Hosting from the Feminine Principle
At the end of May, we hosted a Rite of Passage for a small group of people who felt called to step out of their everyday hustle and into the rhythm of their deeper questions and longings. Unlike in past years, a clear pattern emerged out of the first days of softening and opening. A pattern that brought forth strong emotions and incredibly profound questions around gender and the ways of navigating this world where being a man or a woman opens and closes so many doors regarding how and what we can be. *
As we progressed through the week, we decided to propose a bold step, against all expectations of returning participants: Our night of challenge would turn into two distinct processes, one for the men and one for the women. My colleague and dear friend Chris supported the men with a rather linear, clearly guided, and certainly cathartic process.
And there I was, tending a circle that follows a different calling, a different rhythm. What would it mean to host from the feminine principle?
Surely, this would be a collaborative process, unfolding in circular ways, that create context for things to shift. Like a womb, listening to our bodies for guidance & wisdom, soft but also strong. Beauty would have a role, adorning what is sacred.
I called my women to sit together and make sense of the invitation, to make sense of what we mean by speaking about womanhood and the feminine principle. Making them understand that yes, there will be holding, but mostly collective hosting and structure emerging based on what we sense as a group. We started into the process with tension, the well-familiar fear of missing out showing through, and a fear of 'getting less' by a more collective approach that was interviewing our individual journeys, rather than isolating them. This joint framing turned out to be incredibly helpful and powerful, allowing us to resolve and dive deeper into the origins of these tensions, and stumble across important differences in our perception of words like feminine & female.
In this moment, I realized that I would have to let go even more of my holding - and clarify for myself and the group that I am not acting with a lack of agency, but handing the agency to the group and the field of our unfolding process. And what happened as a response was different to anything that I could have ever expected, so much richer!
After setting our frame, we started tending to the actual preparation of the night, which rang true as the initiation of our process. Setting up our room and altar, preparing a fireplace, and finally getting together, braiding each other's hair, painting henna on each other's palms, and starting to dive deeper under the sound of light chatter. Preparing for the ceremony in ritual. Getting ready for the wedding, knowing there would be no groom waiting.
As we opened the official part of our night by lighting our bonfire, we invited the voices of our ancestors to support us with the questions brought forward in our circle. How to honor the masculine in us? How to connect to the nurturing part of our mothers and grandmothers and find grace for their wounds and inabilities? What to do with all the rage from being misunderstood, belittled, abused? How to support each other, and not add to patterns that bring harm and distrust? Our invitees spoke through the sparks of the flames, and only hours later did we decide to listen to our bodies, moving the conversation inside to our beautifully arranged altar space.
Time did not exist as we danced around the center, inquired the cards for guidance on the role of women in great transitions, and listened to each other's stories. The web between us was almost palpable. A beautiful process of listening, feeling, moving, sensing, sharing, becoming visible that moved all of us to tears at one point, leaving us rather nourished than exhausted. Truly tending to the soil as a collective and celebrating each other's stories.
All of us had a personal breakthrough moment of some kind within the remaining time at the rite of passage. Not because we aimed for it, but because conditions were well-tended.
What happened the following day was no less magical: reconciling the two groups, listening to what women wish men knew about being a woman, and vice versa. Holding space for forgiveness and allowing our own small realities to speak to wider patterns.
Of course, half a page of a blog post cannot capture this kind of process, and it also shouldn't, as what was in the field is incredibly intimate, maybe even sacred. And yet, sharing an essence and making this work visible, inviting reflection and shared learning, rings just as relevant.
Let me close on a note of my personal learnings as a tender of such spaces and an apprentice to life herself:
This rite left me with a heightened clarity of how the idea of facilitation, 'inner work', and even regeneration or systems change as concepts are incredibly shaped and defined by masculine perspectives. Our times of reconciliation will require a conscious effort to move into balance proactively. On the metta, and on the most intimate level. Can we take the time to slow down and continue to challenge our own assumptions? Try new ways, taking every trigger as valuable information? Lovingly invite circle, dance around the center, scream in full-on rage when a process is calling for it? Become allies in the mission to reconcile across borders, genders, generations, family members? Let us try in all the ways!
I'd love to hear from you!
*All of our participants this year identified as either man or woman. It is incredibly important to me to acknowledge the relevant role of other gender identities, in particular transgender people, in several of the known rite of passage traditions. In this rite of passage, we did not have the chance to explore this.
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