home—body podcast
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home—body podcast
The Initiation Deficit : Part 1 🐦🔥
In this thought-provoking episode, we explore why true transformation is so challenging in dominant Western culture. We'll dive into the forgotten art of initiation - a powerful process that goes far beyond simple willpower or "knowing better." Learn why real change requires us to embrace death and uncertainty, and discover how our lack of proper initiation rituals may be keeping us stuck in patterns of reactivity and fear. Whether you're seeking personal growth, spiritual development, or simply wondering why New Year's resolutions never seem to stick, this episode offers fresh insights into the nature of authentic transformation and what it truly takes to evolve as human beings.
“Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them.” — Marion Woodman
we discuss —
- Change is not just about "knowing better"
- Two crucial ingredients of initiation
- Why many people struggle to make sense of their transformational experiences + resist growth
- What the ego’s role is in all of this
- What it means to come of age
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Mentioned in the episode—
🌊4 Water Ways for the Soul is a self-paced mini-course that dives deeply, simply, into the principles that unblock resistance and run gracefully through life’s obstacles. Water invites you to sink deeply into something more real, and more true; and this mini-course is the perfect dose of foundation principles for engaging with the work of the soul. **Learn more and sign up for 4 Water Ways for the Soul here.🌊**
📚 The Pregnant Virgin, book by Marion Woodman
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Learn the 3 main ingredients that have been the bedrock of each quantum and beautiful transformation in my life. Get 3 Keys for the Soul here for FREE. 🗝️
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This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
thanks for listening. peace, be well. 🙏
Grace. My name is Grace, and you're listening to the homebody Podcast. Greetings. Everyone. Welcome in. Today's episode, I'm going to talk about the process of initiation, and it's great deficit in dominant Western culture today. And I'll also point out, or bring to the table, some of the things I perceive are the effects of this deficit, namely, our inability to become which is an inability to truly transform in a deep and life changing way. It also contributes, I think, to our lack of embodied understanding and an overall sense of dysregulation and or fear that shows up when we attempt to become conscious. CO creators this episode is publishing right at the cusp of a new year, and this time of year, it's a season that we often want to imbue with a lot of transformational energy. Right we make all of our lists and our goals and resolutions and our plans for the new year, trying to harness enough behavior, control and vision and willpower to really make a change, or to steer our boat towards where we want to go. And as long as those things aren't too far off course from where we are right now, they can probably work. No problem. There's nothing wrong with any of these things. I do all of these things. But if we don't know how to change on deep evolutionary soul levels, which is what initiation does, which is, you know, this belongs to the language and the art of magic and spirit. Well, the willpower will only get us so far, and it certainly won't get us anywhere on a deep soul level, we are very creative beings as humans, but I notice, without a language and ritual and understanding of initiation, we never seem To quite shed the skins of previous selves and these skins start to collect as layers of dead, metaphorical skin. And these layers start to conglomerate and make babies and create a giant velcro ball that all of our pain and failure and disappointment and triggers can latch onto, and then we try to overpower this giant velcro ball of pain and dead skin that we haven't shed. And then we think that tapping into that overpowering sense of will is stepping into our co creative power, and it's not because really, all we're able to do in that state is react to our pain, react to the heaviness, be dysregulated honestly we feel from all of the layers of that dead soul, skin hanging on that we haven't shed or we don't know how To and we're not sure if we want to. It's a process that we don't know anymore in dominant, you know, I'm speaking from dominant North American culture, and therefore it's a process that we collectively don't trust, and so we don't do it. And all of that is fine, if that's where someone is at. However, let us not confuse this reactive fear based extreme willpower behavior control. Let us not confuse that with true Interstellar, divine human co creation. They're not the same this second one, this true interstellar co creation is the true force of transformation, and I would love us to stop confusing the two, because I see them get confused pretty often, especially in the circles of personal development, spiritual development, self help, etc. I think getting skillful with initiation is getting skillful with transformation. And maybe you've noticed by looking around at the world at large or at your life, we are in a heightened pace of transformation as a species. And on this planet, things are changing fast, and they're changing a lot, and it seems like the beating of the drum of time. To borrow a symbol set from Hindu mythology, the beating of the drum of time is going quite fast now, and there's a wave and then a wave, and then a wave, and then another wave. And the skill of initiation, of death, of transformation, on this deep level, these are the skills. Of not drowning, for not being overburdened by the call to transform. When life is calling us to that, when we have the skill inside of us, we have this practice inside of us, when life around us and within us is saying it's time to change, it becomes something, even if it's something that's quite powerful. It's something that we're able to integrate and move through without feeling overly dramatic or burdened by it, because we've really shed and stepped into something that is truly us, which is something that is truly transformative. I hear all of the time, especially in personal, spiritual development spaces, change is about knowing better so that we can do better. Have you heard that if we just know better, we'll do better. Know better and we'll do better. Here's the thing, it's not about knowing better. Sure, knowing something can help. But information is not the seed of change. It's not example. You can probably think of 10 things right now in the next five seconds that you regularly do that you know better about. I can think of 10. So change is not about knowing better. So we can drop our obsession with trying to get people to know what we know, so we can educate them into our information hubs in the hopes that they'll agree with us and become just like us. Whatever that is, change is not about knowing better. Change is engaging chaos. Change is stepping into the unknown and uncertainty and change is death. That is why real change actually doesn't happen very often, unless it's forced upon us, because it only really happens for the brave. It only happens for people who can dive into the underworld, not because they're addicted to feeling bad or sad, but because they know how to become and what it takes. They know how to ride the wave of uncertainty when they see that dragon of chaos coming. They know how to get on it and ride and they even know how to trust it and ride it with grace, and sometimes even ride it with ecstasy. Initiation is a doorway into change, and it's a vessel that can carry us through into something that is truly different, and it's not something we have a lot of language or culture for in our content consumption is King mainstream reality. So we're going to dive into it today and hopefully initiate that culture and imagination inside of you. This will be a two part episode, and this is the first sort of laying the foundation for some of the things I'm going to talk about, and the second will be more about how we respond to initiation, why it's important, and what it looks like when we don't respond. I wanted to start us with a quote by Mary Ann Woodman, who is a young and psycho analyst and writer, and this is from her book called The pregnant virgin. Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rights, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life through failures, symptoms, inferiority, feelings and overwhelming problems, they're being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant, but because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth, unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life unless cultural rituals support The leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which that process can happen without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth. The individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone. End Quote, I'd love to sit with that for a minute, because I think there's a lot of of wisdom and illustration in that quote, in that observation from someone who spent their life and their entire body of work really helping people with the transformation of consciousness. And I want to back up a bit before we dive into some more specific examples and talk about the two things that I am personally going to emphasize in these episodes, initiation is and can serve a lot of purposes, but the things I'm going to emphasize are one that initiation. Conversation is death portal. We tend to have a romantic view, or a fantasy view of this, but when we're actually confronted with death energy in our lives and what it's asking us to let go of most of us either misunderstand it, we run away from it, or we are devoured by it, or we just learn to live with that energy close by, and then we cope all the time because we refuse or we don't know how to engage it more meaningfully. The second thing I'm going to emphasize is that the process of initiation is also intended to tether us and to introduce us to the great and powerful energies, the gods, the archetypes, the forces that help us embody what the next stage of transformation asks of us to help us embody who we will become. So let's talk about the first one. Let's talk about the death portal. And before you're like, I'm so good at death. I love death. I'm dying all the time. If it doesn't have a lot of charge for you, it's probably not actual. The death portal really tends to bring up things that are high sensation for us, that we could respond to in a very triggered way. So let's stay out of the romantic fantasy view of this, and really talk about this death portal. And I'm going to use the example of an initiation as coming of age in a lot of ways, because it has existed in many different forms for almost all cultures of humanity, where there's a moment a threshold, where we step through the door from being a child, and then we move into the accountability of an adult, which means the version of us who was a child, our life as a child must die. And this death portal, or this threshold moment, it's going to be true of any initiation, getting married, having a baby, becoming an elder menopause in order to really get married, something about who you were before must now die, so that you can live into something else. Same with becoming a parent, the you who wasn't a parent is now going to die so you can step in the fullness of who you are going to be on this next chapter, and we have even more contemporary or could be initiations that are intended, or could usher us into new capacities of power, money, success, failure, etc, but we get culturally again because we're ill equipped, because We don't have this language of the soul and of myth. We get really scared when we're at a death portal, which is sometimes actual death. And sometimes people have put off the death portal so long that that's the first place they're encountering it. And also because as a culture, we've digressed into total materialism and wholly identifying with that which is temporal About Us. I look like this. I act like this. I'm from here and there. These are my traumas. These are my issues. These are my favorite things. These are the things that I hate. This is my favorite ideology, and they are understood and these are treated as fixed, innate and inseparable parts of our identity, when actually what is true is that all of that is a part of your impermanence. Those are things that the ego likes to cling to, to define itself, which is the ego trying to cling and not go through the death portal, which will keep you small, inevitably, because the soul wants to grow and evolve and the ego doesn't, so it will begin to feel like you're in a suit that's too small, or in a life that's too small. And these things that we cling to, or that the ego clings to, these temporary things about us, these are things that we must learn to let go of if we're going to truly initiate and transform there is an essence to us that is essential. In my belief, there's an essence to us that's eternal. It's trans temporal. There's a part of us that lives outside of time and space, and that seed, that essence is what gets refined over time. With each death and rebirth we experience, the more and more we receive and participate in the death rebirth of the ego that leaves us less attached to what's impermanent, and then what we get in exchange is a brighter, more refined, more luminous, more radiant, more clear expression of that which is essential about us. There will be some things of you that stay and remain through each death, rebirth, portal of initiation. There will be things of you that you find again on each side. Of death and rebirth, but you'll only get to know. You don't get to decide what that is, though. You will only get to know what that is after you've gone through the tunnel, after you've stepped through the threshold, and I can hear you now. Oh, I don't know grace that sounds so dramatic, and also a little too spiritual. Can I just want something a lot, and then that transforms me and transforms my life? Sure, yeah, of course. And we'll get more into this in a future episode. Sure, you can want something a lot. I'm great at that personally, however, unless the death portal is involved, that want will likely digress into something that is Mary escapism and fantasy, that will then create a greater divide and more separation, rather than becoming something that transforms you into something wider and Wilder, something that closes the gap of separation, both inside and outside of you. Death is a key ingredient to this process, and it's most often an ego. Death, our ego is the smallest part of us. It's important, but it is the smallest part of us. I usually use the example of the ego being a car. There is a part of us that is the car right to be in this incarnation on this planet. We need a body. We need a car to be driving around in this experience. Beautiful. So grateful for the car. Thank you for the car. However, there's also a part of us that is the driver of the car in the maker of the car, potentially, when we get too attached to the car with it being the color red, or a Corvette, or getting so many miles per gallon, or has this x special kind of tires, we're actually missing out on connecting to something much Wilder and more powerful when we're like, Well, I'm a red Toyota, And this is how many miles per gallon I get as soon as any of that changes, your identity and worthiness is on the line, and that ironically, makes the Ingo cling to it even more so. Back to the example of coming of age. How many people do you know who claim to be adults, but are really just giant 14 year olds with money. In dominant culture in western world being initiated into adulthood. Well, to say, dominant culture in North America being initiated into adulthood has become replaced with being a teenager, and then teenagers simply grow up to become adult teenagers who can vote and drive and make money, etc, and have kids. But there are now no values in our culture or very view, very few embodied experiences of it. You know, we don't really have culture. We have consumerism. We have King consumption. We have a culture that's modeled on the opposite of initiation. That's right, you don't have to change. Just buy things. Everyone else is wrong, and you're right. You're a red car. Yes, you are. Here's how we can make it fit better, maintain it, make it more concrete, puff it up, sell it, pat it out. Make something inherently temporary into something that never changes. Here's how we can take something inherently temporary and turn it into something that never dies or try to but death is change, and change is death, and so there is no change. There is no initiation without it Period, end of story. So back to coming of age. If we were getting initiated, you know, we're we are witness in a right where we encounter the death of our youth, the death of us as a child, and we are witnessed in the receiving of our adulthood and the accountability and responsibility that comes with that. When we are children, we are on the receiving end. When we're children, we need endless help. We need someone to feed us, someone to help us, someone to watch us. But on the other end of the rite of passage, the question becomes, no longer, what was I born to receive, but what was I born to give? What was I born to give? What were you born to give? But most of us were never initiated into that question, and so we are stuck in a confused dynamic with loads of responsibility, wondering, what do I get? What's in it? For me, there's an attention starved, hungry child still growing inside that's wondering, what about me? What about me? What do I get? How will this make me feel better? How. Will this make me feel more secure? How will this make me more comfortable? How will this make me feel more permanent? And every relationship and situation and circumstance, often unconscious, unconsciously, becomes about what's in it for me, and any relationship that isn't oriented around that is then decided that it's toxic or unsatisfying at the least, and I'm being hyperbolic with my descriptions here, in order to illustrate the energy of this, it can and often does show up in a more nuanced way, such as an inability to listen and an ability to be wrong, an extreme distaste for anything that ruffles the egos feathers or makes us remotely uncomfortable, and pretty much every adult I've worked with and just taking a look around, we all have a stuck teenager inside, wondering when they're going to feel better and finally get what they want from mommy and daddy, who were also probably Still stuck teenagers in adult bodies, because they also were never initiated into the world with the grounded and spiritual support, with the ritualizing into adulthood, and the misunderstood, stuck teenager inside has yet to fully understand, has yet to fully stand under What was I born to give to the world? We think it's like about shining our light back to us and how amazing and great we are. It's about being sparkly and famous, but I promise there is something more special than that, something more ecstatic, something more radiant and more wonderful. But it's an adult question, and this brings me to the second aspect that I wanted to discuss about initiation, which is through the death portal, what we meet in there that brings us out to the other side is the introduction, the ceremonial, ritualized connection to the great and powerful energies that sustain us and that we are called to embody, both at large as general humanity, but also in unique and precise ways according to our destiny. These great and powerful energies inform who you are, your nature, your biology, and are the guides and guardians of this world, reality and all that is. And as I said earlier, through more and more transformations, that inner, eternal, luminous part will become more radiant and more cultivated. As we go through more and more initiations, we become more seasoned, we become more refined, and our embodiment becomes more precise, and it precisely embodies that general energies and the specific ones that you are transmitting into and onto Earth, the more our ego becomes the servant of the soul instead of the other way around, the more elegant and aligned your embodiment becomes. For most of humanity's timeline, we've been oriented towards the Earth in this way, we've understood the earth as a form of source, and ourselves as a form of that as well. And so there's this value placed on this direct connection in a very practice, manifested way of initiation, and also which pulled us into a way of living our lives that we're sensing and moving with and through the divine and also through place, through where we are. This could be an interesting point to check in with your body and really check in with yourself. And notice, as soon as I start talking about this, do you start automatically projecting this initiatory reality, this connection to place, to earth as a form of divine, as humans also as a form of divine. Do you start projecting this onto other groups of people that don't include you? Did you automatically start thinking about other times, other places, other people that don't include you? We all belong to this earth, and we have all had and can have an intimate connection to place, in space and time and body as a revealing of the Divine. It absolutely does include you, and so pay attention to how you might unconsciously be opting out of this. Let's get back to tethering to great energies. When we're children again, we're plugged into specific caregivers who function as our primary sources of sustenance, approval, guidance, protection, especially young children, right? The parents are sort of these gods. These are or the caregivers are the. Sources and givers of everything that we know, but ideally when we come of age and we step through that death portal, we are then given or introduced to the cords that plug into something greater. The cords to our parents are cut and we are plugged instead into the greater parents of the wider world, the Great Mother, the great father, the earth herself. Our concentric circle of what's available to us then becomes much bigger, because we are then bigger, and we have access to something bigger, and we are also responsible to something bigger. We are initiated into receiving our own guides, our helping spirits, those who walk with us, humanity in general, this planet in general, but also you in particular, from and through the other world, the greater worlds, the cosmos, and this new and wider belonging will then entrain you into a much bigger sense of responsibility, a much greater sense of embodiment and source that's bigger than a nuclear family obligation. It can include that for sure, but it's beyond that, and in initiating that leads us through death and into this great connection we then see and understand and belong to the world, to the place, to the great and powerful energies that brought us here, of which our biological parents can be a part. But they are not the source. They are not source. So coming of age, we cut the cords we needed as children that said these people are what we need to survive and thrive, and we instead step into the stream of the Mother, the Father, and all of the allies and energies that weave throughout our existence. And we then learn and we're accountable to instead source our belonging, source our wisdom from this new and greater stream. And now that we've met and witnessed these great and powerful energies, then we're expected to carry them and hold them and be in relationship to them, in our lives, in our bodies, in our decisions, to seek their wisdom to ask for their help and live our lives according to the vision that we then receive from that greater belonging. And I'm going to leave you all with that today. There will be a second part to this episode releasing in a few weeks, where I'll talk about what happens if we don't do this, what are other ways that we can respond? What does that end up looking like, and, more importantly, what happens when we do do this? And for now, I would love for you all to contemplate and invite in the questions. What's dying right now this year, what wants to shed? Can you? Could you what what support or containers do you need? What culture do you need, what stories do you need to help you do that? And the second question I'd love for you to contemplate is, what great and powerful energies are you being asked to step into? Who are you being asked to meet, to connect with or to become introduced. And you may not know, but you may have a sense of what could be waiting for you on the other side, the most important question is the first one, what's dying right now? What's trying to shed? What accumulations are we still holding on to in what ways are you fixating and clinging to the ego identities the car and what ways are you clinging to that? I hope you'll take some time to really live into these questions over the next few weeks, as you sit in the space between these episodes, be sure to check out the show notes for some of my current offerings and gifts that are here to support you and guide you as you deepen your soul work and to help you become more skillful and embodied with all the ways that your spirit and magic wants to live through you and into this world until next time. Peace be well. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a few moments to subscribe to the show leave us a review and share the episode. These small tasks help our independent podcast. So much. Be sure to also check out the show notes below to learn more about any resources, guests or sponsors that we shared with you today. Our intro and outro music was created by artists Erin palavic and Jared Kelly. Our podcast logo was created by Elaine Stevenson, and this show is produced by softer sound studio. Thank you for being here. Be well. Peace. You.