I’m feeling a bit tight as I prepare mentally and emotionally to go into ceremony again. This time next week, I could be stripped naked on the top of a mountain. Kidding, but I actually have no idea what I’m going into.

I’m currently watching the lot of stray cats that seem to be more active in my Grandma’s yard. I don’t know where they come from. We’re in the middle of Montana, how are there so many stray cats here?

Meeting God

I’ve been told that you can meet God through many different ways, depending on sort of how you’re built and what your constitution is like. The Christian mystics say you can meet God through two ways: the mind, through intellect, or the better way, through the heart.

For me, it’s through the heart. So, I’m always seeking more of these embodied experiences of divine, infinite love. Where the heart expands just a little more, and you feel this oneness with everything around you. It’s like being on MDMA, but that doesn’t even really describe it.

It’s what I find is my experience of ceremony, typically. It’s why I keep coming back to ceremony, especially to the ones with the lineage I’m now studying. Ceremony requires specific alchemy. You do this and you get this. If you don’t do this, Spirit is forgiving, but you might not get what you want. I have royally fucked alchemy in a major ceremony, and it’s like so comical because it’s no surprise I would do that. And thankfully, Spirit is forgiving. I’m always the type, put me in any place, any institution, any place where there are rules or norms, and I usually butt right up against them. I quickly find, without doing much, I swear, the gaps, the holes, the little spaces you’ve left for chaos to seep through.

Alchemy, at its heart, is the art of transformation. You use alchemy in a science lab, and you also use it for the soul. It’s about refining what’s heavy, crude, and unconscious in us into something radiant, something closer to God. Alchemy laid the groundwork for modern chemistry. The same stages you might use to work with a mineral—blackening, whitening, yellowing, reddening—read like chemistry but point to death and rebirth, to shadow and integration, to the slow fire that remakes us. You can call it proto-science, mysticism, or psychology (Jung talked about alchemy), but there’s a process here that works: soul alchemy is about healing and transforming what is heavy into what is light.

The best kind of tools for me in healing have been alchemical. Even the breath, breathwork, which you can find everywhere, is an alchemical process. You’re using this thing, the thing you do every second of the day, all the time, consciously and unconsciously, to transform your state of being. Wim Hoff climbs mountains in sub-zero temps through his alchemical breathwork. Yoga is alchemical. Tell me you don’t feel better about yourself and the world after a good session and some time in Shavasana. Alchemy can start to look like modern miracles.

It’s why ceremony is so powerful and so needed. For me, I had a lot of alchemy I needed to do to get into my own heart. When I was working in corporate America, going through the higher education system, focused on more money, more prestige, more status, more power, faster, WHY IS IT NOT HAPPENING FASTER, I was as disconnected from my heart as I could be. I wanted love, but I had perverted it. If you didn’t give me something, or weren’t something that could add to that, I threw you out. I’m simplifying my experience right now, but I didn’t like who I was, and I was miserable, truly. I was spiritually sick.

I’ve needed a path into my heart, and I had a lot of shit to get through. And ultimately, I’m talking about alchemy like we can throw some salt and some water on me and magically I’m transformed. But that’s not it. Ceremony, and the alchemy of the process of it, provides YOU the internal tools to do the change yourself! THAT’S THE KEY. So it’s not like potions and magic words. It’s conditions and challenge, pressure and release, that let you, you as your own greatest healer, and internal alchemist of your life, transform yourself.

Rites of passage

I told this guy I’m dating (being a prostitute for) about the ceremony. It’s really hard to explain to people beyond someone who’s gone through anything similar what it is and why it’s important. I hope the above helped.

Something I’m reminded of, and why it’s hard to explain this stuff, is because we don’t have ceremonies, initiations, or rites of passage in the world today. Especially the Western world. It’s actually part of my life’s mission to make rites of passage a key aspect of living.

A rite of passage is a turning point in life where you leave one stage behind and step into another. It’s a marker of change, typically from childhood to adulthood, single to married, life to death. It matters because it gives shape and meaning to transition. At its core, a rite of passage is about crossing a threshold and being recognized as someone new.

When you don’t have this, you don’t have that embodied graduation of your natural biological, but more importantly, spiritual development. Which is a development of your maturity.

Women have some more natural initiations. Getting breasts is one. Getting your period is another. There’s quinceañeras and Jewish Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.

But for most white Westerners, I think there’s been a real disservice to us because we’ve lost, or never used, rites of passage. Instead, we outsourced rites of passage to the education and legal systems. You go to first grade, and then second, and then third, and you keep going all the way to twelfth, where you’re supposed to be a mature 18-year-old ready for the world. It couldn’t be farther from the truth, but this is what we were culturally fed (and has been my experience of public schooling in the US).

Instead, we’ve used graduations, getting your driver's license, and turning 21, where you get to “legally drink” as a rite of passage. It’s like, how disconnected from the important parts of life can we get? Turning 21 and being able to legally buy alcohol teaches you nothing about the world or yourself. It celebrates hedonism. It celebrates your infinite ability to now legally drown yourself in a substance that is not good for the mind, body, or soul.

A true rite of passage would look like, at 16, having 24 hours in total darkness. I’m serious. The kind of experience that 24 hours in total darkness would show is profound. You get to be with parts of yourself, your mind, you get to challenge your strength, your courage, your ability to do something hard. That’s the kind of work that opens you up to immense gratitude, to see the world differently when you come out than when you went in, and to embody the felt sense of what it means to go from darkness and regain light. THAT is a rite of passage. THAT is the kind of thing that shapes character and builds humans who are resilient, mature, and loving.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ve enjoyed my soapbox for the day 😃. If you’ve been through a rite of passage ceremony, I’d love to learn about it! Reach out and let’s chat.

Peace Out,
Val

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