the Initiation Deficit : Part 1 🐦‍🔥

Today we explore why true transformation is so challenging in dominant Western culture.

We discuss —

• Why change is not just about "knowing better"
• Two crucial ingredients of the forgotten art 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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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the Erotic Devotion Podcast. I'm your host, Grace Allardyce. Welcome everyone. You're listening to what used to be called the Homebody Podcast. We're still here on the same feed with our entire back catalog still here, but we've updated the name and the cover for the show to match who and what the work has grown into. We're kicking off this new chapter for the show by re-airing some of our past favorite episodes during this month of June, and we'll begin publishing fresh new episodes beginning July 5th. We appreciate your patience, encouragement, and enthusiasm as we've been updating our digital presence, and we're so happy to be back in your hearts and your ears. Thank you for listening and enjoy. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about the process of initiation and it's a 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, that 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 on to. 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. 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 ten. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 Marion Woodman, who is a Jungian psychoanalyst 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 are 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. 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. Um, 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, et cetera. 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. And my belief, there's an essence to us that's eternal, it's transtemporal, 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 meriscapism 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 and 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 ego 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 I'll just 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, et cetera, 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. There's like, 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 ri we are witnessed in a rite 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 unconsciously becomes about what's in it for me. And any relationship that isn't oriented around that is then decided to 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, an inability to be wrong, an extreme distaste for anything that ruffles the ego's 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 gonna feel better and finally get what they want from mommy and daddy, who are also probably still stuck teenagers in adult bodies, because they also. We're 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 is a form of source, and ourselves is a form of that as well. And so there's this value placed on this direct connection in a very practiced, 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 these 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 gonna 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? Um, 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? And what ways are you fixating and clinging to the ego identities, the car? In 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. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, or share the episode with someone who would enjoy it. Check out the show notes below for more about our guests, plus links to gifts and other resources to take you deeper. Our podcast music was produced by Santiago Paramo, our podcast art graphically designed by Sarah Mendoza, and photography by Charlie Watts. Thank you for being here, and we'll see you next time. Be well. Peace.