The Initiation Is the Path

I ran the first Sacred Edge in April. For a while, every gathering initiated me. Waves of fear and grief moved through me before each one. My body shook. Holding the work meant meeting parts of myself I’d never had the capacity to meet and feel before.

The morning after last week’s Sacred Edge, I noticed how different it is now. It doesn’t initiate me every time anymore. It used to be so crunchy.

The initiation itself hasn’t stopped, though. What I’m being initiated into is shifting. Now it’s trusting and listening to what is true, both in me and as a steward of Co-Awaken, and paving the way firmly while surrendering attachment to outcome — bringing the team fully with me as I do.

I’m finding a deeper willingness to step into it, knowing that the initiation is the path. The more I do, the more I trust my resilience to move through it, even when it feels like death.

What’s exciting in this chapter of Co-Awaken is that I can feel a palpable energy of initiation moving through the whole team as well.

This summer, Jessyca and Erica began facilitating at Sacred Edge. And Kiki and I spent August teaching True Contact together, the deepest work we’ve ever shared: cultivating secure attachment through the dyad practice, first in a four-week cohort, then in a weekend intensive for parents with their little ones.

Somewhere in that month, a new way of being together as a team began to take shape.

I can feel a coherence among us that didn’t exist even two months ago: a shared devotion to meeting what is true. In our team meetings, we routinely set the content aside to meet the tension underneath, at the attachment layer, because there’s no other way we want to be or create together.

The word I keep coming back to is self-initiation. Traditionally, initiation happens within a community: elders hold the rite, guide you through an ordeal, and welcome you back changed, with a new place among your people. By self-initiation, I mean choosing that crossing ourselves, making contact with places deep inside us that we once needed to avoid to survive.

Right before Jessyca co-facilitated her first Sacred Edge with me, I shared my desire for her to relate to it as an initiation. When I said it again, I heard myself clarify: I am in no way initiating you. It’s a self-initiation.

Self-initiation is also the only way this work can be taught. We can create a beautifully held container, and we do, but each person has to choose to step in and make contact with what they’ve long resisted and avoided. Our part is to keep meeting those same places in ourselves, because our own awakening is what lets us transmit it to others. That’s co-awakening.

This month, on a medicine retreat, I got to practice that in an even deeper way. A familiar panic and dissociation came, the one I’ve met on this retreat before. But this time it took me somewhere I’d never quite reached: something that felt like baby consciousness, like I was back at my own birth, where the dissociation seemed to begin.

I knew what I needed. I reached for the practice we teach. I just kept borrowing the nervous systems of other participants, and their arms for the dyad practice. I let myself dissociate, came back into contact, and let go again. Each time, a little more of the fog lifted and I felt more here, until I pulled myself back into the present moment.

It’s deepening how we understand secure attachment with Life at Co-Awaken. We’ve often described it as trusting that Life is unconditionally holding us. Now it also feels like trusting our capacity to remain in relationship with whatever Life brings us.

We can spend years organizing our lives around what we’re not willing to feel. The resistance becomes perception, then story, then what we believe about other people, ourselves, and reality. Each time we initiate ourselves, less of the past is projected onto the present, and that changes what becomes possible between us.

That’s what I see across the team right now: people I love choosing, on their own, to meet what’s here at the attachment level and initiate themselves. It’s where our coherence comes from. I’m proud of who we’re becoming together.

Building a company has started to feel like part of something larger. More and more, we’re meeting every point of tension as a pointer to some attachment wobble, something we want to initiate ourselves through. That way of meeting Life is what we’re bringing into the world.

Something new is coming through the school from this place, and we’re excited to share it with you soon.

Wherever Life is inviting you to step in right now, the initiation is the path. And you don’t have to walk it alone.