A Rite of Passage Ritual for Daughters, Youth, Adults in Your Community

​This is a rite of passage ritual that came through for a sister-friend whose daughter is just completing high school - but I can imagine it being useful for our daughters and youth needing seeing and recognition at any stage. Or indeed, by our inner children needing recognition, in and as a loving act of self-parenting. As often as needed! It is also a good ritual for those co-celebrating their birthdays, with the birthday honorees in the center.

Forest Portal, The Magic Woods, Brocéliande

The ritual itself is straightforward (and may include other elements you bring into rituals, such as adornment, drums, songs or chants, altars or tableaux, invocation). Each participant in turn comes forward and speaks what they know to be their gifts and strengths into the circle. If they are shy about this, the community encourages them to take space! To get bigger! To go deeper and wider! 

Then they receive. Becoming the center, they are showered with the attention and seeing and recognition of community. They are feted. 

In fullness, the circle transitions to the next participant. ​

​In the hyperindividualist yet paradoxically homogenizing culture of modernity, many of us carry wounds around our gifts not being fully seen. To speak and claim our gifts and to be seen within the subspace of a nested community can be tremendously healing. It can also resource us for times when such seeing may be particularly lacking: we can, in those moments, draw upon the somatic and energetic remembering of a time when we were held in our knowing within community and celebrated. By imprinting in our brains and hearts these relational moments of being recognized for our deepest, most authentic self-revelations, we can allow them to recharge us when needed. This is medicine for our indigenous selves: the part of us that aches to be vulnerable in community. 

​I see the medicine of community as particularly potent for young women and adolescent girls who are just beginning to grapple with how to embody femininity in a culture whose mainstream is marked by misogyny and sexism. In a culture that teaches women to be in competition with each other. It is not only their being seen and celebrated for their gifts that constitutes the medicine: it is also their seeing and celebrating each other! Setting into motion cycles of reciprocity, of mutuality, of deepening trust. 

I would love to hear from you if you or any youth, women, loved ones in your life meet in ritual trying out this format. Send me a note, send me photographs! Kisses to you and to the fabric of relationality we are reweaving.

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