✨ Rough Initiations and Eldership - Francis Weller 🌱

"what reconstitutes the psyche, in addition to understanding what happened, is reestablishing our place within the wider cosmological context. We must be restored and re-storied to complete the rough initiation that was precipitated by trauma. In other words, we must return to our lives as vital and engaged participants in the deep song of the world" 

I had a lovely voice message exchange since writing of my romance with Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief. I tracked back to our first 'meeting' 2021 Embodiment Matters discussion "In The Absence of the Ordinary: essays in a time of uncertainty" - a book also now published.

I listened to the discussion again yesterday morning during my run. I hadn't been in a place to receive the wisdom then, not having read The Wild Edge of Sorrow, but new recognition, learnings and yearnings coursed through my body in re-turning to listen 🙏🏽🫶🏻🌱 I stopped to release tears for early losses, and recognising how systems had not held me in navigating illness 15 years ago, and since.

Weller reflects how many experience 'Rough Initiations' — profound disruptions - illness, trauma, loss, disrupted childhoods, and other personal crises that share features with traditional initiation:

• A sudden crossing into an altered reality – the familiar world is stripped away

  
  

• A deep change in identity – life can no longer be lived as before

  
  

• Irreversibility – no returning to the “old self”

Modern rough initiations often occur without community holding and witnessing by elders and peers. They fragment rather than integrate the self, leading to unresolved grief and a sense of exile unless we actively stitch ourselves back into belonging. 

For those who grew up without enduring care, the presence of attuned elders and other communities of recognition is not just supportive, but essential. In the relational space of being truly seen, grief can move, and a path to joy and vitality can open. Weller invites us to re-turn to villages of belonging and intergenerational healing and offers core practices to support this:

• Self-compassion - radical acceptance of all parts of ourselves

• Turning toward feelings, walking alongside them

• Looking for, and astonishment at beauty to draw us into relationship and love

• Patience with slow unfolding of healing and transformation

• Invitation to deeply inhabit our beautiful and strange otherness - not conforming to mediocrity

• Service - healing journeys are incomplete until what we’ve learned is given away in service

I'm grateful of my enduring need for intergenerational relationships, Weller's eldership, and the many elders who have shared their stories, and held space for me for our mutual understanding and growth. Those relationships support me in service to others.