Harvesting the Fruits of Initiation

The Fall and Winter are good times for self-reflection, so looking at the process of initiation seems timely.

Do you find yourself working in companies with similar dysfunctional cultures? Have you dated or married a similar type of person who drives you crazy? Have you experienced a significant loss in your life? Do you repeat patterns in other parts of your life that you don’t like? It might be time to look at these experiences and patterns more closely to learn more about yourself, using the framework of initiation. Going through the process of initiation can put these experiences into a larger psychological and cosmological context. When you do so, you can reflect on them to make sense of your personal experiences and patterns, which helps to further your own personal development.

What is Initiation?

Our English word “initiation” comes from the Latin word initium which meant “a beginning, a commencement; an entrance, a going in”. In the modern world, you typically experience initiations as processes, which may involve formal or informal rituals, that mark the end of one phase of life and the beginning of the next. For example, common initiatory events are being baptized into a church, getting your driver’s license, graduating from school, joining a sorority or fraternity, birthdays specifically turning 18 or 21, getting married, menopause, midlife crisis, and retiring. Some are marked by formal ceremony, while others are more informal and may have little outward recognition at all.

In addition to the common initiations experienced by most people, you also go through many internal psychological initiations throughout your life. They often happen during challenging or difficult circumstances or new life phases that test or stretch your limits. These are often the more important initiations that serve as “little deaths” that are opportunities for you to let go of parts of yourself that no longer serve you and that help reveal your Higher Self to you. I’ll concentrate on these psychological/spiritual initiations.

The Stages of Initiation

As with the typical life initiations mentioned above, psychological initiations have 3 main stages: departure, ordeal, and return/reintegration.

During departure, you either willingly or unwillingly find yourself in a situation where you experience a change in yourself or in your circumstances. You typically feel that things are changing or aren’t “normal” anymore. Leaving the safety of what was normal signals the beginning of the second stage, the “ordeals”.

The ordeal stage occurs as you enter a new circumstance that takes you out of your routine or your comfort zone. In this stage, there may be new expectations, new requirements, new people, or new ways of being and doing that you aren’t used to. The purpose of these ordeals, is to provide the opportunity for you to see what you need to do differently or how you need to be different to adjust to or overcome what is going on. Going through the ordeals can feel mildly irritating to downright devastating.

Finally, in the third stage, you return and reintegrate to a new landing place as things eventually get “better” or more settled, with the benefit of your experiences and insights during the ordeal stage. This return to a new landing place gives you the opportunity to embrace what you’ve been through and put to work the insights from your experience of the “ordeal”. You can proceed with your “new normal” with the benefit of the wisdom and knowledge you gained about yourself and your ways of interacting with the world. Done consciously, the initiation process you guides your evolution to a better expression of yourself.

Metanoia: A Change of Mind

These stages of initiation result in another Greek concept, metanoia, which is a transformative change of heart and mind. Initiation and the resulting metanoia is a way of self-healing that evolves the psyche. Through the process of initiation, a conflict or hurtful experience brings calls for you to make sense of it, heal yourself, and adapt to a new way of being in the world. In a sense then, metanoia is the psychological or spiritual growth that results from an initiatory process of self-healing around an experience.

The Myth of Persephone's Initiation

An ancient Greek myth often told to illustrate initiation is that of Persephone. She was a youthful maiden (known as the Kore) who was abducted by Hades (separation), Greek god of the Underworld. In protest, her grieving mother, Demeter, goddess of agriculture and the fertility of nature, stopped crops from growing leading to drought and hunger for humans. Meanwhile, held in the Underworld, Persephone, experienced her new-found independence from her mother but was also unhappy being away from the carefree life she previously lived as a maiden (ordeal).

Finally, the god Hermes brokered a deal for her return to her mother Demeter. But before she left to go back to her mother, Persephone ate a few pomegranate seeds – maybe by choice -- knowing that eating them would tie her to Hades and the Underworld for eternity. Although she was allowed to return to her mother (return), she was also obligated to return to the Underworld from then on for a few months of each year because of the seeds she ate (reintegration), thereafter living with a foot in both worlds. Because of this ordeal, Persephone matured from a young maiden to the wise Queen of the Underworld (reintegration). In her new role, she was independent of her mother and now exercised her own choice. Also, she was able to direct her compassion towards those who found themselves in the Underworld (metanoia).

As a modern-day example, let's assume you worked with someone who was challenging for you. Your interactions with this person could represent a separation from what was “normal” for you (getting along with most people) and an entrance into a different experience (of bad relationship). Next, with this challenging person, there was probably at least one aspect that made the relationship hard, or an ordeal, so your usual ways of relating didn’t work. You might have felt frustrated, irritated, or some other negative emotion while going through this ordeal. Upon reflection, you might have realized your contribution to the bad relationship and stopped feeding into it (reintegration). Then you could return to a more settled or “normal” circumstance by navigating the relationship differently. In the end, the experience changed you in some way as you become wiser and a better version of yourself in future (metanoia).

If you work with your initiations consciously, they offer you an opportunity for self-reflection. In other words, you can examine your experience during the ordeal and your behaviors to learn more about yourself. And you can use the experience and/or what you learned to let go of what isn't working for you. In the end, every challenging person or circumstance is likely to be a good teacher for you, even if you have to go into your own "underworld" to see it.

Like Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds, when you fully digest and integrate the initiatory experience, you may experience a change of mind that allows you to grow -- to be and act differently or to take your life in a new direction. In short, the initiatory experience allows you to "reveal yourself to yourself", seeing your part in the drama, and deciding if you like what you see. Without experiencing the ordeal in a conscious way and without dedicated self-reflection, however, you are likely to repeat similar behaviors and patterns without evolving to become your better, most authentic self.