlds. What followed was a period of great power and creativity, but it enacted an enormous toll on my body and took years to fully recover from.

Playing with fire need not always burn though. I discovered this quite literally when I found myself serving as sacred fire keeper for medicine ceremonies for a span of years. There, Abuelito Fuego initiated me in many things: how to temper one’s self, when to add pressure and intensity – when to hold back, how to recognise what was necessary to dance amidst the licking flames and emerge unharmed.

Initiations are not certifications. All my initiations are ongoing, and their lessons endlessly generative.

Sometimes, we are called upon to initiate others, though closer inspection troubles the orientation of this dynamic. Every parent, child and lover has experienced this reversal.

I do not have children of my own, though I have worked closely and at depth with children who have suffered in ways no being should. In this guise, I was initiated into dark reaches that demonstrated beyond doubt that compassion has no breaking point, even if the body and heart most certainly does.

More than once, I have even undergone false initiations. I wish I could tell you that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have recognised them as such now, but that’s not true. Each of these contained within them profound lessons that only so grave an error could grant me entry to. Such was it when I voluntarily consecrated myself in a religious order, wrongly reading the omens to suggest that doing so was the crowning moment of my Saturn return. Shame is a Saturnian gift.

Other times, an initiation comes on softly and fills one’s every cell with joy: fasted, drumming and in communion with the vine of souls, the braces of my drum became emblazoned with the glyphs of the zodiac, picked out in shimmering rainbow light, as the tree under which I sat whispered to me in rasp-bark tongues.

I don’t know what an initiation is, but I know what it feels like. It feels like the threads of fate in conspiracy, with me the tethered puppet. It feels like hunger sated. It feels like knowing there are miles yet to travel, and counting on my own two feet to see it through. It feels like the glorious bodhisattva shouting ‘yes!’ with the bitter seaspray of samsara on the tongue. It feels like breaking down, wracked by sobbing for all the injury I’ve ever taken and encountering open arms and whispers of tender assurance. It feels like coming down, at last, from the mountain – and exulting in my worldliness.