Soul-footed Wild Woman

There’s a woman who’s body is the pristine wilderness of our planet. She knows the less-trodden paths that lead to no-where, because she made them. From the wild wood she inhabits the minds and hearts of us all, craftily watching and waiting for the moment when she can pounce, take off our shoes and reveal to us the paw, hoof and claw hidden underneath our feet. Then she invites us to walk and find our soul-footing in the world.

This is the Wild Woman archetype. Not an out-of-control, hysterical being. A being who is full of Soul with a keen sensing, playful spirit, a heightened capacity for devotion, relational by nature, inquiring and possessed of great endurance, strength and a deep intuition. Some call her the Woman who lives at the edge of the world, or She who knows. Let’s call her the Wild Woman in all of us.

There are times when we experience the Wild Woman in tasting something delicious and juicy. Or through the great beauty, sights and images nature provides; an amazing sunset or sunrise, a woodland seemingly untouched by human feet, a river’s narrow passage when the waters push through a gorge like a being in the birthing canal.

For some, the words wild and woman are a figurative knock on the door of our feminine psyche, summoning up a portal or passageway. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “No matter where a woman is from or her cultural heritage, she somehow knows these words wild and woman, and that they belong together.” They are causal in recollecting who we are and what we are about.

No matter what these words conjure up, there is a longing that comes with them. A knowing that “I too have this in me and it needs to be let out!” One hears it loudest perhaps, when one has given little time to the mystical life; little time to wandering aimlessly in nature, or not enough time over to exploring the dreamlife. We hear it when one’s creative life has been paid too little of our attention or our true love’s such as dance, music, story, artistry and craft have been put off, let go, disregarded because we are too busy.

Without the Wild Woman, we women can easily loose the sureness of our soul-feet. She is the soulful heart of a woman, so maybe it’s time to let her in.

Author: Alexandra Hatfield

If you would like to join a very special 9-month long journey with the Wild Woman Archetype and a diverse and rich group of women visit http://www.wildrites.uk/wild-woman/  

Re-enchantment

Dear Friends

Disenchantment is everywhere. We seem to have fallen out of love with so much that the contemporary world stands for. In the face of a relentless barrage of awful news and an evermore uncertain future, when more and more is asked of us and it feels that we get little of meaning in return, it can be hard to find the magic in our lives.

And yet, magic is still there; in the return of spring flowers and the first green leaves, in the smiling eyes of those we love. In fact, for all that the world is a tough and frightening place right now, that magic is often with us; in birdsong, in shared laughter, in the way sunlight falls over the land.

Magic is, of course, a tricky word. But at Wild Rites we have started to talk about enchantment – and the possibility that we can re-enchant ourselves by connecting deeply with the world around us.

Over the past 500 years or so, western culture has privileged reason and the rational intellect as the primary ways of engaging with and understanding our world. As a result, we live in a “secular age”. The goddesses and gods, the spirits of place, the shaman and the cunning folk, the notion of a divine spark, have all been driven away. We are left alone, as individuals, with our own minds as the only place where meaning might exist.

At the heart of Wild Rites is the understanding that - in fact - meaning resides everywhere, in everything and most especially in nature. Ceremonial objects can be imbued with meaning. Animals, plants, trees, rivers, the rocks we sit on and the cold wind we brace ourselves against all hold meaning for us and have messages to give us.

Can we allow ourselves to step into the enchanted web of meaning that we share with our surroundings? A web that we are intimately part of and whose presence and intelligence we actively co-create as we open and offer the gifts of our psyche to the world around us.

At Wild Rites, we lead ceremonies that guide you to a state where your psyche becomes porous, so that aspects of your soul are released to resonate with the wild landscape. This allows a deeper relationship to develop, not only between yourself and wild nature but also between you and the world at large. And it is in the depth of this enchanted relationship that you can begin to see your soul mirrored back. This mirroring is key to what Wild Rites offers, as we guide you through ceremony to see what nature is trying to tell you about the state of your soul and your emerging self.

The word porous is important here. What Wild Rites offers is not the Garden of Eden. We are not promising you an experience of a return to nature as an ‘innocent’ dwelling in paradise. That would be to regress, to lose our sense of self and purpose, merely to feed on honeydew, as Coleridge would have put it. Rather, through shared council and the deep ritual of medicine walks, we seek to guide you into a participatory relationship with wild nature. A relationship whose insights and meanings you can take back into your everyday life.

Call Of The Wild Soul is a four-day long ceremony, which brings us into relationship with more of our Wholeness. Over our time together, we build a ceremonial container that enables a softening of boundaries and helps you to recognise that you can choose to be more porous, so the buffers between your consciousness and the Unconscious, the inner and the outer, begin to soften. This softening enables you to experience aspects of soul outside yourself, amidst the wild landscape where we work. Or, we could say, to enter a state of enchantment.

We then invite you to go out and gather and retrieve these soul parts from the landscape, facilitating a return of that which has been repressed, forgotten and disavowed along with your latent potential. This allows you to move to a state of greater Wholeness and integration. At Wild Rites we do this whilst honouring your ego (we consider this essential) and supporting you to integrate into consciousness that which you retrieved.

As we all dream of a different, better future, perhaps by becoming a little more porous and entering into the enchanted, we can begin to understand what we have to offer the world as our Whole Selves and to bring that into being?

The Medicine Wheels; Emanation Myth and Map of Relationship

As I write, Wild Rite’s autumn season of workshops is about to begin. And I am wondering what the people who come to work with us will bring to share with the communities we form and to the magical landscape we work in?

For sure, we have already witnessed this year the stress and anxiety that has arisen from the ‘great pause’, from lockdowns and the isolation of social distancing. People are yearning to be met by Nature, to be soothed by Her peace and held in Her graceful arms. But more than that, we hear a calling out for meaning, for a retrieval of something we have lost; deeper ways of relating to each other and to the greater creation of which we are just a part. So, it feels like a good time to say a little more about the cosmology that Wild Rites works with.

One of the functions of myth is to provide us with a cosmology, a way of relating to and understanding our place in the cosmos. In the British Isles the most prevalent cosmology is that of the Abrahamic traditions (Judeo-Christian-Islamic.) All are rooted in a creation myth, in which one creator known as God makes the known universe or material world in 6 days yet remains separate from the creation.

There then comes the first humans to be made, Adam and Eve/Hawwa who are tempted and promptly banished from their Garden of Eden after they eat from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil and create sin. The garden and the perfection of the Godhead are ruined for humans and they remain separate from God and His unattainable perfection.

This separation from God, together with God’s edict "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (Genesis 1:28),  has in part contributed to humans treating planet Earth and embodied existence as something to conquer, dominate and transcend. Consciousness remains above and separate to Matter, and matter can be considered dead or at least subservient. I’m sure this cosmology is why many of us unconsciously or consciously continue to relate to Earth in this way.

In contrast the Medicine Wheels offer an emanation myth, in which the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine do not create the world, instead they become the world. The world is therefore Divine, suffused with spirit, not somewhere to dominate, transcend or conquer but a place of relationship, experience and community with other beings. This is the Sundance. The emanation story even provides us with the first layer of the medicine wheel without which there is no Life.

The story goes a little like this…

THE FIVE COUNT[1]

“In a time before the beginning there was our Great Grandmother, the Great Zero, she was no-thing and therefore every-thing in potential. As she resided in Eternity, she grew bored and lonely so she turned in on herself and divided in two creating our Great Grandfather. Our Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother made love and their first child was our Grandfather the fiery dancer we know as the Sun. They enjoyed making love and so did it again creating their second born our Grandmother the Earth. We now have One, The Sun in the East and Two the Earth in the West.

The Sun married the Earth, this created a flow of energies, gases, evaporation, rain, rivers and oceans. The Water and flow enabled the plants and Trees to grow they were known as the Standing People. Giving us Three the Standing People who reside in the South. When the Sun married the Standing People they grew, they breathed in Carbon dioxide and exhaled Air. Air is birthed from the marriage of One the Sun and Three the Standing People. Four is the element of Air which gave birth to the moving people, the animals for with air they grew lungs and begun to move about. The four is placed in the North.

The Five is the marriage of One the Sun, or more accurately the energy and consciousness of the Sun aka Spirit and the animals creating the divine animal or HU-man. Five sits in the centre of the Medicine Wheel and is know as Fully Human.”

To be Fully Human is to reside at the centre of our experience in balance with the One, Two, Three and Four, in relationship to the spiritual powers that sit behind the directions as we experience them.

What I have just shared is referred to as the 5 count and is also known as the Children’s Count. We are all children of our Great Grandmother, the Great Zero and this count was taught to children to bring them into relationship with this world. The wheels build on and on in a way that enables us to perceive the relational nature of this world in which we have our Being and participation.

The Wheel places spirit in everything, rather than somewhere else, other, out-there in a Heaven to be attained. It provides a living map which brings us into I-Thou relationship with both our inner and outer world and beyond.

If you would like to stand at the centre of your own wheel and learn more about the way of relating to nature and soulmaking then join us for our 4-day soulmaking intensive “Call of the Wild Soul” where you will begin to experience your own medicine wheel and learn more about this ancient cosmology.

We have 2 places available for our last retreat of the year “Call of the Wild Soul” October 1st – 4th. Is one of them yours?! I really look forward to exploring the four directions and the medicine wheel with you.

 [1] Adapted from oral instruction as is traditional.

All Creation is Born of Woman

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

After millennia of patriarchy and an exaggerated emphasis on the masculine we find ourselves amidst a time of polarisation and global crises, a potential turning point where many are considering and speaking of purpose. We may find ourselves asking “For what have I been born into this time?” and “What is mine to do?” Tragically, in a patriarchal society, purpose often gets reduced to a mental goal or mission statement “my purpose is…”

I want to write a little about Purpose as we work with “It” at Wild Rites. I deliberately use a capital ‘P’ because to experience Purpose is to be in conscious relationship with the impetus behind life. Some traditions speak of this intelligence as God, Goddess, Great Spirit or the Tao. Bohm called it the ‘Implicate Order’.

We experience ourselves as living a purposeful life when we are in conscious relationship with this intelligence and impetus, for then we can choose to unfold, become and work with life. It is much easier to travel with the flow of the river than try swim against it! We experience this relationship through our innate, wild and unadapted Self.

The first sacred law of the Zero Chiefs, who brought the medicine wheel teachings to the Americas is “ALL CREATION IS BORN OF WOMAN”. I imagine very few people would dispute this at a literal level. Yet, we need to remember that these teachings are a subtle, sophisticated, esoteric science hidden in plain sight. To be more explicit we could say that to create with Purpose we need to begin with the Feminine, and that every idea and form we express, however physical or subtle, is a creation.

To be in relationship to Purpose from the perspective of the Medicine Wheels requires us to honour “ALL CREATION IS BORN OF WOMAN” otherwise we break the first law and experience ourselves as a separate from Life.  

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.” ― Andy Goldsworthy

What this tells us is that to come into relationship with Purpose we need to begin with a Feminine receptivity so that we can be impregnated with ideas and possibilities, so that we can be INSPIRED- to be breathed full of spirit. Otherwise we simply work in the masculine world of form and action by looking outside of ourselves and asking “what should I do?” When we act from this place we often simply manipulate matter rather than create in alignment with life. In our current time of global crises that would be like moving the deck chairs around on the sinking Titanic, hoping it would make a difference! We cannot solve a crisis at the level it was created.

When we allow Purpose to impregnate us, we can allow action to take place through us, bringing together the masculine and feminine sides of creation. This feels like actorless action, the naishkarmya that Krsna speaks of in the Bhagavad Gita. It is to be in both the stillness and the movement of the Tao. This is what it means to live a life of Purpose and we can experience this at many levels. When we connect with Purpose in this manner it is often experienced as finding our place in the order of things.

To be in relationship to Purpose gives a taste of realising that every event, all suffering and joy lead to this moment, for without these experiences one would not be capable of embodying what is calling.

The Wild Rites River of Soul is a three part journey of coming into relationship with and embodying Purpose. On Call of the Wild Soul you learn how to look and listen into the mirror of Nature and begin to retrieve your Wholeness, your Wild Soul. This has often been described by participants as embodied soul retrieval. The Vision Quest then enables you to surrender and open to Purpose so that you can receive divine inspiration, then you begin to actualise this in your life. A year later if you choose to return for Embodying the Vision we guide you to take further strides towards the embodiment and actualisation of Purpose as It wishes to move uniquely through you.

Very often questors who come to us and open themselves to Purpose expect a complete change in direction. They are pleasantly surprised that the Purpose which is calling them requires them to use their existing skills. They discover that Purpose has always been working with them to develop the capacities and skills they need to express the unique genius that has sought to flow through them. And this is true for us all.

Once we begin to allow Purpose to move through us we can then refine our vehicles of expression (body, feelings and mind.) Perhaps we upskill, perhaps our body form changes, perhaps we let go of limiting beliefs and stuck emotions.

Connecting to the Purpose that wants to move through our unique vessel, is to know Dante’s “the love that moves the sun and stars”. This stage of development is a decisive shift where we become a Soul which expresses through a personality, rather than a personality seeking Soul. With this profound and decisive shift, on one level life becomes much easier as we allow life to move through us. Yet on another level we may need to resolve resistance from our personality, some of our ways of being may no longer serve who we are becoming, we may need to refine our capacities and skills to express our unique genius.

As our souls begin to express through our personality, it becomes harder and harder for us not to move in increasing harmony with the ecosystem around us. This is true ecopsychology where we connect with the Intelligence behind creation and we allow that to move us, because then we move in relationship with the Whole, with Nature, for we are one. Once we know our interdependence with all beings then to harm Nature is to harm ourselves which is no longer comfortable or easy to do.

As we increase and refine our capacity to allow Purpose to move freely through us we become a hollow bone. The marrow that acts like the Velcro of our egoic conditioning is eroded away, as we becoming an ever clearer creative expression.

For me, I am in relationship to Purpose when I experience myself expressing love. After 20 years of working with the medicine wheels and other spiritual traditions and a decade of working with Psychosynthesis this often takes form in Wild Rites work. I could say that I experience Purpose by allowing love to flow through me and that my work at Wild Rites sits downstream of allowing this flow. At Wild Rites I experience the greatest flow of love and it has become a vehicle for expression of Purpose in my life.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you have built against it.” Rumi

This blog is for all who have the ears to hear, nevertheless I am inspired to write it at as I work on the ceremonial architecture of “Wild and Gentle Man.” It concerns me how so many men’s movements reduce Purpose to simply a mission statement. As soon as we say “my purpose is…..” this possessive form descends us to the level of the personality. To work with Purpose we do ultimately need to develop expressions of our personality that allow us to work with form. But only after we have first connected fully with soul.

Unfortunately, so much men’s work focuses purely on the masculine side of being a man. At Wild Rites we offer something different. We are asking you to come into relationship with your masculine and feminine and to watch the dance between the two. This is the intention of Wild and Gentle Man. As you relate deeply to the ground of being which keeps you in relationship to the unfolding order that is Nature, you live a life saturated with Purpose.

I hope that you might join us at Wild Rites on The River of Soul, as you journey towards finding your own life’s Purpose.

The Great Turning of Our Time

THE UNCONSCIOUS WORLD IS SURGING UP

Crisis:
"decisive point in the progress of a disease," "vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse." From the Latinised form of Greek krisis "turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death" (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen). From root *krei- "to sieve," "discriminate, distinguish."

Corona:

"a crown," from Latin corona "a crown, a garland," A coronavirus is so called for the spikes that protrude from its membranes and resemble the tines of a crown or the corona of the sun. A corona is also the "luminous circle observed around the sun during a total eclipse"

Looking through mythopoetic eyes, the eyes of Soulmaking, the Corona Crisis is thus a global turning point in global dis-ease. One which points to a hidden luminous circle that can only be seen during a total eclipse of the Sun.

Nasa tells us “The Sun’s corona is the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the Sun's surface. That makes it difficult to see. However, the corona can be viewed during a total solar eclipse.”  During a total solar eclipse, the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. When this happens, the moon blocks out the bright light of the Sun. The glowing white corona can then be seen surrounding the eclipsed Sun.

What is this sun that is becoming eclipsed? Perhaps the Sun God, Apollo? Known for light, knowledge, disciplined work ethics and emotional restraint. The favoured son of Patriarchal Zeus. Perhaps our society has been a little too close to the Apollonian way of being and for too long repressed other  aspects of the Whole. It is time to relate to our planet and all inhabitants - human and non-human - as living beings, rather than as commodities. With the eclipse of this bright light, an imposed slowing down and going within becomes possible. With this comes the possibility to see the collective shadow formed by our repression.

Is this the shadow of great technological advances being treated as an end in themselves rather than to serve a more sustainable way of life? Or commercial growth for growth sake and unrestrained use of the resources of Mother Earth, or our fantasy that we as humans have dominion over Her?

Yes, a crisis can be a time of suffering, particularly at the level of our ego’s and for the ego suffering is to be avoided at all costs. Is this then why so many survival dynamics and patterns are getting triggered and played out right now?. At the other extreme we can take flight to spiritual heights or hide behind spiritual truths. The level of soul sits betwixt and between, as the experience of spirit in matter. At the level of Soul we begin to unveil the meaning in our suffering. The language of Soul is the language of symbol and myth.

This morning, walking, Alex came across Slow Worm taking the warmth of the sun into its body. This small chthonic creature rested like a living Ouroboro, the emblematic ancient serpent continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself. A gnostic and alchemical symbol that expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation. We don’t see this every day and its presence struck a hopeful message that it is time to wake up, be seen and renewed. Time for an acknowledgement and integration of shadow.

At times of crisis Hope is a powerful medicine. Hope allows us to tap into our soul senses – senses  that tell us there is purpose and meaning in all things and that if we align to what gives us true meaning and purpose in life we continue to act as Mother Nature does – we allow that which is ready to die, die and birth ourselves anew. This is the call we hear. This is the circular movement of the ouroboros.

Many of our one-to-one clients are asking themselves what does this mean for me, my family, my work, my organisation, the world?  As Alex and I are supporting folk to face into these questions whilst remaining connected to Soul they naturally move into this turning in a way that allows them to align with the Emergent in their life and to continue with a sense of purpose and hope. Let’s be clear, there is a greater call here than to wash your hands! The call to really listen, to work with timeless practices to unveil not only individual meaning and alignment but to unveil the greater meaning of this crisis-turning-point.  We have found that the old practices in nature of council, ceremony and deep connection enable us to tap into the higher greater intelligence of the group beyond survival and ultimately Nature herself.

I am reminded of the analogy of the young woman not slowing down for the bend ahead and hitting the wall, whereas the old woman looks ahead sees the bend in the road ahead and navigates the turn and remains on the road - her path…

As a response to this call we are inviting those that can hear it to a four-day immersion called Unveiling Meaning.  We will focus on individual, group, community and collective meaning at this time. We will focus on cultivating Hope and connection to Purpose. We will work together to form a circle of our own that acts as a guiding light.

The event will take place July or August and will be limited to 8 participants with Alex and Jon as guides. Please email jon@wildrites.uk if you would like to be a part of circle, include in your email you July and August availability for a Friday to Monday event. This may form the basis of an ongoing group, depending on what emerges. 

This will be an advanced Wild Rites Event so if you have not worked with us previously please write to us with a couple of lines letting us know your experience of council, group work and working with Nature as a mirror to Self.

It was bat that did it - an experince of the Soulmking Intensive
by Simon Stanley

It was the bat that really did it in the end. Leaving the warmth and companionship of the barn for a night full of showers and stars, the bat flew so close to my face that I could feel the air it displaced with its wings. It was like a spell or a gift, take this as a blessing the bat seemed to say, don’t waste it, and that was it, the door was open. The door, that is, to a sense of myself as more primal, more directly kin with the bat and the stars, more essential and much more determinedly and sure-footedly on the journey that is my life.

It could also have been the hare that ran over the bridge and almost bundled into my legs. Or the ewe I found, weak and panicky, one horn caught in a wire fence. Or the ancient beech that, as I sat with it, slowly showed me the richness of its dying, how it held a whole world in its kneeling form: foxglove, oak seedling, bracken, primrose, five types of fungus, a whole forest of ferns. All of them (there were others), seemed like messengers bearing some significant learning for me, or like mirrors, in which I could see my life reframed, or through a new and extraordinary lens.

There is no doubt about it, Longsleddale is a magical place. Alex and Jon refer to it as a place where the veil is thin but for me it was more like the veils were ballooning in the wind, opening up bright vistas onto my life, my blocks and self-limiting habits and my dreams and potentiality, in ways that seemed fresh and potent, full of power and bursting with energy.

Would the beauty of Longsleddale taken me to this place of awareness if I had stumbled on it alone? I don’t suppose so. The wonder of the Wild Rites Soulmaking Intensive is that it takes such a magical place as the basis of a kind of alchemic experience, in which story, ceremony, myth, the wisdom of the four directions and the power of council come together with those extraordinary ‘nature’ encounters to build a crucible. In that crucible, I think all of us who shared the experience met ourselves (and each other) in new and deeply moving ways. And that really is quite amazing; that a diverse group of strangers can come together to make camp in the rain on a Thursday afternoon and leave on Monday lunchtime, having bonded and shared deeply, having seen themselves anew and carrying a fresh sense of purpose and determination.

As alchemists go, Alex and Jon are pretty special. They conjured laughter and tears, songs and stories, phobias, confessions and deeply-held wounds out of us in ways that felt both safe and validating. More than that, they pointed us off down new roads where we might go to shed the aspects of those old selves that no longer serve and find new adventures, perhaps even a whole new country to explore.

It is called an intensive for a reason! I guess I had thought this might be a kind of vision-quest-lite but the challenges, provocations and invitations were very real and the rewards equally profound. I left with fresh energy, excitement and insight, bearing the outline map of where my life needs to go next. That was a wonderful gift.

After the intensive I spent a few more days in the Lake District. The magic didn’t stop. At Aira Force the perfect Beatrix Potter red squirrel stuck her head round a hazel trunk and gave me a long, appraising stare. Go on she seemed to say Get on with it, you don’t have time to waste, before she went back to her autumn foraging.

To be Wild Woman - Deep Relation to the Archetypes of the Embodied Feminine Self

Having completed the first phase of the 2019 Wild Woman initiatory programme and being blown away by the power of what was received from the land and each other I felt it time to reflect on why this programme has exceed all possible expectations and left the Wild Women wanting more. This short article is the result of my musings.

Jung posited that there are primary images residing in the psyche that have both an intelligence and a will of their own, he called these Archetypes. Wild Woman is a primary archetype of the Embodied Feminine Self and forms the basis of a 9 month initiatory women’s rite of passage where we work with four key aspects of the Feminine Soul; the Maiden (Virgin), the Lover, the Mother and the Crone (Wise Woman).

When a woman is out of relationship with these archetypes, or in denial of their significance in her psyche, there is the potential for them to be unrecognised and unconscious drivers of her behaviour. Imagine a woman unconsciously identified - or let’s say possessed - with the Maiden archetype. She may refuse to grow old. She may search out surgery to remain young looking in body. She may be dependent on another in her life financially and emotionally, all the while unconscious to her own need to have healthy and conscious relationship to the maiden archetype who is in possession of her.

It could be the same with the Lover. This woman may define herself by her beauty and outward appearance – afraid to leave the house without her “face-on”. She may only feel worth or alive when she is in the throws of a new love affair and then soon go cold or depressed when the honey-moon period is over and she has to face the hard work of a conscious loving relationship. She may be all things to all men/woman (depending upon her sexuality) without truly considering what she needs from relationship.

Another dynamic to being possessed (or too close to an archetype) is,, paradoxically, be too far from them. Let us consider the Mother and Crone archetypes, and when they are denied, split or unconscious to us as women. Our un-met needs for good-enough mothers may be projected onto older women in our lives until we come to learn how to mother ourselves. Our crone may be rejected as a Halloween caricature or our inner wisdom marginalised as foolish nonsense. Or perhaps we treat others as ‘the one who knows’ and externalise our inner teacher onto ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’. We may value logic, reason and ‘facts’ over intuitive knowledge and the paradox of Mystery if we have little relationship to the Crone wisdom within. 

To be out of relationship with these archetypes is to live a sterile and dry life with a lack of energy and meaning, for these images bring us libido or psychic energy. Knowing about and working with these archetypal energies brings a maturity, inner leadership and  - when healthy relationship is established - the vital constellation of the Wild Woman archetype.

The Wild Woman rite of passage process we offer at Wild Rites is powerful because not only do we build an awareness and appropriate relationship to each of the four key feminine archetypes, we do this in a grounded and embodied way. We focus on building a nature-based, and embodied relationship to the four key archetypes of the Feminine Self.

We do this through creating ritual and physical symbolic acts that bring us into deeper relationship with the archetypal energies in the here and now in the physical world.  This enactment in Nature anchors a lived experience of the archetype and draws it down from the level of imagination or for some even their unconscious. To have Nature as a mirror to our Wild Woman is incredible, for she can be with all of us! Whereas another individual, such as a therapist or coach can only mirror as far as they have gone themselves.

Sometimes the danger of purely guided visualisations and reading books means that we don’t really embody our personal relationship to the archetypes. They remain ephemeral, unreal and for some a way to escape life rather than enrich it. Ceremony, ritual and a nature-based approach to relating to these archetypes enables the energy to move through us, both when we come together for the Wild Woman rite of passage weekends and for these archetypal forces to be truly incorporated into our lives.

Another significant factor that allows us to embody our relationship to these archetypes is that we have aligned them with the sacred turning of the year (sometimes known as a medicine wheel or wheel of the year. You can see this in the image below). What this means is that we come into relationship with each archetype at the time when that energy is naturally looking to find expression through us and our planet in the northern hemisphere. What we have found is that this profound alignment significantly turns up the volume of the ceremonies, personal and group impact.

All this is done within the container of an initiation group of 8 women who have demonstrated their readiness for such a journey by writing a letter of intent and going through an enrollment process. The psychological and spiritual maturity that enables a woman to be a part of Wild Woman provides a safe holding group where participants can take responsibility for themselves and their development whilst contributing to the collective intelligence around how feminine consciousness moves in us.

If you are looking for a true immersion into the Wild Woman in your spiritual and psychological life and are ready to begin this rite of passage please contact alex@wildrites.uk asap as enrollment in the 2020 programme is now open. The programme begins in April. http://www.wildrites.uk/wild-woman

About the author: Alex Hatfield (MA) is a Psychosynthesis therapist and coach and co-founder of Wild Rites. She is Programme Director for Wild Woman and a guide on the 2020 Wild Woman Rite of Passage.

Intention and the Vision Fast

 We live in a time of quick fixes and spiritual tourism, with organisations beginning to provide a short Vision Quest process with little time for thorough preparation. At Wild Rites the preparation phase at base camp is four days long.

We have heard from some that a lack of guided preparation results in a “disappointing” or “un-meaningful” solo experience because they didn’t have time to clarify and gain deep insight into what was calling them to quest.

Our experience has taught us that a four-day preparation benefits both a meaningful quest and the ability to translate that meaning into evident every day doing.  Or to put it another way, fruitful incorporation begins with thorough preparation.

The recipe for an effective preparation includes:

• Building community. A safe container to provide a mirror during preparation and to support and nourish questers as they rebirth during the quest time and afterwards - many questing communities are supporting each other post quest.

• Refining questers ability to recognise and listen to the mirror of Nature. To develop an I-Thou relationship to Nature, which was previously a given in indigenous questing cultures.

• Identification with Soul. Wild Rites describes soul as the experience/ experiencer of being an unlimited spiritual being in a limited world. The ego experiences fasting simply as suffering, the Soul experiences meaning in the suffering.

• Self-generated ceremony. Learning about the ceremonies that are in our bones.

• Tarp craft and physical aspects of the quest.

• Intent, or the inner tension, which will be discussed next.

Intention; to be in-tension

Vision Quest is a surrender to the Will of Self. This is very different from giving up. Surrender is about knowing that something greater than the personality is holding you and therefore an act of faith and conviction, an act full of personal will. Giving up is an act of apathy, an act devoid of personal will.

Intention is of paramount importance for a meaningful and fruitful quest. Mahatma Gandhi, a long-time practitioner of fasting retreats writes “The mere fast of the body is nothing without the will behind it. It must be an irrepressible longing to express truth and nothing but truth… All fasting, if it is a spiritual act, is an intense prayer or preparation for it. It is a yearning of the soul to merge in the divine essence.” (Fasting in Satyagraha, 1965.)

We will now gradually unpack Gandhi’s words to better understand the necessity and practice of a well-formed intent.

The word intention comes from the Latin word intentionem which means a purposeful stretching out, exertion or effort, particularly towards a goal or objective. We could say that to have an intention for a Vision Quest is to create an inner tension where the goal of that inner tension is Self-realisation

To develop greater Self-realisation is often why folk quest (although they may not use these words explicitly). To stretch towards the goal of Self-realisation, the stretch needs to be one of body, emotions and mind towards our spiritual Self.

This is both incredibly sophisticated and at the same time very simple! The first stage is to begin to relate to our personal body, emotions and mind to recognise where and who we are in the present. Let’s consider the body, emotions and mind as three horses pulling a chariot. The charioteer is our unique spark of spirit-in-matter and our centre of awareness and will. We call this our “I”.

The days preceding the intent ceremony are spent supporting questers to come into relationship with these aspects of themselves by using a map of the human psyche called a Medicine Wheel. The Medicine Wheel is a map of Wholeness which enables us to see ourselves reflected through the mirror of Nature.

Some questers can be overly identified with one of the three horses, commonly the mind or emotions, or they may be unaware that one horse is pulling them off course. This is not simply about imposing one’s strong will over the horses, we must first befriend and love them.

Once aware of our horses (body, emotions, mind) we can dis-identify from them by identifying with the charioteer, or the ‘I’ and experience our personal will. Ultimately, Will is the energy that radiates from the spiritual Self (Spirit) and at this level we would call it Transpersonal Will because it is beyond our personal sense of self. We also have our personal will, for example, ‘I will do the washing up’ and ‘I will live a meaningful life that expresses my true nature and essential gifts’.

Our personal will includes an aspect of the Transpersonal Will because Transpersonal Will is the energy that animates all of creation. Nevertheless, we have ‘free will’ and are able to choose - consciously or more often unconsciously - to either live a life out of alignment with our spiritual Self or in alignment. Much of our suffering and dis-ease comes from misalignment between the personal and Transpersonal Will. Think of a person who at heart has an unrefined talent for music and yet because of their beliefs that musicians don’t make any money becomes an unhappy investment banker!

A thorough preparation and well-crafted intent ceremony brings the personal will into greater alignment with the Transpersonal Will, as Gandhi calls it ‘the expression of truth’. It is essential for the guides we train and those who wish to live a sacred life to understand that the intent of the Vision Quest is a process of bringing an individual into alignment with what is seeking to emerge in and through them. “What you seek is also seeking you.” Rumi.

Intent is very different to “I want”. Intent is a deeply energetic process and we hold an intent ceremony at the culmination of 4 days preparation. The ceremony focuses on energetical alignment as one component, with the second component being the right amount of inner-tension (IN-TENTsion) to bridge the gap between who we are today and who we are emerging as. Too much tension and we see a vertical splitting and disconnect from either matter or spirit. Too little and individuals can remain solely identified with ego and spend four days suffering hunger or enduring without meaning.

Our intent ceremonies are conducted with the other seven questers as witness, holding a circle with open hearts. This open-hearted witnessing requires first building a community and supporting the community to develop heart-sight. During the intent ceremony, when the inner-tension between the personal self and the spiritual Self is just right, we see the individual fill with Transpersonal-Will. This can be a deeply somatic experience such as shaking, filling with colour, dropping to knees, roaring or tears of joy. This is accompanied by an ‘I am …..’ statement that anchors the energy and provides a thread or bridge to the emergent Spiritual Self.  This “I am” statement then acts as a personal mantra.

The bridge and alignment created by intent is essential for a meaningful quest. When fasting for four days the psychological structures and membranes that we associate with our identity are stressed and become more porous. A clear intent ensures that we are focused on the spiritual Self, rather than only visiting the ‘attic’ and ‘basement’ of our psyche and opening up to the collective unconscious.

At Wild Rites we posit that to become a guide of the vision quest requires Heart-sight; the ability to perceive an individual’s spiritual essence.  This sight then needs to be combined with a deep understanding of a human psychology that recognises where an individual is currently at in their psychospiritual journey. These two combined enable a guide to see the gap between who a quester is in their current life and what is emerging in their potential. When this gap is held with compassion the quester begins to see, and more importantly, articulate their own gap and can begin the Vision Quest working aligned with Mother/ Father Nature to bridge their gap and ultimately occupy a their place in Creation.

About the Author:

Jon Keen is a co-founder of Wild Rites. Jon’s journey to become a vision quest guide includes an 8-year apprenticeship to the metis-Cheyenne medicine man Stone Sitting. He was adopted as the Spiritual Grandson and taught by the medicine man and author of Seven Arrows, Hymeshosts Storm. Jon then trained for 6 years in Psychosynthesis psychology, a psychology of spirit, as a guide, coach and therapist.

He has also completed shorter trainings in the USA such as with the School of Lost Borders month long on guiding Vision Quest. Jon wrote his psychology M.A. thesis on the vision quest from a psycho-spiritual perspective because he had seen too many people experience luminous experiences without incorporating them into their lives (including himself, until integrating by training with the Institute of Psychosynthesis in London).

Today he guides quests and Soulmaking programmes in Nature. He trains guides over long-term apprenticeships and helps organisations (modern communities) to come into greater alignment with Spirit.

Next Wild Rites Events:

Autumn Vision Quest, Sept 12th-22nd, Lake District

Wild Nature Soulmaking Intensive, Sept 27th-30th, Lake District

The Soul-footed Wild Woman

There’s a woman who’s body is the pristine wilderness of our planet. She knows the less-trodden paths that lead to no-where, because she made them. From the wild wood she inhabits the minds and hearts of us all, craftily watching and waiting for the moment when she can pounce, take off our shoes and reveal to us the paw, hoof and claw hidden underneath our feet. Then she invites us to walk and find our soul-footing in the world.

This is the Wild Woman archetype. Not an out-of-control, hysterical being. A being who is full of Soul with a keen sensing, playful spirit, a heightened capacity for devotion, relational by nature, inquiring and possessed of great endurance, strength and a deep intuition. Some call her the Woman who lives at the edge of the world, or She who knows. Let’s call her the Wild Woman in all of us.

There are times when we experience the Wild Woman in tasting something delicious and juicy. Or through the great beauty, sights and images nature provides; an amazing sunset or sunrise, a woodland seemingly untouched by human feet, a river’s narrow passage when the waters push through a gorge like a being in the birthing canal.

For some, the words wild and woman are a figurative knock on the door of our feminine psyche, summoning up a portal or passageway. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “No matter where a woman is from or her cultural heritage, she somehow knows these words wild and woman, and that they belong together.” They are causal in recollecting who we are and what we are about.

No matter what these words conjure up, there is a longing that comes with them. A knowing that “I too have this in me and it needs to be let out!” One hears it loudest perhaps, when one has given little time to the mystical life; little time to wandering aimlessly in nature, or not enough time over to exploring the dreamlife. We hear it when one’s creative life has been paid too little of our attention or our true love’s such as dance, music, story, artistry and craft have been put off, let go, disregarded because we are too busy.

Without the Wild Woman, we women can easily loose the sureness of our soul-feet. She is the soulful heart of a woman, so maybe it’s time to let her in.

Author: Alexandra Hatfield, Feb 2019

If you would like to join a very special 9-month long journey with the Wild Woman Archetype and a diverse and rich group of women visit http://www.wildrites.uk/wild-woman/  (1 place remains for 2019, we start in April).

Incorporation: Building Bridges and Crossing Oceans

“Many there are who have visions. Few there are who make their visions real.” (Steven Foster)

It was a still and crisp sunny April morning in SW England, the sun had not long risen and the birds were singing. I had just emerged from my first vision quest, which had included a sweat lodge, a four-day dry fast and then another sweat from which we had just surfaced. I am told the final sweat was incredibly hot, yet it was the easiest and most pleasant sweat I had known- I was in a very altered state.

I stood in the centre of a wheel with eight men holding the directions and my mentor leading the ceremony. I had a profound sense of inter-connection to everything around me, I felt deep love for those gathered- I felt love for all creation. The men were testing me to see if they deemed me worthy to be called a “man”, somehow, I intuitively knew the answer to each test. The words that spontaneously came from my mouth were exquisite, I did not think, each one surprised me as I witnessed wisdom flow from my 27-year-old mouth.

Eventually I stopped answering their questions and began spontaneously praying, until my prayer ended with “… from now on my footsteps will be my prayers.” My mentor said to me “In this moment you are a holy man.” Those words went deep and I believed myself to have been magically transformed into a modern day holy man, a wizard.

My quest was part of an apprenticeship to a medicine man/ shamanic practitioner. We had been working together for several years yet I was still unprepared for such an awakening. Previously I had lived a life of un-integrated extremes with periods of smoking marijuana all day and an addiction to falling in love, alternating with periods of spiritual athleticism, to include a sattvic diet and practicing yoga several hours a day. Both had enabled an avoidance of suffering and the inevitable tension that comes with living a life of purpose.

Having not heard of Van Gennep’s three phases, or the word Incorporation, I imagined myself to be magically transformed. I had no context to understand incorporation and I was blissfully unaware that a transmutation of my personality would be required if I was to live the vision received. Two days after my quest, I simply got on an aeroplane and flew back to the Caribbean where I worked as the captain of a luxury sailing yacht.

My life as a yacht captain serving the whims of charter guests became no longer satisfying, I was ready for another type of service. At this stage I was very identified with my ego and movement towards expressing my vision was relatively unconscious. I fell back into addictive behaviours and flip flopped between gratifying egoic drives and spiritual purity. The gap between vision and reality seemed too wide to bridge.

Nevertheless, eighteen months post quest after considering studying psychology and having this decision mirrored to me by a trusted elder I returned to England and began a master’s in Psychosynthesis Psychology and training to be a psychotherapist.

Psychosynthesis psychotherapy is psycho-spiritual and best suited to supporting healthy neurotics (like you and me) to further Self-realise and actualise. It’s founder Roberto Assagioli, an analyst and esoteriscist, was a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He first published papers on spiritual emergence and emergency in the 1930’s.

Psychosynthesis training involved participating in group work and individual psychotherapy for four years. I began noticing the impact I had on others and the disparity between who I believed myself to be and the reactions I received. This was a painful mirror and I would flip flop between hiding in spirit and denying my vision. Nevertheless, I knew both to be real/ true and this created tension within me. Fortunately, Psychosynthesis provides a context for this and I was held by a community specialising in integrating spiritual awakenings.

The mythic return of the hero, when considered psycho-spiritually, is the building of a bridge between who you have been and your innate potential/ True Self. There are many different levels to realise our True Self, ultimately they move towards the same source- a Universal Self, hence actualising one’s vision serves the people, planet and all of creation.

During the vision quest, we commune with the External Unifying Centre of Nature - our truest mirror. Doing so creates within us a new Internal Unifying Centre, which is like a new star for the planets of our personality to orbit, yet we still have the gravitational pull of the old star- hence we experience tension.

The ego experiences this tension as suffering and avoids it at all costs. It is not until we begin to awaken at Soul level that suffering has meaning and symptoms become messengers of the Self. By ego I mean the structure that has been built based on the past and how we have learned to deal with these experiences. By soul I refer to the experiencer and experience of Spirit / Self in matter.

“The project of the soul is not to annihilate the ego but to allow the soul to use the ego as the ego uses the hand.” (Thompson 1995).

I would like to discuss two factors important to Incorporation:

1.      Separation of levels between the True Self and the ego.

2.      “I” development.

In my personal example, I had attributed qualities of Self to my ego and believed myself to be an idealised image. I had developed a transpersonal identification.

An incapacity of the mind to stand the illumination, may cause the experience to be wrongly interpreted and there results, so to speak, a “confusion of levels.” The distinction between absolute and relative truths, between the Self and the “I” is blurred and the inflowing spiritual energies may have the unfortunate effect of feeding and inflating the personal ego.” (Assagioli)

Questers who differentiate levels of experience prior to fasting are less likely to attribute transpersonal qualities to the ego. As guides, during preparation, we can include experiential learning on differentiating between ego, soul and Self. It provides reassurance to know about stages of incorporation and spiritual awakening prior to experiencing them.  Assagioli’s four stages of spiritual awakening provide one such roadmap. (Psychosynthesis 1970).

The key to incorporation is recognising that both our ego and our vision of Self in potential are simultaneously true, just at different levels. In Psychosynthesis terms, this is called “bifocal vision” which is to see the other as both Self in potential, and how they behave and act now.

To see oneself in this way creates tension and requires compassion. When we cannot bear this tension, we hide things from ourselves. E.g. we may reduce the vision or runaway in spiritual flight and the world benefits less from our questing.

As an incorporation coach, I often find myself holding the larger tension and compassion for a coachee whilst supporting them to identify a third point within the “gap” (R Evans, Trifocal Vison). This third point is the place where there is most willingness/readiness to step towards their vision and begin to bridge the gap. For the coachee's Will to be engaged it is crucial the step is big enough to be meaningful yet not overwhelming. It is like helping someone walk a flight of steps or climb a mountain.

“It is as though he had made a superb flight to the summit of a mountain top, realized it’s glory...but had been brought back to it’s starting point with rueful recognition that the steep path leading to it’s heights must be climbed step by step.” (Assagioli 1970).

As the vision received is more often a direction than a destination, Incorporation Coaching has a different context to many forms of coaching. The work is about supporting the coachee to develop their own centre of “awareness and will” so they can hold themselves in the creative tension. In Psychosynthesis this centre is referred to as the ‘I’. The ‘I’ is pure awareness and will and the unique spark of Self/Spirit in matter.

Once the coachee has sufficiently developed their ‘I’ they can bring their vision into the world and may no longer need coaching. They will still face fears and need to overcome challenging mindsets but they can choose not to be controlled by them - this is the art of dis-identification.

 Well supported incorporation begins in the preparation/ severance phase. I consider it important to ascertain if a quester has a sufficient level of ‘I’ development prior to questing and if not offer pre-work or an adapted or different ceremony.

As this article ends, I am left with the image of a ship, ‘I’ stands at the helm steering the ship towards the beacon of vision. The Will emanating from Self fills the sails and the ship weathers the sometimes stormy, sometimes tranquil mysterious Ocean. Every now and then the ego attempts yet another mutiny…

My thesis “Rites of Passage through a Psychosynthetic Lens” is freely available at www.wildrites.uk/resources