Meeting the Wild
A leaving-home rite of passage
What was your experience of leaving home for the first time? Have you now as an adult found your true place in society? Or do you perhaps feel lost, cast adrift, confused and disorientated?
A pervasive sense of fear, doubt and confusion about who you are and where you are going can be a sign that you have missed out on one or more important rites of passage in your life. In traditional societies, significant transitions, such as leaving home, marrying and giving birth, are marked with rituals or ‘rites’ that support people to let go of their old identity and embrace the new.
In modern secular society, many of us miss out on such rites. Without them we can end up stranded in a form of psychological no-man’s land, unable to fully release the old self and fearful and unprepared for what lies ahead. Our transition into mature adulthood therefore remains incomplete.
Meeting the Wild addresses the lack of rites in our culture by providing a powerful opportunity to revisit the important transitions in your life – in particular, your ‘leaving home story’.
Caroline will share a powerful journey of self-discovery, an adventure into the mystery, to reclaim and integrate the parts of yourself that have been lost along the way. On this potent journey into the unknown, wild nature will be your guide, the drum beat will be your calling, and the spirit world will send its allies to your side.
The tools will include dance, meditations, shamanic journeys, time in nature as vision-quest, ritual and ceremony, writing and creativity. We cannot know quite what form the journey will take. Only you can decide as you meet the dancer within you, choose to take each step, learn to trust in yourself and the support that lies all around in both the seen and unseen worlds.
Having completed your rite and assumed your new identity, you will be ready to re-enter society, with your heart opened, a renewed sense of connection and responsibility to all of life, and security in the knowledge of who you are and your true place in the world.
Prerequisites: To attend this course, it is helpful if you have taken part in at least one ecstatic dance workshop, shamanic journey work or similar.
Come and remember, come and share offer to the play of life
the rite of passage you forgot to do
because no one told you
you could or it was necessary.
Tell yourself it did not matter?
Deny yourself with shame,
hide yourself and tell yourself it simply is a game.
Afraid to show to others self-indulgent did they say?
What do we choose from our hearts to remember of that day?
Come remember yourself ,
the journey that’s not forgotten let it all become its dance,
be seen and celebrated
your life it is a ritual a re-membering, a tale to be told,
a forgotten being
a story of the heroine
or of a wounded soul
They always have their place, a story to unfold
the lives that they have touched that will never grow too old
An empowering rite of passage that can no longer be denied,
you know in your heart it matters
and your life can be your pride!
Caroline Carey
