Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.
Indian proverb, retold by Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
Turning fifty, celebrating an anniversary of your sobriety, living through the breakup of a relationship, experiencing the birth of your child or grandchild, losing a job, getting married, entering menopause, finishing a dissertation, recovering from an illness—your life is regularly enlivened and pummeled by change. Life’s passages can mystify you, damage you, or overwhelm you. When you take the time to acknowledge and reflect on them, they can also bestow wisdom and expand your vision of who you are and what you are capable of.
To mark a passage is to acknowledge that a change has occurred, that you are not the same person you were before. There has been a break, a shift, a lurch, or a flourish. A retreat furnishes the crucial element of reflection by which change is transmuted into wisdom. Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the reality of your hurt, your excitement, or your fear. Within the safe container of a retreat, you can listen to your instincts and allow those instincts to show you how to chronicle this shift in your life, how to take the beauty or the pain and turn it into something illuminating and meaningful.
You may wish to travel as part of your retreat, to read over years of old journals, to sort through photographs, to clean closets and plan a giant yard sale, to climb a mountain, to dive under the ocean, to construct a teepee in your backyard and live it for a month. As part of this expression, you might wish to weave in elements of the following practice.
Prepare
An object that symbolizes the passage you want to mark—your baby’s tiny undershirt, a copy of your divorce papers, a photograph of the house you just bought, your sobriety pin, a baby picture of you. If you don’t have access to or can’t find an appropriate object, draw one or make one out of clay. If you can’t think of a symbol or don’t have time to do this now, wait to do this until you are on your retreat.
Your journal and a pen.
Reflecting on Your Passage
Celebrating, mourning, or wrestling with a life passage is an extraordinarily personal act. No woman’s ceremony will resemble that of another; each will be unique. As when creating your opening and closing ceremonies, here, too, the same guidelines apply: you know exactly what to do if you listen and follow your instincts. What brings this practice to life is believing you have the authority and ability to mark your passage. Allow yourself to take your needs and actions seriously and yet keep a spirit of play active.
Begin by reflecting on the person you were before this shift occurred. Ask yourself:
Using whatever method or medium you like, describe your life before this change.
See Good Ways to Listen and Contemplations.
When the passage you are marking is a loud and clear one (the birth of a child, the death of a spouse, moving across the country), it is easy and perhaps painful to see the changes that have taken place and may still be happening. If the passage you are marking isn’t dramatic or distinct (a birthday or a marriage after living together), it may feel harder to distinguish the changes. If this is the case, look for details of how your life has shifted. Ask yourself other questions:
Be aware that sometimes you start this process only to see that you are too close to your passage to mark it yet. Trust that and let it go for the time being.
Dialogue with the symbol you chose before, or create one now. If no symbol seems appropriate, then dialogue with yourself to find one.
See Courage: Giving Yourself Support.
In whatever way you wish, work with these questions:
Then, using spontaneous writing or drawing, explore the question
One way to enhance this process is to draw a circle in the middle of a piece of unlined paper, then close your eyes and relax, repeating the question a few times in your mind. Then visualize an image of the Divine as you know it illuminating your question. Ask the Divine for its help in showing you what is best for you in this new phase of your life. When an idea, symbol, or image comes to you, focus on it while imagining it bathed in brilliant light. Then gently come back to the circle on your paper, and fill it with a combination of images and words you felt or saw.
Do something with your body that embodies this change. In some countries not so long ago, women in mourning shaved their heads and wore black for a year. I’m not suggesting anything quite so dramatic. A more familiar example is for women to change their hairstyles or dye their hair when going through a relationship breakup. It is couched as a way of cheering yourself up, but it signals to you and everyone who sees you that something is different. What would bring this change into your body in a way that feels positive, accepting, growth promoting, kind? You may choose an action to perform on retreat, or you may decide on something you can do in the next few days. For example, if you are marking a big birthday, you might try downhill skiing or taking a dance workshop. If you’ve become a mother, perhaps you will buy some new clothes that allow you to be comfortable and that hide stains well. Decorating yourself with rub-on tattoos, painting your body with body paints or makeup, walking in a different way—whatever brings your passage home.
Stories
This is Ann’s story:
I had breast cancer, and although I had been in remission for almost a year, I still felt like I was “sick.” I wanted to do a rite of passage to acknowledge the me that was well, the me that got sick, and the me that was well but forever changed. I specifically wanted a way to live with the fear of a recurrence.
I took two days and one night for a retreat on a friend’s land about two hours from my home. As part of my opening ceremony, before I left home I sat my family down to tell them what I was doing and to announce that the woman who came back home would not be the woman they had worried about and had taken care of. I gave them each a framed picture of me doing something physical and looking healthy and a pin that said, “I am the son of a healthy mom” and “I am the husband of a healthy wife.”
On the drive there I listened to rock ’n’ roll, something I had not felt like doing since getting ill. It had seemed too young and hopeful.
I arrived at my spot and spent lots of time setting up my tent and getting comfortable. Then I went for a long hike and focused on how good it felt to move. Back at my camp, I sat down and meditated for quite a while on the question “How would I describe myself before?” Images of nursing my son, of wearing a bathing suit, of being comfortable changing in the gym dressing room, of making love came first, then feelings of trusting my body, of taking it for granted, of never thinking this could happen to me. I realized, too, that I hadn’t been as in my body as I am now. I wrote about my impressions and then spent some time physically getting out the rage that emerged (for the umpteenth time) by chopping wood.
Then I looked at my symbol of the change, which was my prosthesis. Before I had seen my prosthesis as another way I had to change myself to be attractive. But as I dialogued with it, I found I appreciated it when I wanted to “pass” but that I no longer felt I needed to wear it every day.
Then I meditated on the questions “How have I been changed by this passage? Is there a gift to be claimed?” I hated the idea of a gift and resisted it mightily. But as I let my mind drift with the questions, I couldn’t deny that the me I am now is more resilient. I am more able to decide what is important to me and less likely to do something I don’t want to do. I actually feel more in my body. It was painful to see good things coming from the cancer, but they became real to me in that moment. I started to cry.
I changed the last question to “How can the new me deal with my fear of recurrence?” When I asked God to help me, I saw myself handing God this bucket oozing with black, tarry stuff, which seemed to symbolize my fear and the physical cancer. I resisted surrounding that image with light, but when I finally did it, the bucket changed into a bucket full of brilliant-colored fish that swam all around me. When I came out of meditation and drew the fish, I found myself thinking about the story in the Bible where Jesus turns water into wine and loaves into fish (at least that’s the way I remembered it), and I realized that every time I felt the fear of becoming sick again, I had to do something to transform that fear into something nourishing. The words transfiguration and transformation kept banging around in my head. I knew that I had answered what I wanted the next part of my life to look like—I wanted it to be about finding the courage to transform my fear into love. I had no idea how I would do it, but I felt very eager to try.
I made the new me real by using face paints to paint a fish over my breast and to read Deena Metzger’s poem “Tree” out loud to the trees.
On the way home I stopped and bought fish for dinner.
This is Jan’s story.
For my thirty-seventh birthday I made the usual plan with my partner for going out to dinner. It was supposed to be a no-big-deal birthday, but this longing to be alone and think kept growing in me. So at the last minute I took off alone for the weekend to a bed-and-breakfast. I got some flack, but I felt I had to go.
See Retreat Plans: A One-Day Birthday Retreat.
What made this passage real to me was deciding to trust that I felt I was on the cusp of changing even if the outward signs didn’t say so. When I journaled about how I would describe myself before, all I could think was, “Before what?” I was going back to work on Monday, back to
Sharon; everything was the same. But when I tried the question “What is changing in my life that I have not been willing to see?,” I drew blood. I decided to do spontaneous writing for twenty minutes (which felt very long and painful), and what emerged was that I maybe wanted a child. Now, for a thirty-seven-year-old lesbian who never has come out to her parents or her co-workers, that is not an easy thing to admit.
After a break in which I jogged until I was exhausted and then took a long shower, I thought about a symbol. What was it? I halfheartedly did some spontaneous drawing and after a while got into it and drew a set of shackles and a ring. When I dialogued with these bizarre items I learned that (surprise!) I was sure motherhood would tie me down, especially in my career, and that the ring was a ring my mother had given me that she had been given by her mother and her mother by her mother. I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to pass that ring on to my daughter.
It was very clear to me how I had been changed by this passage or, more accurately, the acknowledging of a possible passage. I had let the cat out of the bag. I saw the gift as being a chance to be honest with myself and my partner and to make a conscious choice and perhaps to stop the bickering that had been arising between us for the last year or so.
“What do I want the next part of my life to look like?” at first seemed way too big of a question to consider right then, so I went out to dinner instead. But as I was eating, it occurred to me that the question didn’t need to be so far-reaching; “what the next part of my life would look like” could mean “What would my life look like as I made a decision?” I decided I wanted it to look brave, informed, and creative. I went back to my room and did a spontaneous visualization in which I envisioned myself moving through the next few days and weeks with a tolerance for the ambiguity I was feeling, with tolerance for Sharon’s shock (we both had agreed we didn’t want children), and with an ability to listen to my wisdom. I blessed myself with oil and fell asleep.
The next day I decided to make the change real by carrying around a sack of flour for twenty-four hours. What would it feel like in my body to have to account for this thing? I also tried to walk and think like a mother.
For Long Retreats
Marking a significant passage lends itself to the luxury of a long retreat. Being able to take breaks between questions, to mix other practices in to strengthen your listening, and to enhance the transformational ability of this work is precious. It is also lovely to have enough time to sink into this gradually.
For Mini-Retreats
It is very challenging to try to mark a significant passage on a mini-retreat. However, it is an excellent practice to use mini-retreats to register the many small but important shifts that inhabit your life. Too often, you experience change, and nothing is done to acknowledge it, learn from it, or let it go. Your child starting kindergarten, a small promotion at work, moving across town, a change in a friendship, and the death of a pet all can be addressed within this container. Taking yourself lightly through each of the questions or working with just one is a way to tailor the practice.
For Retreats in the World
You may find yourself wanting to do something in public as part of your passage ceremony. Attending church, scattering ashes, walking on the beach, and meditating by the Vietnam War Memorial are all examples. If you do any of this work out in the world, you need to be extra aware of protecting yourself psychically and physically, because you are especially vulnerable when you are in the betwixt-and-between world and contemplating change.
See Where Will You Retreat?: Create Emotional Containment.
For Retreats with Others
Involving others in the creation of your passage can greatly enliven and make real to you the changes you are experiencing. There are countless ways to do this. One is to work with the questions on your own and then come together for a rite of passage that others participate in. It could be anything from climbing a nearby peak together to attending a singles night to participating in a sweat lodge or even taking turns supporting one another in doing a vision quest.
For larger groups, try sitting together in a circle taking turns telling the group about your passage. The woman talking starts a necklace of beads and other objects. When she is done, she passes it to her right. That woman adds a bead to it, taking a few minutes to describe what she has observed about you as you’ve gone through this change or to offer an affirmation if she doesn’t know you. The necklace is passed to each woman until it returns to the woman who started it. Then you start another, until everyone has a necklace to mark her passage.