Feminine Legacy Podcast With Jacqueline Hyacinth
Welcome to the feminine legacy podcast. This is an evolutionary platform where we gather to share our stories and wisdom, with the intent to preserve the sacred, and create meaningful legacies to impact future generations. Through live transmissions and conscious conversations we bring light into the darkness and lean into the mystery delving into topics include: womb wisdom, ancestral medicine, spiritual healing, rites of passage, feminine leadership and embodiment, sex, birth, death and so much more ... The future is now! Dream with us...
www.ourfemininelegacy.com
Feminine Legacy Podcast With Jacqueline Hyacinth
Episode 48 ~ Honoring Adolescent Girls ~ Mentorship, Community, & Rites of Passage
Ever wondered how we can better support teenage girls as they navigate the stormy seas of adolescence? Join us on the Feminine Legacy Podcast as we sit down with Johanna Reimer, a passionate mentor and creative teacher from Colorado. Johanna shares her heartfelt journey and the vital insights she's gained about the transformative power of mentorship and community support. Together, we discuss the pressing issue of heightened anxiety in today’s youth and explore the significant void in creative and conscious opportunities for teens past early childhood.
Picture a community where every adolescent feels a true sense of belonging, where parents and mentors come together to create a village-like environment for empowerment. In this episode, Johanna and I dive into the importance of group dynamics, communal blessings, and traditional rites of passage. We celebrate the incredible strength young girls discover through these challenges, emphasizing the necessity of physical togetherness and unwavering community support. We also ponder the broader cultural loss of these rites and the need to revive them for the healthy development of our youth.
But that's not all—Johanna introduces her upcoming nine-month girls group facilitator training, a program designed to guide women into matriarchal leadership. By connecting youth with nature and bridging ancestral wisdom with modern realities, we uncover how these initiatives foster resilience and prepare the next generation to lead in an ever-evolving world. Tune in to realize the profound impact that mentorship, communal support, and rites of passage have on nurturing and empowering our youth, creating ripples of positive change within families and communities.
To reach Johannah Reimer: https://wakefulnature.com/training
To Reach Jacqueline Hyacinth: www.ourfemininelegacy.com
Welcome to the Feminine Legacy Podcast. This is an evolutionary platform where we gather to share our stories and wisdom with the intent to preserve the sacred and create meaningful legacies to impact future generations. Through live transmissions and conscious conversations, we bring light into the darkness and lean into the mysteries, delving into womb wisdom, ancestral medicine, motherhood, feminine leadership and embodiment, sex, birth, death and so much more. The future is now Dream with us. I'm your host, jacqueline Hyacinth, mother, mystic, healer and feminine embodiment mentor. I offer training, healing, education and rites of passage.
Speaker 1:You can book your first session and sign up to receive a free gift at OurFeminineLegacycom. I'll drop the link in the show notes. With my whole heart. Thanks for tuning in and, without further ado, let's get into this week's episode. Hey everybody and welcome to the Feminine Legacy Podcast. This is your host, jagwelyn Hyacinth, and I am joined today by a beloved sister, johanna Reimer, who is in Colorado and she is doing such beautiful, powerful work with our youth. She's a mentor, a creative teacher, a ceremonialist and many other things, so I'm excited to welcome her today. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, so honored to be here.
Speaker 1:Me too, I'm so excited to dive in. I often lay up at night thinking about our youth, about the future, all the ways and the things that are happening on the planet and how we can all show up and and offer more. So when I saw your work, I was like I don't see that many people that are outside of the education system really, really devoted to the youth. So I would love to have you speak about this calling and how this came in for you.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I think that there's so many amazing things being offered for the littles. You know I was trained as a Waldorf teacher and ran very alternative Waldorf homeschool, nature-based programs for kindergarten through the early grades and I would say even up to middle school, like elementary school. There's so many cool offerings for kids, like getting them in nature, getting them expressing themselves creatively, but once we hit adolescence it's like where are the offerings now? And there certainly are some cool like rite of passage experiences, wilderness camps that you can do, but there is a real lack of ongoing creative, exploratory, conscious experience for teens. And so it was really this void that I saw as an educator and just wanted to fill. And so that was really how I started.
Speaker 2:And you know the work is thriving and there is such a great need. And you know the work is thriving and there is such a great need. And you know the adolescents what they're facing today is pretty intense and I feel like it's only getting more and more intense and more and more challenging. You know the anxiety levels that the teenagers have despite their socioeconomic background, race. You know education, family systems. I work with some very privileged kids that have access to a lot and have very healthy family systems and they are still suffering from confusion and anxiety because it's a crazy world, and we have responsibility as adults to really usher them into our protective net, our safe haven for them, and to help them find their way through adolescence.
Speaker 2:Because how I see it is that most of us in this culture, in the over culture, are not finding our way into true adulthood. We've lost our rites of passages and traditionally, in any indigenous culture and we all come from indigenous cultures, however far back you might have to go there was a traditional market, right right, there was a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, but now we have this very long phase called adolescence and there is no guarantee that you will make it out. You can be 70 years old and still be caught in your adolescent development, and so I really wanted to create opportunities for girls to experience adolescence in a way that is held, a way that they're being watched and cared for, and a way that they can come with all of their questions and their confusion and their anxiety, their joys and their lows all of it and just have that safe place and ultimately be guided from childhood into adolescence, but also out of adolescence into womanhood.
Speaker 1:I feel so much safer just even hearing you talk about it. It is the most important thing at this time. I'm curious did you have mentorship when you were young, or did you become the woman that you need?
Speaker 2:I would say that as a child, as an adolescent, I did not have mentorship. You know, I that's partly why I wanted to offer this and why I love doing mother-daughter stuff is I didn't have opportunities for like sacred mother-daughter experiences, but as a young adult I definitely did have amazing mentorship.
Speaker 1:I definitely did have amazing mentorship and it's definitely because of the amazing mentors and elders that I have in my mentor. We did not have although I want to give reverence to my family, my parents, but also generationally it was a different time when we were coming up and it had been so much had been lost over over many, many years, decades, thousands of years, where our cultures were still intact. So it's almost like bridging back and creating new pathways, and so many of us me included, right, who I come from Italian ancestry but my roots, even though I've lived on the land and had access, my people, are not there anymore. My people are not there anymore. So just knowing and trusting your own heart and an opening to be of service feels really, really important. A lot of women come to me and feel confused because they feel like they don't have a route to offer.
Speaker 2:So it's really interesting the times that we're in as far as the way in which we're all being called to show up young adults living at home longer and longer, like having a harder time finding their calling, where this capitalist culture just rewards wealth and rewards working, working, going, going, harder, harder, harder.
Speaker 2:And so I am like really wanting to call in the women that see that the youth are struggling and do something about it. It doesn't have to be your full-time job, it doesn't have to, you know, take everything you have and be, you know, like a source of exhaustion, but it can be something very simple, like offering a girls group, offering some kind of village auntie experience for the youth in their lives, because we know that there's a problem but not enough people are doing something about it, and so I really just hope that anyone listening here can feel inspired to just like go on a date with one of the teens in their lives. You know, share something, share one of their gifts, like do something that extends towards them, because there are many girls, especially, that implode and they look on the surface like they're doing fine, but they're not. They are like really confused and there's not enough access points for support absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's also interesting how much more developed they are now with everything that's happening. So it's like their bodies are plumping up and they're becoming these little women, but yet their insides are still. They they're very confused. And the women that come, these young girls. It's so interesting to see how developed they are and how they are showing up in the world, even how in their family units, how they are portrayed and how they're brought out. I live in New York.
Speaker 1:So I know that our experiences, you know, depending upon where we are and are quite different, but really interesting. How fragile obviously they are and how much tending and nurturing and how much they want to open and learn. But there are not so many resources, as far as I can see, that are teaching them more traditional paths of connecting back to nature and, you know, learning how to tend the fire and learning how to listen to their bodies and and calm themselves and nurture themselves.
Speaker 2:So it's such important work yeah my yeah, my whole curriculum is that I use for the first two years of working with the girls is called journey through the elements, and so we use the different elements as ways to resource ourselves. And it's like, how many tools can we give the girls over these really hard, challenging years? How many like village aunties can come in and share some of their wisdom so that they can draw on what they need to draw on as they face adversity, as they face challenge or conflict, whatever it is that life presents them that they have something to draw from? And so, yeah, I really believe that we can set up our youth so much better than the education system is. And I know families are maxed out too because we're just, all you know, trying to get by there's so the pace of life is so fast right now and still it's our responsibility to take care of our future leaders, the future women of the world all right, these, these little souls.
Speaker 1:They're going to be nurturing our world. Yeah, and the way in which they do that. We are essentially a bridge for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I just really firmly believe that they are only going to be able to do their soul's work if we set them up to do that, like if we are, of course, like unfortunately, you know, traumatic events happen that we have to unpack and work with, but like we don't need to set them up to unlearn things Right, and we don't need to set them up to, like, not have the information that all of us, as women, have had to find on our own because we weren't given this wise woman information while we were growing up. And so that is how we free up our time, our energy and our resources to do our soul's work, to help the environment, to help systemic change, which so many of the youth are drawn towards. They see the problems, they have a sense of truth and they know, but we need to set them up to be able to address these challenges.
Speaker 1:Very, very true. Something you said that is really important to speak about is you spoke about privilege, and I have found this to be an extraordinary understanding, because there was a time when, for example, I harder for single mothers, but then when I would be with my friends who had beautiful, supportive husbands, they were very stressed. They were still, no matter how much support there is. We're living in a society, so I like that you brought up the privilege piece.
Speaker 1:Yes, it can be more challenging when there is a leg of the table seemingly not there table is seemingly not there but also our collective world.
Speaker 1:Regardless of what our environment is, we also have an inner environment right Of what we're carrying, what our emotional and spiritual resources are. So I think it's really important to be able to see that all of this, no matter where you are or what you're doing, youth needs assistance and support, whether they're highly resourced financially or whether they're not. And the curious part is how to bridge for those places Like sometimes I lean in and I'm like, okay, I'm in New York, Aside from my own family, my own community, and the young girls that come from their parents, from their moms that are on board. How to have a bigger impact in like inner city, for example, and yes, I have a lot of like. That's always like how do we do this? Like is taking kids out into the woods for a day. That's wonderful and, as you so beautifully said, it's like this cultivating over time like having a rite of passage once and expecting someone's life to be completely changed.
Speaker 1:They're beautiful, deep moments, but how do we cultivate that space and those relationships that will create momentum and build our youth, which sounds like you're doing that very beautifully?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think it's all about integration, like that is probably the hardest thing for our culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, integration.
Speaker 2:Like it's slow and we don't love slow things and we don't like necessarily to do the hard work. It's like you know it used to be click a button and now it's just talk and things happen. We don't have to use our will force for much right, and so integration takes like sitting with the hard stuff, slowing down enough to feel the hard stuff and slowing down enough to really be with it in a good way tell me about the moms and the dads like do when you come in as village auntie and they sign their children up to spend time with you.
Speaker 1:Tell me about, like the level of involvement that take your time.
Speaker 2:Sorry everyone, I'm recovering from COVID, so bear with my voice and my cough. Yeah, what's interesting is my first girls group. I was so committed to doing mother-daughter things because it's something I didn't have, like I mentioned, and the moms complained. They said, you know, we really want the dads to be here, like our daughters are close with their fathers, and we would like to have family experiences rather than just mother daughter. And I thought, wow, wow, cool. And so, yeah, I I still provide mother daughter things and you know, part of my curriculum is working with the parents and it's usually 99% mothers who show up for the parent circles. Dads are always welcome, but, yeah, it's like if we're going to create a village around these kids, the parents have to be on board and the parents that are drawn to this work really get that. And so, um, there's parent circles every block that I work with the girls just to catch them up on what we're doing, but also to explore for them to share and have a space of what's going on for them, because you know, it's always really nice to hear that you're not alone, right, that your community is also, you know, struggling in this in this way or whatever, to commiserate and like to bond over um, what's alive as being a parent in a crazy culture and raising an adolescent, and there's always so much wisdom that comes from the circle. You, you know, I definitely don't claim to be an expert. I claim to be, you know, just a human being who is devoted to the adolescence and always learning, and I find that the mothers and the fathers have so much wisdom to share too and that we can all learn from that. So I really value having those parents circles and involving them.
Speaker 2:You know, part of the culminating experience of the journey through the elements curriculum is at the end of the year we have it's like their little mini rite of passage. It's a preparatory rite of passage, but it's honoring the ending of their childhood. And they do an elemental quest, an elemental challenge, and they go up on the mountain for a full day and they're given an earth challenge, an air challenge, a water challenge and a fire challenge. And so we go up on a mountain for the day and we have an elemental challenge for each element there's an earth challenge, an air challenge, water and fire, and after they go through this ordeal and have some experience of risk and challenge to really find their inner strength like that is empowerment right when they have a challenge and they have to rise up their inner strength Like that is empowerment, right when they have a challenge and they have to rise up and meet it. Because I don't believe that anyone can empower anyone other than ourselves. And so I know, like let's empower the girls is a really popular idea, but I don't actually believe it's possible. I think that we can provide opportunities for them to find their own sense of empowerment, and so that's what the challenge really offers.
Speaker 2:But the beautiful part that I love the most is the parents and the community have gathered at someone's house and they welcome us back and there's beautiful celebration, cheering, welcoming them back from their ordeal. And they come and we circle up as a community and the girls claim their special gifts and speak to who they are becoming and they're witnessed, and that is just so beautiful. For the parents to hear their child like this is not going to come unless we create that kind of opportunity right, like no child's going to stand up and say you know, I've come to realize this is my gift. That would be cool, but you know, we we have to craft these opportunities and they don't exist, naturally right now, the way we are living, and so that's one aspect of the work that I do. And the parents then bless their kids and it's not about blessing your daughter, it's about blessing this group.
Speaker 2:And I really I didn't realize what I was doing.
Speaker 2:I think when I started offering girls groups, that how important the group dynamic is and how much bigger the ripple effect can be than one-on-one, one-on-one mentorship, one-on-one therapy. Yes, there's a time and in place, but I think overall what we're missing is the group experience, a sense of belonging, and so to hear the parents share their blessing for a group of girls rather than just their special daughter, it's really beautiful. And like nobody has to get it all, because the community is getting it all, they're covering all the blessings. You know, I had one mom say oh, I really wish that I had said this and I said you didn't need to, somebody else did. That's the beauty of village, of coming together and not having to be the one person, to be the nuclear person that has it all figured out and has all the right things to say Right, and I think that that is such a beautiful antidote to the world things to say Right, and I think that that is such a beautiful antidote to the world we live in.
Speaker 1:It really is. It also feels so nourishing just to envision you all together in physical, like our bodies next to one another. It's so different now. So much of the work is like online and so.
Speaker 1:I really love, that it's like roots on the earth and that you guys are growing in relationship and sharing with it directly. It's really really important, really important for all of us. Something you brought up that it feels like it's prime and important for me. You know, there was a time and still sometimes like where there's. You know, we do rites of passage for our daughters around the time of their menstruation, right, and we make these beautiful events and they are really sacred events, they're timeline markers, they're really an indicator of something bigger that is emerging through the psyche of these young women.
Speaker 1:And there's this deeper calling inside of me that's saying, like this is beautiful and it does not create that sense of empowerment that you were referring to, sense of empowerment that you were referring to like how to find that, that place where our youth have an experience, where they are connected with nature and have to do something outside of their normal experience to draw on strength. It's so important. So I'm like also still leaning into like how to implement that here, especially, as you said. I mean like just the fact that how long are your? Are they nine months? How long do you run your mentorships for?
Speaker 2:They're long-term. So I ask for either a one-year or two-year commitment, but nobody wants to stop. So why would we stop? Once we have trust built, right, that's the hardest thing. And so the elemental curriculum really creates like the fun experiences, the beauty, the bonding and the trust building. And then why would we just leave that? Why would we just leave that? So we continue. So I'm creating a girls group facilitator training and you definitely don't need to be a mother so far many women are mothers who are in the training but it is a nine-month initiatory facilitator training to go through your own initiation into matriarchal leadership and into offering this work for the girls in your community beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 1:It's so important that go ahead. It's so important that you have created this structure thank you yeah, it really is.
Speaker 1:It's such powerful work. I think, like my son is 30 years old and it was a different time when we were raising our kids, because I was a teenage mother, along with a great many of us. There was like a big boom at that time of teenage mothers and so we raised our kids in community, but we were kids ourselves and so we really did understand that village because it was important for our survival. But to be able to do it from this new space, in this new time that we're in, we're literally like in a very particular time on our planet that's calling for some incredible medicine from these young beings and, as you said, if we are able to steward and hold space for their becoming, then they can really live into their purpose in a way that would set them up to be the strength and the leaders of this world. They have a big, big task at hand.
Speaker 2:They do, yeah, and so do we. You know, it's not okay to just resign once our children get kind of difficult and start getting more and more autonomous, right, and so my model that I want to share with people through the facilitator training is one that is very much girl approved. Like the girls love the experience, and so often I hear about like boys groups or girls groups that don't succeed because, you know, I think they're just not meeting the girls in a way that they need to be met and somehow I have, you know, created a model that really works for them. And so I feel like, yes, we need this in more and more communities. And for a long time I thought, you know, I just I can't teach anyone to do this because I'm just me, right, yep, and other communities of girls need you to be you and you to share your gifts, and I will will, you know, through the training, help you really become an expert in understanding the soul centric and eco centric model of human development that helps us understand the life stages in a more spiritual, earth based way, way um, and to awaken some of the ancestral um connections that we've lost through colonization, through assimilation and, you know, really share those with the girls, because what lives in our bones?
Speaker 2:Like we all know we're wired for connection, right, we all know a women's group feels so nourishing, but there's no reason that shouldn't exist for young girls as well. And so the girls often say that this is their favorite part of the week, and I'm like just amazed by that. I love that, and so I just I want, I feel very strongly now after taking my first group through eight years. I took them from fifth grade through senior year and at that closing ceremony, you know, the mothers told me yeah, you um like thank you for doing this. Our children are the lucky ones and this needs to be in all the communities. So please, you know, do something. And so I took that as my initiation into being this facilitator of more groups happening in the world, a training facilitator, I should say.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I wonder I like can dream about this for days around what it could look like if women were supported, if mothers were supported, if our men were supported. It's such a powerful time of coming back to work together and share resources and support, and just so beautiful to see women mentoring other women like in the the old way, but in we're bringing something very ancient and something new for the times. Yeah right, really meeting the girls where they are, not where we are, per se?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. You know, I really stand by that statement you just made. That it's not about just like figuring out what our ancestors did and copying that. It's definitely looking to the past and tuning in and understanding, you know what has been done, but also carving and crafting something new for the tides, for the children right in front of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I feel so important. That's where the sweet medicine is. It really shows us, too, that each generation has this gift to bring forth right, that we are the next consciousness for the times that we're living. And so just really opening up and holding the space for the youth to be able to express whatever that times that we're living, and so just really opening up and holding the space for the youth to be able to express whatever that is that they're here to both destroy and create.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the beauty of yeah I think it's the dalai lama who says this and my apologies if that's not correct, but mostly sure. The dalai lama says says that the next Dalai Lama will be the Sangha, will be the community. And so how do we create more communities, more centers of aliveness that can ripple out into the world and create a healthier, more connected and thriving world?
Speaker 1:I love that too. In our lineages, the guru. It's like the guru will be alive in all beings. Just all that wisdom to come together, it's all. Yeah, it's, it's. Our time is coming, it's here, there's a lot of and there's so much room for rebirth now In a new way. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing this with us and passing on this medicine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else that you feel like you want to lean into, about what lights you up about it, or what's anything else that you want to share that feels like yummy for you, right?
Speaker 2:now, um, yeah, I, you know, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Actually, I feel like we, you know, have touched on so many of the places that are near and dear to my heart and, you know, I think that we're so drawn to the mysteries of the feminine as women and I just again, I already spoke to this call but, like, let's share that with the girls that they don't have to do it on their own, and it really starts with us living into the teachings.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like you know, how are you with your cycle every single or bleed, every month, how do you move through your monthly cycle, and you know what's your relationship to it? So it's, that is what's going to teach our children as well. You know, I think it really does start with us and that is part of the facilitator training, of sitting in our adolescent seat, of like doing some of the peeling back of the onion, like what are some of the wounds that we're still carrying from our adolescent journey? Because it's a rough journey and you know it's only getting more rough with the rise of social media and you know the opportunities for total lack of, you know, responsibility and accountability. So, yeah, agreed, all right.
Speaker 1:So when does the program start?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the facilitator training starts around the fall equinox, so it's nine months. It'll go from September through the summer solstice of 2025. And, yeah, we will have so many amazing guest teachers who are experts in the fields of you know, adolescent development. In the fields of you know, adolescent development, wilderness, rite of passage, grief work, storytelling like circle facilitation, the history of witches, like there's just so many amazing things that I'm really excited to share with the world beautiful, what a beautiful thing yeah incredible.
Speaker 1:So I just want to lean in and see if there's anything else that comes up for me to ask you. So I guess I want to just lean into a question for those that don't have supportive parents I have. Do you have any experience with that, or has all? Basically everybody who's in is like obviously, because their consciousness is prepared them like as far as. Do you think? I'm like sometimes I sit with how, like, let's say, someone comes to me a young girl who's 12 years old but she's enmeshed in a family that does not participate in strengthening her in her her cyclical living or connecting her to the earth or any of the things that you seem to have that your parents seem to be really rooted in. And I oftentimes lean into like how to do that if their parents aren't supportive, like is that even possible or is that like a dream? I don't know that. I know the answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is I don't think well, at least out of the moms that I know, any of them think they're being unsupportive. Even if they are, so that's one piece. And yes, usually it's the mothers who are going to find out about this work and because we didn't have it, they want it for their daughter. They see the value in it. Um, I would say, you know, if you see a child who that's happening to, it's your job to take that child under your wing, and I have done that in so many different ways before offering this work. While offering this work, um, it's like, if you are devoted to the youth, you will find a way, and so perhaps that child won't end up in a girl's group, but doesn't mean that they won't can't have a village auntie looking after them, sharing little tidbits of wisdom, because they are actually eager for connection, even if they're crossing their arms and slouching I agree with you I agree yeah, especially the ones who don't have enough of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, lots of food for thought here. Yeah, thank you for that. I appreciate that. I appreciate it All right. Well, I will put all of your details below for our listeners. And it's incredible work. I'm so excited and looking forward to seeing all those lives being touched and how deeply the healing comes through the family unit when any one person is being loved or touched, whether it's women's work or work with the youth. If somebody in the family has an opening, it does create a segue for everyone. So I'm sure even those mothers and fathers that they get to come in circle with you and their daughters. It must be so powerful for the entire unit. It's such a ripple of change that we want to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and for the culture, right, just overall for our own feminine legacy, right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yes. The legacy of these children are yeah, yeah thank you so much.
Speaker 2:It was lovely to be with you it was lovely to be with you too.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much and see you again okay.