Monthly Archives: October 2008

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Conclusion

October 26, 2008

CONCLUSION

Before writing this book, before Hellinger, even before my children became adolescents, I had a vision. It came to me after listening to an ancient Lakota story about Makah, Mother Earth (mother of all), and the second cleansing of the earth. In the ancient story, Makah has become displeased with the people. They war and fight, take no care of her living body and no longer listen to the Elders. Makah, in her displeasure, brings only a few of the people deep within her body and then ruthlessly shakes the rest off the people off the planet. This event, the story says, is called the “second cleansing.” Later, those who were taken inside re-emerged from her belly as the Lakota people and, once again, began populating the planet.

When I first heard this story from a Lakota Elder many years ago, I began to think that Makah must certainly be frustrated once again with her angry, unaware, warring children. Perhaps she prepares to do a third and final cleansing. What, if anything, would keep her from shaking us off once again, I wondered?

The answer? Love. Only love, massive amounts of love could convince her that we were worthy of living on her beautiful body. Love for each other, love for the earth, love for all other creatures. Love.

I began writing a story with the main plot constructed around a revolution of love happening on planet earth. In my story, Makah is disgusted and displeased, ready to toss us off again when, unexpectedly, her sweet granddaughter asks for the opportunity to give the people one more chance to prove their ability to love. Makah agrees to let her try and sends her granddaughter down among the people in a human body.

I put the awakening scene in the beautiful Badlands of South Dakota because it seemed that here, for sure, magic could happen. Then I sent two small Lakota boys to discover the strange woman asleep under an embankment. Next I saw the spirits flying in like racing storm clouds from all corners of the earth to assist Makah’s granddaughter in bringing about this revolution of the heart.

At this point, I fell deeply in love with my own story. Its characters were people just like me trying to find the Good Road, but not always succeeding. I loved the image of the Ancestors, the Great Beings, the Sages and Saints, the Shamans and Medicine Men long gone, and the spirits of great human souls all arriving, unseen and invisible, to help save us from our own foolish selves. In a final scene, the two boys gather around a drum at the base of Bear Butte, a sacred mountain, to drum the new rhythm for all time. They are surrounded and assisted by these Great Beings.

Today, as I read this beautiful story again, I see it not as fiction but perhaps as reality. My sight has grown keen. I see those wise ones all around waiting only for us to humbly ask, “Please help us.” An invisible hand is at work in the world; it guides this purple pen as I write, it inspires the amazing works of scholars like Senge, Fritz, Pearce, LeShan and others. I see it at work blurring the lines and boundaries between scientific study and spiritual pursuit, creating the crossover pioneers like Hellinger, Erickson, Bohm, Dossey, and many, many others. It is a revolution of the heart.

To all of these invisible beings, I ask humbly and directly, “Please help us to fashion a culture that supports its little ones, that reveres its old ones, and cares deeply for Mother Earth.” Our culture seeks a deeper solution than our task forces and small problem-solving armies can provide. We need the special language of the heart, embedded in story and ritual that only the heart speaks. Help is all around if we only ask.

On the day I wrote these final paragraphs, I had a phone call from a man in Iowa who heard one of the Oyate programs. Actually, he had heard the show a while ago, scribbled the number down on an old receipt, and then stuffed the slip into his glove box. When he called our 800 number, he couldn’t recall why he had written the number down so he opened the conversation by asking me, “Do you know what you do?”

Of course, some days I ask myself the same question, so I laughed and said, “Yes, I think so.” As soon as I told him about the Oyate series, he immediately remembered hearing the program. He told me that when it began he had to pull into a parking lot to listen. Then he said something like, “I heard your heart in that program.”

His words touched something in me and, instead of taking an order, I found myself telling him about constellation work, kids and culture, this book-I even told him my astrological sign. We had an animated conversation that lasted nearly forty-five minutes. He agreed to help spread this work across the country.

What I didn’t tell him was that the night before I had asked all those unseen beings to help me with this work, to find the right people who can find the right people who will make a revolution of love. And then, a stranger was calling me from nowhere!

Let’s find each other, you speakers of the language of the heart who are out there reading books, praying, talking to the spirits, and raising your children to be awake and aware. Lets put our heads together, our hearts together and make our families and culture strong once again. This is no time for sitting on fences, walking the middle road, or keeping your truest thoughts to yourself.

The next time a little girl falls in the hot sun, let’s catch her quick, before she falls.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, jamie lee, parenting, spiritual development, teens, The Education Crises | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 9

October 25, 2008

Counting down to my son’s wedding and the chance to see all of my grandchildren. We leave Wednesday and I can’t wait.

Jamie

CHAPTER NINE

What is an Elder-Based Culture?

Throughout this book I’ve made frequent references to our need to return to an Elder-based culture. It occurs to me now, at the end of this writing journey, that I haven’t actually defined that clearly for you or myself. Elder-based culture-it certainly sounds good, but what does it mean?

On the surface, the meaning is obvious. Elders are the old ones, the members of our families and communities who have already passed through most of the life stages except one-death. In smaller traditional native communities, these Elders have real status. Our experience in Indian country bears witness to this. The Elders are given first voice on issues. The children of the community are taught to bring food and drink to the Elders at any gathering before taking what they want. Elders are consulted on important policy issues and mediate conflict between younger tribal members. When we look again at mainstream American society, this status is not so apparent. Oddly, like our youth, the Elders have lost their rightful place in the world.

In the current culture, the Elders have become Elderly, often seen as frail, sickly, unable to contribute, and a burden on society and their families. This is a very sad indicator of the decline of a culture. I recently saw a Cheyenne quote on a website that said, “A Nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground, then it is done. No matter how brave its warriors or how strong its weapons.” Perhaps the same could be said about the nation’s Elders. When the Elders are left out of the vital loop of life, no longer charged with the challenge of contributing their wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to the younger generations . . . they simply get old and culture declines as a result of it.

In early tribal cultures, the task of surviving from one day to the next was so arduous that the younger members of the tribe, those of childbearing age, were expected to provide for the food and safety needs of the others. The grandparents and older aunts and uncles were the primary caregivers of the little ones. It was also recognized that these more experienced members of the tribe had both more patience and more wisdom to give to the children. The circle of the family rippled out around the children in a sphere of care and influence. In Lakota country, this extended family is called the tiyospaye.

In many of the modern Indian communities we visited, this is still very much the general practice. Sadly, there are also a huge number of little ones in the care of grandparents because the parents got caught in the deadly web of alcohol, gambling, or violence. This is true not only in Indian country but in all communities. When the grandparent takes the full role of parent, they lose their place as grandparent and Elder.

This topic, the erosion of the Elder status within families and communities, certainly deserves its own deep exploration as it echoes through the generations. Like our youth, the Elders have increasingly become a target of the drug companies. Recently a friend’s mother was in psychiatric care for depression. Over several months her medications were switched, rotated and stacked, one upon the other, until the poor woman finally went into a toxic overdose. She ended up in a coma in the hospital. Many Elders are under the care of multiple doctors with several medications being prescribed and no one overseeing the entire regime.

Like youth, our Elders need challenge. John Ratey (2001)¹ in A User’s Guide to the Brain, wrote about an interesting research project done by David Snowdon, a University of Kentucky professor. He studied a group of nuns living in a monastery in Mankato, Minnesota who were living into their late nineties and early hundreds with strong minds and bodies. Snowdon wanted to know why. He discovered that the nuns, operating on the belief that “an idle mind is the devil’s plaything,” had numerous weekly programs intended to stimulate the mind. They held reading groups and debates, brought in speakers, wrote in their journals, and had study sessions. Ratey (2001) wrote, “Snowdon, who has examined more than 100 brains donated at death by nuns in Mankato and other School Sisters locations across the nation, maintains that the axons and dendrites that usually shrink with age branch out and make new connections if there is enough intellectual stimulation, providing a bigger backup system if some pathways fail.”

It appears that the brain, like a muscle, atrophies without active use. If we shuffle our Elder parents and grandparents off to the side, limiting their involvement in our lives, the effects on their health and brain functioning can be disastrous.

This poses a great challenge to our culture. Our families are scattered like leaves in autumn. Even in my own life, my grandchildren live ten hours away. It is painful for me to not be available to assist my daughters during these early years of their marriage when they are both in college and still trying to find their way in the world. My place is near them. I feel that in my bones, and the telephone is a very poor substitute. As I’ve worked on this book over the past several years, it’s become clearer to me that to create a true Elder-based culture, families need to stick together. Holidays twice a year simply don’t cut it.

In this new millennium, the Elders are living longer, living alone, and living far from their families. We have this strange belief that when we finally get the kids out of the house, it’s our turn to play. Just as our culture is rife with social assumptions about our clueless kids, we have social assumptions that the relatives should butt out of the lives of our young ones. Strange. Like the missing rituals for adolescent rites of passage, it occurs to me that I have no clue what an Elder-based culture would really look like.

We operate under a notion of independence that makes no sense and serves us poorly. We act as if we don’t (or shouldn’t) need each other, and then wonder why we feel isolated and alone. However, creating this Elder connection is not the same as the undeveloped adult running home to have Mom and Dad take care of life for them. Except for a few very close-knit and small native communities I’ve visited, I have no model in the current culture to draw on.

During one of our collection trips to southeast Alaska, we met a Tlinget woman named Marge. Marge was probably in her early sixties, a beautiful and vibrant woman. As we talked with her, she told us that she was being prepared and initiated by her Elders to become an Elder herself. Marge was not taking this action lightly. Being an Elder in her community, she explained, was a true commitment and responsibility that is not simply given but must be earned. As I listened to her, I realized that, rather like the president of the United States, the fate of the younger generations rested on her ability to make wise and careful choices. In Lakota country, people are taught to consider their decisions based on how that decision would effect the next seven generations.

As we’ve seen through these discussions on levels of development and the maturing brain, we don’t automatically get wise when we get old. We must strive for it. To become an Elder we must also be initiated into that status.

On our final night in southeast Alaska, we had supper with Marge at her house. After a wonderful meal of freshly caught halibut, Marge explained that she would like to perform a song and dance in honor of our visit. She put on her own mother’s button blanket, took up an eagle feather, and did a slow-moving dance in her living room while she sang. Her sincere offering touched my soul deeply. I’d lost my mother just six months earlier to illness and was still grieving her loss. Something about Marge and her slow movements evoked that grief within me. When she finished her dance, I started to sob. I was a little embarrassed but the tears were beyond my control. Marge was very sweet and comforted me.

When I woke up in the hotel room the next morning, my lower back went into spasms. The pain was incredible. I found a chiropractor and a massage therapist, but the spasms only worsened. Thankfully, we were at the end of the trip, and I crabbed my way across airports and parking lots and finally made it home. I was completely taken over by my pain. For the next two weeks I couldn’t seem to do anything to relieve the spasms.

Finally, one night I was explaining to Milt that I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so sad-for no reason, I told him. He gently reminded me that my mother had just died and that perhaps my experience with Marge and my mother’s death were related. His words opened up this deep pool of grief. I started to cry again. I cried for hours, even crying myself to sleep that night.

I missed my Mom. I wanted her back again in physical form, back in her chair in her little house working crossword puzzles and waiting for me to call. When Marge wore her mother’s blanket across her shoulders, sheltered and warm, I think my soul began to cry out for that. After crying the night through, I woke up the next morning and the back pain had completely disappeared.

Hellinger says we need the strength of our ancestors and our parents behind us if we are to stand strong in the world. I once heard him speak about low back pain resulting from not taking the support of the parents and ancestors. When we don’t feel supported, or are unwilling to take that support, it makes us weak. Honoring the Elders is not just a social nicety that says we should honor them. No, it is a deep need in us to have them back us up and make us strong.

In my work as a facilitator of family constellations, one picture I find particularly beautiful is to see a woman standing with seven generations of women behind her, or to see a man with seven generations of men at his back. When we stand in this place, we see that our generation is just a small foothill in the great mountain range of our ancestors. We feel their strength.

One of the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian religions is “Honor Thy Father and Mother.” Too often this commandment is taken as a social rule or courtesy (not deeply felt) that we extend to our parents out of respect. My understanding of this has changed with the study of the orders of love as observed by Hellinger; we honor our parents not for their benefit-but for our own. Our strength in the world comes from the two portals of our parents from which life flowed through to us. We need our Elders-they do not need us.

In many tribal and other cultures around the world, the spirits of the ancestors are treated as real entities that exist and surround us. The Elders take their guidance from this direction in prayer and ceremony, beseeching the spirits to assist them. The true genius and pioneering courage of Hellinger’s work has been in his willingness to consider that the influence of the ancestors and past generations can extend beyond the grave into the present generations. In some religious and scientific circles, this is a cause of uneasiness.

This discussion, while seeming to stray off into the Mysteries, is of particular importance for if we are to define an Elder-based culture. Each member of a system must seek guidance from the ones behind him or her. To the three-year-old, an older brother of ten is an Elder. To a twenty-year-old, the parents or grandparents are the Elders. If you are eighty, your Elders may be in the spirit world. The stairway to heaven is generational, and only those on a higher tread can show us the way.

This natural order is dictated by the soul, not the head. Your head may be full of yes-buts. Yes, but my parents weren’t successful or smart, my grandfather was a railroad worker, my daddy a drunk. The soul doesn’t speak the language of yes, but. It knows life has arrived in this body only from these two parents. The deeper structures of the family system are like a giant reservoir far upstream, the larger body of energy that Hellinger chooses to call simply “the greater force.” The ancestral line and the two parents who give life are like the place in the dam where the water is released and allowed to begin its flow downstream.

The river of life is a river of love. It flows down to us from above. Without our Elders we, quite simply, wouldn’t exist.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Indian Country, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, culture, Elders, jamie lee, rites of passage, teens, The Education Crises | Comment (1)

Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage, Chapter 8

October 24, 2008

This is one of my favorite chapters. I think it places a 911 call to our culture to pay attention and to begin to search for real solutions. I’d love to hear from you.

Jamie

CHAPTER EIGHT

What Shall We Do Here?

The first teacher I had in my study of the family constellation work was a German named Heinz Stark. For one year I followed his work in the United States, and I even did some organizational work for him. I always loved the way he would first face a client in a constellation group, look at them, and say in that strong German accent, “What shall we do here?” His query was so simple and non-threatening, so open-ended that we would naturally begin to allow for any and all possibilities to unfold as we entered the work.

So, what shall we do here? These are our children. These are the little ones we guarded, watched over, and nurtured as babes. Every heart should break when one of them dies because they could find no reason to go on living. Every heart should break when we pick up a newspaper and see a lousy three-paragraph article about a child who has shot and killed another child. These are not juvenile delinquents, not wasted remnants of a no-good society. These are our sacred children! In Lakota country, there is a saying common in ceremonies: Mitake Oyasin. It means we are all related. One could say we no longer live in tribes-or one could say the tribe just got larger.

I had a friend who, when she was feeling down or apathetic, would say she had the “why bothers.” Our society has had a bad case of the why bothers for too long. We have to solve the right problems and not dump endless resources into trying to solve the secondary problems that arise from not solving the true problem. But when it comes to adolescent behavior and development, we are like the blind men describing the elephant. One will say it’s a long, flexible appendage; another will say it’s a huge wall with a rough exterior. And while we are all attempting to determine the nature of the beast, we have an ever-growing population of angry, disillusioned young people who thirst for honest guidance.

We have traveled quite a distance in this book, you and me. We’ve wandered around Indian country, and we’ve taken a look at what is left of our mainstream rite of passage rituals. So, what shall we do now? Let’s start talking, and figure it out.

Mental Models and our Current Culture

A few years ago I borrowed my stepson’s car to run an errand. It was after dark and I only had to go to the store. At the time he drove a sporty silver Mazda with heavily-tinted windows. On my way home a patrol car came up behind me with lights flashing. I pulled over and waited until the officer had approached the car before I rolled down the window. I still remember the look on his face when he saw he’d not stopped a punk kid but a forty-plus grandma. I’d not been speeding or doing anything wrong. The officer stumbled awkwardly through checking my license and registration and then mumbled, “Have a good night, Mrs. Lee.” After parenting six young people through the teen years, I knew why he stopped me. He figured I was a young person up to no good.

Peter Senge (1994), a management consultant and author of The Fifth Discipline, said that in order to build a learning organization, in this case a learning society, we must challenge the underlying assumptions or mental models that flow beneath the decisions we make. Mental models, according to Senge, are “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” (p.8) He goes on to explain that most often we are not even aware of the mental models that rule our actions. They must be made visible.

What are the cultural and social assumptions underlying our treatment of the young? What do we believe? How have we constructed mental models that push our young out of our care?

Several underlying assumptions are increasingly apparent. One is that being an adolescent has nearly become a crime in our society. The juvenile centers and jails are full of young people. The insurance companies penalize young people for getting a speeding ticket by bumping their insurance rates sky high. We look at the young with suspicion and distrust. A second apparent assumption is that adolescence is in danger of becoming a psychological disorder in our society. When a child does not fit within the tight parameters of “normal,” we diagnose them as disordered rather than widening the parameters to help us understand them. A third assumption flowing under public attitudes is that young people are clueless. We need to take a moment and challenge each of these assumptions with great vigor.

The Criminalization of Youth

One year at my children’s high school, security people were hired to wander the parking lots and to enter any open car to search for drugs or weapons. My son, Tom, said one of his teachers had left his keys in the car and the security guard brought the keys to the teacher during a class. The teacher was outraged that somebody would enter his unlocked car and search his glove box. He claimed it was a violation of his rights.

Periodically, the school goes into what they call lock down and all the students and teachers are required to stay in their rooms while the school is searched. The students have no idea whether the lock down is a true crises situation or a routine search.

We need to guard the rights of our children as we would any other innocent person and protest when they are harassed and invaded as if they are criminals. That officer had no real call to stop me the night I drove the little Mazda. He was just looking for trouble. I’m not naïve about these powerful energies that arise in adolescence, but I do object to making it a crime to be young. I believe that the harassment is worse for adolescent boys than it is for girls, but both are targeted.

What shall we do here? We could take notice in our neighborhoods. We could begin to challenge our own beliefs and assumptions about our young people. Are we automatically suspicious and distrusting of a person simply because he or she is an adolescent? We should resist irrational fears and policies that treat our young as if they are up to no good.

Once when my son was in high school, he came home with a new ID card that he had to scan into a machine at lunch to make sure that he was on campus and not out there up to no good. We had a good laugh because the picture on his ID was not that of my son. Later, a security guard literally cut the pass off of him with a knife, and then sent him to suspension for not wearing his ID. Can you believe that?

Adolescence as a “Disorder”

There is a massive advertising campaign going on to put people on very expensive drugs for social disorder, uneasiness, sleeplessness, and on and on. Patients have literally entered the doctor’s office having made their own diagnosis and practically written their own prescription based on some cute television commercial. My teacher, Heinz Stark, once told me that “All diagnosis is a hypnotic induction.” Remember that we need all of the subtle signs and signals of the body in order to steer a course toward the life we want.

Our health care system demands we have a diagnosis in order to be treated, and so we have millions being diagnosed with one disorder or another. Children are the current targets of many marketing campaigns by the pharmaceutical industry.

A large percentage of the popular media have wholly accepted the idea that depression, ADD, bipolar disorder, and many other disorders are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. This position is quicksand, unsupported by the data, yet we have all bought the advertiser’s message. The human brain, by its chemical nature, is constantly in varying states of balance or imbalance. Skip breakfast and you’re imbalanced. Get only three hours of sleep and you’re imbalanced. Worry about a test and you’re imbalanced. In fact, we are seldom, if ever, in perfect balance.

Peter Breggins, in his book Talking Back to Prozac, (1999)¹ points out that all of these powerful psychotropic drugs have been tested on the normal brains of animals. Essentially, their effect is not to cure a chemical imbalance but to cause one. He tells a most surprising story of the original FDA chemical trials of Prozac. Breggins says that the population chosen for the FDA clinical trials was cleared of anyone with serious depression or suicidal tendencies. Additionally, no old people and no young people were included in the study. Additionally, the published results did not include the fifty percent of the tested population who dropped out of the trials because of the severe side effects. The theory that depression and other mental disorders are caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain is being seriously challenged by current research, but the public thinking has already drifted in that direction.

We have what amounts to designer disorders being created to establish a viable market for the drugs that are being designed. These drugs introduce powerful and extremely toxic chemical compounds into the fragile developing brains of our youth. It is a dangerous situation because of the vulnerability of child and parent alike. Having the problem identified as a disorder does something to relieve the guilt parents feel that they have somehow done something wrong. However, it stops all genuine inquiry into the direction of soul building and development.

What can we do here? Just say no. We can begin to take the signals and cues of the body and brain seriously, reading them for meaning and texture and discovering what language of the soul they speak. An agitated, depressed youth is a billboard. His symptoms don’t arise from nowhere; they come from something happening in the life around him. If a teacher bores her students, should we drug the student? Parents, adults, teachers, and the general population have an obligation to educate themselves on the realities of these so-called disorders and discover what is truth and not truth.

Adolescence is not a disorder. It is a natural and potent developmental age that carries the young person to the next place in life. They need guidance, support, resources, and challenges from the Elders around them. They do not need to have those adults place the burden of a troubled society on their young shoulders.

Adolescents are “Clueless”

A third trend that is on the rise is the social assumption that teens are somehow clueless. This damaging image is promoted and pushed on the ridiculous television programs and in the advertising that we have today. Movies with a deeper content like Good Will Hunting or Dead Poet’s Society are rare events.

One night my son and I were having the strangest conversation. He was about ten at the time. He said, “God is everywhere, right, Mom?”

I didn’t know what he was thinking about, so I said, “Yes, as far as I know God is everywhere.”

Then he said, “Well, if God is everywhere and in all things and people, do you think he ever gets crowded?”

His words entranced me. I thought about the underlying constructs of what he was asking. Not only was he thinking about God, he was thinking about the ultimate comfort-or discomfort-of being God.

Young people are not clueless. True, they are given little opportunity to express or explore these higher realms of thought and philosophical inquiry. Like initiation, they hunger for it. They want to know how the universe is built, where they fit in the larger scheme of things and what, if anything, it all means. Is there Good? Is there Evil? Is there some omniscient operator somewhere running this software of human life?

This deep inquiry is an example of the earthbound mortal self trying to extend itself into larger realms, into the unexplored and massive interior of unused brain cells that are the key to unlocking mystery, fostering understanding, and extending the human capacity to create the kind of world we all want. Somehow we’ve very cleverly constructed a negative public relations campaign aimed at adolescents in our society. How could this be?

What shall we do here? We should think and speak well of the young. Rupert Sheldrake (1995), a well-known biologist and researcher, pushes us to understand more fully the power of the “expectancy effect” in scientific research. Study after study indicates that what the scientist expects, he is likely to find. The same is true of parents, teachers, and adult community members who deal with youth. This negative public relations campaign encourages adults to expect very little of our young people. Likewise, it encourages youth to expect very little of themselves-or the adults around them. This is a dangerous attitude that, sadly, produces results. If I expect my adolescent to be clueless, I’m likely to get what I expect.

I once joined a task force for a program called “WISE” (Wise Individualized Senior Experience)² that creates a way for high school seniors to select, design, and undergo a program of their own making. The program, designed to beat the senior blues, is a mentorship and apprenticeship program that builds a bridge between high school and real life. As I got involved in our local WISE program, it became clear to me that we need more programs like this, and we need to intensify their efforts to encourage students to take charge of their educational pursuit and not sit like robots in a classroom. WISE students have built handcrafted canoes, worked with doctors, EMTs, and fireman. They’ve crafted programs for themselves that bridge the uneasy differences between adolescent youth and the adults of their community. Both have gained from this experience.

We can build more bridges of this type. We can give each young person a chance to stand and be counted, to prove that he or she is not clueless and is, in fact, a deep well of ideas, thoughts, and resourceful thinking. The next time someone rolls his eyes as if he knows all about parenting a teen, simply say, “It’s the most wonderful part of parenting, to watch my young child become a man or woman before my very eyes. A miracle!”

When I entered the Master’s program with St. Mary’s University in Minneapolis, I was stunned by the learning experience they offered me. Rather than follow a set outline of courses, I was encouraged to chart the course of my learning. I was told to “Do no busywork.” For two years I followed a program of my own design, trashing what didn’t fit or work for me, and adjusting my course accordingly. Because I could enter deeply into topics that were of profound interest to me, learning was easy. My courses were not slotted into categories but integrative, all encompassing, taking small side trips into topics that related to my main subjects.

With the internet and the need we have for integrated learning-the push to get the brain to access those marvelous frontal lobes-I see no reason we can’t employ this with students as young as sixteen. If I were asked to redesign the educational system, it would be in this direction. Sadly, programs that allow a student to pursue his or her subjects independently are reserved for the “at risk” student and carry a stigma.

Creating a New Public Relations Campaign for Youth

One day on my counter top I noticed that the large and pretty bowl of tomatoes I’d picked in my garden was swarming with fruit flies and had a bad smell. I gently began pulling the tomatoes out of the bowl and washing them under cold water. They were so beautiful. Sure enough, one large tomato had ripened too quickly and was causing the problem. With this rotten tomato I had to take serious measures (I threw it out), but the rest were still perfect. I also had to recognize that it was my own neglect of the bowl of tomatoes that had caused the problem.

It’s so important not to paint all young people with the dark brush and palette of a few unfortunate or troubled teens. This public relations campaign against youth must be contained and controlled by any or all means possible. We act as Dr. Frankenstein must have reacted when his creature first sat up on the laboratory table; “Oh my God, what is this I have created?”

Much of the problem-solving our society engages in has to do with trying to squash symptoms rather than resolve fundamental cultural issues. Rising rates of teen suicide, gang membership, violent crimes perpetrated by young people, teen pregnancy, overflowing prison and juvenile centers all point a hefty finger at the need for a lasting cultural change. We can’t afford to wait. Every year, the already-staggering amount of resources required by our society to deal with these overwhelming problems increases.

What shall we do here? A few suggestions:

Allow a natural, strong image of the young person and his or her role in society to emerge and grow stronger.
Listen more and stop blaming the young for what they did not cause and cannot change alone.
Recognize our loss of power as parents, and stand again in our place behind and not against the youth.
Offer respect and honor for their stage of life and not poke fun or ridicule them.
No longer allow televisions and movies and magazines to create the common image of the “teen werewolf.”
Give them their right place within our society.
Challenge our social assumptions and redefine the normally developing energy of the adolescent as magnificent.
Redesign our educational systems to encourage brain development and not stunt it.

Adolescence is poetically layered with the language of the soul. The questions, Who am I? Where do I belong? and What is the cost of my belonging? lead to deep feelings. Sometimes these feelings disguise themselves as depression, sadness, despair, anger and grandiosity. This is the stuff of soul building, the directional finder that leads the way toward greater integration and wholeness. The call of the higher realms of thought and being are the carrot in front of our cart. It’s important we not judge the disguised appearance of the soul’s deepest movements.

While researching the themes of this book, I stumbled across another book by Pearce called Evolution’s End, (1992)³. Pearce is a thorough researcher and has been a favorite writer of mine over the past decade. In the progression of his books, he has perhaps looked more deeply and holistically at human brain development than most other individuals. After writing The Magical Child (1986), he came back with expanded understanding of what he calls postbiological development-or development beyond biology-and wrote The Magical Child Matures. Evolution’s End extends his understanding even further. Pearce is always interested in what nature had in mind for us. What is her blueprint? What has been coded into us regarding our own human development?

In the book on evolution, Pearce suggested that the brain is not just a processor but a receiver linked into larger bodies of information which he lightly calls “soup sources” that exist beyond the body. With proper growth and development and an adequate push from the environment, the brain can actually extend its neural receptors to receive information from these larger sources of information outside the body. This was the goal of tribal Elders when they took the boy to the mountain and left him there for three days without food or water. They wanted not a compliant, good boy but a young man connected with the ancestors and the realms of spirit and soul.

Initiation and the rite of passage are not only about contributing to the community; they are also about finding the powerful links between this, the mundane world, and the larger realms of spirit, soul, and the greater forces of creation itself. This moment of human development cannot be forced. It can only be prepared for, like tilling the soil in preparation of the later harvest. The opening of adolescence is the beginning of this moment.

A Cultural Resurrection-Reinstating Initiation and A Rite of Passage

I never did build a rite of passage ritual for my daughters. As I’ve explained here, we took off on the trail of our ancestral line through the constellation work, storytelling and initiation. However, I did slowly become alert to what I call “initiatory moments” in my adolescent children. In fact, as I think about it, it is exactly what I do for my clients and workshop participants. I watch for a soul on the move toward some new level and try to support that movement whenever possible.

As parents, our job is to make them face the difficult questions head on. We can push them out when things get a little too soft. We can close the pocketbook quietly and ask them, “What is your plan for getting that car/trip/stereo that you want?” We can tip the balance scale of give and take back in our own direction-give less, ask (or demand) more of them. Additionally, we can get more involved in our communities and neighborhoods and speak up when the negative public relations campaign against youth gets too noisy.

I’ve asked many adults what they think about youth and they say such conflicting things as, “Age envies youth” and “Age idolizes youth.” It seems ironic: if we envy or idolize youth, why do we treat them so badly? Perhaps the truth of this is that we adults are clueless and uninitiated.

What are those dreams and visions that you had as a young person that are as yet unfulfilled? What is your greatest fear, and what could you do to test and challenge that fear? What is it that you long to be doing but are nto? What stops you? When I ask this of a group, I don’t allow them to use time or money as convenient excuses about why they can’t seem to bring about the kind of life they most want.

One of my spiritual teachers says that the only thing we can give to another is our own state. We cannot give what we have not obtained. We need to hunt our own whale. As adults, we need to look inward towards our own soul-building and our own development to find the gaps and fill them in like chinking in a log cabin. We need to discover our own sense of self, our own courage and responsibility. How can we teach accountability when lurking in our purses and pockets are credit cards maxed to their limits? How can we teach restraint and self-discipline when we overeat, over drink, and overuse the resources of this planet? How can we teach compassion and understanding when we so quickly dismiss our own young people? We must complete our own initiation.

In the current state of our culture, it’s as if the young people are to blame. Senge says that a common archetype of organizations is to “shift the blame” to another part of the organization. Have we taken the problem of our own lack of initiation and laid it on the shoulders of our youth? To challenge the assumptions that are breaking down the foundation of our culture and society, we need to look into the mirror to discover what fears and unrealized longings are sunk deep into our own hearts. We need to strip down to a loincloth and a bare stretch of ground and have our own vision quest.

It has been my experience with clients, both young and old, that a step back is easier to make than any step forward. Forward movement takes a tremendous gathering of resources and great courage. When confronted with the possibility of bringing forth our brighter, higher nature, we are faced with a fear that is so universal as to send us running for the shadows again.

Initiation is not an event but an ongoing alchemical process. Each fear, doubt, and pocket of self-hatred must be brought to the surface and burned. We need to be purified and tempered in the fire of experience if we are to gain any strength of soul or self.

Do a personal inventory and be painfully honest with yourself. Ask yourself the following questions:

Am I able to build and sustain intimate relationships with my partner or other people?
Am I giving any of my vital energy to old angers, resentments, and relationships that have ended?
Do I have work that satisfies all parts of me and supports me in the world?
Do I have patterns that take me to the edge of something brand new only to pull me back again, and keep me in the old way of being?
Do I have a future vision that extends beyond this week, or this month? What is it?
Am I able to take the strength of my ancestral line on both my mother and father’s side? Do I respect and honor their fate without childish resentment?
Am I a victim of circumstances-or do I have a sense of strength, power and choice in my life?
What do I have to contribute to my culture, and am I doing it?
Am I able to do my life without addictive support from substances, gambling, shopping, etc.?

If your inventory reveals the uninitiated youth in you, consider that buried within your own soul is an unfinished child or adolescent seeking a way out. We find our way to those lost aspects of our Self by examining our darkest thoughts, our fears, sadness and grief, and the greatest yearning of our own heart. We don’t wander into our stored memories to uproot or remove them or to find whom to blame, but only to complete what may have been left incomplete so that we can re-engage our own initiation. We approach our past with respect and curiosity to discover what those hiding younger parts might want from us. We, essentially, initiate them.

Another revealing technique for self-discovery is to scan the qualities and characteristics in others that irritate and infuriate us. For instance, if your boss is stubborn and must always have her own way, perhaps you are stubborn and insistent on having your own way. If your four-year-old leaves his junk all over and it makes you crazy, see where your own junk is. This simple mirror technique asks, “How am I just like that person who irritates me so much?” It can sometimes be painful when we uncover our own flaws and weaknesses, but it is worth the effort.

Finally, don’t forget to discover and strengthen the parts of you that are vitally alive and burning like warm flames within you. Look to your own creativity, the simple desires, the love of beauty, nature or music that sleeps within. I remember when my daughter had her senior picture taken we pulled my old senior portrait out and were both stunned to discover how we resembled one another. It was most shocking to me because I think of my daughter as pretty and very loveable. This was not a feeling I ever had about myself at that age. I’m not sure why, but I was never enough to myself: not thin enough, smart enough, ambitious enough. It’s a lesson I’m still learning as I continue my own initiation.

When I was in my early twenties I decided to attend a writer’s retreat to see what it felt like to be in the company of writers. I was a closet writer and had been for many years, but I was afraid to test my tender talent before the eyes of real writers. For three days I went to the phone to register for the retreat. I’d lift the receiver only to drop it again in its cradle. It was awful. I was terrified that I’d somehow find the tiny flame of my desire doused by criticism. I spoke harshly to myself saying things like, “Who do I think I am, anyway? What kind of a fool . . .”

The self-torture was terrible. Finally, like the seventh grade me who finally tried out for the play, I made the call and even entered a short story to be critiqued by the experienced writers in the group. I attended the retreat and was stunned (and elated) when the older woman who critiqued my manuscript called me an accomplished writer. And, almost miraculously, for the first time, I believed that about myself.

Initiatory moments require something of us. In all we have explored, the rite of passage must have a test or challenge if we are to win the prize of the initiation. We have to do that thing which scares us, which we think we are incapable of doing, which some nasty voice in our head tells us that we are crazy to even attempt. Go ahead and start that business, take that trip alone, go back to school, or take up that paintbrush. Just do it.

When we have done this, then we may, at last, have something of value to offer our young ones. The care of the young soul, whether it be our own or that of our child, includes supporting them through the anguished periods of darkness without judging harshly-and without automatically thinking that we must be doing something wrong as parents. This is a selfish stance concerned only with our own measurement as parents. If our children are in a dark moment of the soul, it may mean we have done it exactly right. In our deepest fears and longings are our greatest gifts. If we never turn in their direction, the gifts remain undeveloped and languishing. This can only lead to real despair and depression.

When we have attended to our own inner initiation, we could also consider what, in this modern society, is the whale we must hunt? From studying many of the futuristic books that predict the trends of the 21st century, we can see that our children need to be able to think freely with those little-used frontal lobes of the brain. Our children need to see beyond their own small world and to think holistically and systemically in order to better judge the effects of a decision in the moment. They need to be flexible, able to cope with changing economies, changing careers, and a constantly shifting global society. These are the whales that our children (and yes, we ourselves) must hunt.

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed during the terrorist attack, my son pointed out to me that the date of the attack was 9-11, the same number that we use to call in an emergency. Tom was already looking for patterns that connect and speculating about what the larger meaning of this date held for our society. He was beginning to hunt his own whale.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises, Uncategorized | Tagged adolescent development, cultural correction, parenting, Patricia Jamie Lee, teens, The Education Crises | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 7

October 23, 2008

When I looked at my “revised chapter” tonight, I didn’t like it. I went back to the original chapter and decided it was much stronger and to the point. So, in the endless schizophrenia of the writer, I brought it back.

Tonight I am in a motel in Rushville, NE with meetings at Piya Wiconi scheduled for tomorrow. All is well in the world.

Jamie

CHAPTER SEVEN

Five Levels of Human Spiritual Development

Years ago I worked in a juvenile care center and a young person, Scott arrived at the center when he was fifteen. I had taught him years earlier in a diagnostic classroom when he was in third or fourth grade. Scott had me mystified. He was considered borderline retarded and looked and acted that way and yet, during his first few weeks in the center, a strange anomaly appeared. Scott was into wires. At one point I was walking up to the house and a loudspeaker wired to the roof of the house greeted me loudly. I was afraid to talk anywhere in the house because our wire whiz had every room bugged. I didn’t even know where or how he was finding the materials to do these things. Borderline retarded? It didn’t make sense.

One night on a night shift, I took his cumulative file out and started sorting his life out piece by piece. The file was thick. Scott had two violent, alcoholic parents and a younger brother and sister. When he was five, the family went into crisis and the kids were pulled out of the home. Scott had tried to be Mom and Dad but couldn’t. Scott was in preschool. During this time his intelligence was tested by some “test giver” and found to be borderline. When he entered school, he was placed in special education. He had never, in ten years, gotten out of special education. In the previous five years he had been in seven different foster homes. He was amiable, friendly and a complete people-pleaser. His primary goal, at fifteen, was to be left in the same foster home until he graduated.

I could find no other test results in his entire file. It appeared that Scott’s entire school career had been determined (or predetermined) by a test given to a confused, scared, unhappy five year old. It made me furious. I tried to take Scott to Alateen-the agency managing the care center would not permit me. They said it was not a part of his treatment plan. I was furious with the system and decided to teach Scott “how not to be retarded.” We had great fun. We worked with how he held his head and shoulders and how he avoided eye contact. We practiced new speech patterns, trying to develop more confidence and assertiveness in his tone and presence. Scott began to feel as if maybe he wasn’t retarded. We had a great time and I hope, in my heart, that his goal was realized. When Scott left the center, so did I.

The developmental trail is very delicate and should be treated with profound care and respect. In the following pages we will trace this path, giving fullest attention to how each stage relates to us as children or adults. The information presented here is taken from several sources and describes five levels of growth and development.

Stages Versus Levels of Development

Could a child be more highly developed than his or her parents? Could he be more intelligent than our best tests would indicate? If we actually adopted this line of thinking, it would force us to let go of the idea that we always know what is best for our children.

Dabrowski and Piechowski, two researchers, gave some intriguing answers to some of these questions. Their information set up a small aha in my mind as I studied it, and I present a gross simplification here.

Most of our common thought about human development is that it occurs in a linear A to B to C progression and that one stage leads naturally to the next; creeping leads to crawling which leads to walking. The research done by Dabrowski and Piechowski disagrees. They say that the brain operates at various levels of thinking as well as stages according to the neurological processing and the way that the brain interacts with itself. As we mature, the old brain connects with the midbrain, which connects to the new brain (this is a painfully simplified description). Primitive thinking comes from the primitive old brain system, and abstract thinking emerges from the new brain. They further state that what pushes the brain to form these higher-level connections is the amount of conflict experienced by the individual. Conflict, by their definition, rises from a discrepancy between “what is” and “what ought to be.” In other words, we have a higher vision of our lives that doesn’t match our current reality.

As the brain develops, it must make a leap from one level of functioning to the next. Once we have made this leap, the old brain system becomes unavailable. It is rather like having an outage to disconnect an old power system prior to firing up the new system. This is called the “theory of positive disintegration” for good reason. The movement to a higher level of development is often caused or aided by crises. Likewise, children or adults making this leap have what Dabrowski calls several types of “overexcitablity.” It is as if they are charged in the body, mind, or emotions with the special energy needed to make this leap.

I introduce this material here for two reasons. First is that we must consider that our young people may be making a leap that we have not ever made. It is possible that because we have done a decent job as parents, this higher level of development is available to our child. Secondly, we must be careful not to misdiagnose this “overexcitablity” as hyperactivity. How awful to consider labeling such precious brain development as Attention Deficit Disorder and putting the child on drugs that may bring the leap of development to a dead end.

Piechowski lists five different types of overexcitability: psychomotor, imaginational, sensory, intellectual, and emotional. When a child displays one form of this overexcitablity, we must pay careful attention. The current fad of diagnosing children with “brain dysfunction” is frightening. We may be killing the potential before the leap is made. It is a terrible mistake to make-treating spiritual growing pains as if they were an aberration or an illness. The movement described here is a spiritual and emotional movement from concrete, logical thinking to higher, nonlogical realms of spirit, creativity, and philosophical exploration.

The levels of development presented in the following pages are much simplified in order to create a framework for identifying where we are on the path. As is true of all descriptions of human experience, these are not absolute truths but descriptions and guides.

A chronological stage depends upon where we happen to fall on some predetermined timeline: infant, toddler, teen, etc. A developmental level depends upon how capable our brain is of making the right connections. One of the primary distinctions between the higher and lower levels of functioning was, as mentioned earlier, the ability to notice “what is” and have a desire for what “ought to be.” This information appears in the research and writing of Dabrowski, and Piechowski as well as the work of M. Scott Peck, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Abraham Maslow, and Joseph Fowler. Below, I summarize to create a framework from which to view levels of spiritual and emotional development.

Level One: Chaos

Chaos comes in many forms. To the child, a wonderful chaos is the result of an immature brain being asked to absorb so much information. The child bounces around reality like a red rubber ball bumping up against whatever is presented and learning along the way. For the most part, we accept and forgive their chaos because it is cute and fun to watch, and because they are children. It is their nature to explore, experiment, and bond with the world around them. When this process is allowed to unfold naturally, the child quickly becomes aware of and moves into the next level-the rules.

Adult chaos, however, is quite different. Although a physical maturity has been reached, the brain is still unable to make sense of all the input it receives. Confusion rules. The chaotic adult can’t seem to get it together on the inside, although outwardly they may look great.

Chaos can be quiet-or noisy and destructive. For me, chaos was directed inward, the confusion most apparent in my isolation and depression. I had no bar brawls, no DUI’s, no obviously bizarre behaviors, but still I lived in chaos with minimal coping skills. I was still the shy, quiet child that had spent her developmental years with her nose in a book.

For examples of noisy chaos, one need only hear an AA speaker or read a newspaper. Violence, car accidents, and families in complete turmoil top the list. Two men shooting it out on an interstate highway, a woman cuts her baby’s head off because she thinks he is a clone, a woman on a date gets raped. There are endless examples of noisy chaos.

The chaos, be it inward and quiet or noisy and violent, is still chaos. The brain, like a runaway train, is out of control. We do not so easily forgive or accept the chaos in adults as we do with children. We expect that because their bodies are adult bodies, their brains must be also.

By adulthood, when we should be standing on a firm foundation, many of us end up on a table with weak, wobbly legs. What Maslow calls the “good preconditions” needed to develop full humanness were not present. The adult, essentially, is operating at the level of the child, except the pressures are intensified by his or her so-called adulthood. This flawed and faltering development cannot hold us steady and strong enough to do any further explorations of the Self.

Recognizing Level One chaos can be difficult because it has become our normal. For many years, I roamed around in my quiet chaos wondering what was wrong with me. I could find no solid reason for how I felt. Many of us cannot. Only a tiny percentage of people experience the noisy, violent end of chaos.

Crisis is the chariot of change. It blocks all the exits, closes off all alternatives, and forces us to admit powerlessness. With any luck at all, the crisis does not kill us but moves us to the next level of development.

Level Two: The Rules

When the child begins to see himself as a separate being (about age four), he moves out of chaos and into Level Two. He notices that not only is there a world separate from his own body, but that world seems to have a form or structure, an order to it. At this stage the brain becomes sophisticated enough to begin sorting out all of the various aspects of reality and how the pieces fit together. There are rules in the language, rules in the family, rules for staying safe, and many rules that are just rules. The rules and routines allow the child to feel safe and secure, to know what is going to happen and when. The brain is still not much good at abstracting or going beyond these simple forms. It needs structure.

A child perceives things in an immature way. For example, when I was about four my dad remodeled our house and moved the basement stairs. I remember seeing him in the basement with the missing stairs. My fear was overwhelming. My Daddy was trapped in the basement. My poor immature brain was unable to comprehend how he would get out of the basement.

When I had the day care center, I was constantly amazed at how the kids thrived within the routines we created. With no knowledge of how to tell time, the three, four and five-year-olds alike knew within five minutes when it was time for snack, lunch, nap, or Mom to arrive. Vary the routines and they would grow agitated and anxious.

Adults in Level One chaos often enter Level Two with a bang. The chaos has become a flood, and the Level Two Rules a lifeboat. M. Scott Peck often refers to this rapid entry as a conversion experience because the chaos is instantly laid to rest when the rules are embraced. The classic examples are the alcoholic who joins AA or the individual who finds a spiritual path and is saved. Even the tight family structure of Amway can sometimes provide the firm rules and structure that allows chaos to fade. This transition is often marked by a dramatic, “I see the light at last” type of experience or “I once was lost, but now am found.”

With this ordered structure comes a time of renewal and rest. Anxiety fades and is replaced with a sense of peace and belonging. Adults are every bit as attached to the Level Two structures as those children in the day care center became attached to the daily routines. The structure represents safety, stability, and a place to grow. To test this, simply poke a bit at an alcoholic’s program or a Christian’s religion and see how they respond. They will fly out in full defense of their chosen set of rules.

This response is exactly right. While we are immersed in this stage of our development, the adopted rules are our lifeline. Like the infant monkey that clings to its mommy’s back, we ride along in this structure to buy the time we need to grow.

In the meantime, we educate ourselves, learn to better manage our brains, take risks with other humans, establish intimate relationships, build new social skills and practice being real. We come out of hiding and, perhaps for the first time, get an inclination that we may not be as flawed as we secretly suspected or that the world may not be out to get us. With any luck at all, we may even learn to laugh at ourselves and our need to take it all so seriously.

For me, those early years in recovery with Alcoholics Anonymous were like a love affair. I lusted for more and more of what the program had to give to me. I knew real joy and pleasure for the first time in my adult life. The meetings, coffee times, and potlucks were the highlights of every week. For the first time, I truly entered the university of the self and became the subject of my own study. The knowledge that AA was everywhere on planet Earth shrunk the globe for me and taught me that I could go anywhere in the world and feel the same safe acceptance I felt here in western South Dakota. It was liberating.

Oddly though, as I turned more and more inward, my love affair with my Level Two structure began to fade, and I became restless and dissatisfied once again. I questioned what was wrong with me. I didn’t know that a new movement was underfoot.

Before describing Level Three, I want to make a final point about Level Two. The process of separating from any structure we adopt is frightening. As children, we stay within the supposed safety of the family for many years as we grow and develop. The same may be true for our second family structure, but just as the teen must begin to find ways to separate off from the nest of Mom, Dad, family, and home in order to seek his fortune, so do we arrive at the same point as adults in Level Two. Our continued growth depends upon this successful separation.

A majority of our society hovers in Level Two unable or unwilling to make the break to Level Three. We know the rules, we know how the game is played, and yet within us there is still an ache, a longing to go on. Unless we respond to and fully understand the nature of that longing, it is easy to misread it as “something is wrong with me.”

How terrible to treat these vital signs of human growth and flowering potential as a mental illness and dump lithium or Prozac on our desire to know the truth. At this moment, I know too many people who have prescriptions from psychiatrists to medicate what are, in truth, spiritual growing pains. Pharmaceutical drugs may have an important part to play for the individual whose chaos has become life threatening, but the vast majority of people on these drugs are displaying symptoms of spiritual growth-not mental illness. My suggestion is, “Buyer Beware.”

Restlessness, sleeplessness, depression, despair, an inner ache, a longing for more, dissatisfaction with life, as well as real physical symptoms of migraines, low back pain or illness are often attempts to break through the barriers of our own limited existence.

As I studied these levels, I realized that this pull away from firm structures and rules is the natural energy of adolescence. When we have done a good job as parents, the child is ready to make this leap at age fifteen or sixteen. Moms and Dads, when your young teen begins to rebel and question every rule, when they try to dump the religion you have so lovingly given them, when they seem to doubt and wonder and contemplate, it may only look like depression or rebellion. However, it may be the child’s attempt to make the magical leap toward what you so badly want them to have-a love of self and others, compassion, a sense of union with the world, and an intimate, personal knowledge of God. Relax. Know that if they are displaying these symptoms of growth, it could mean that you have done your job well.

It isn’t designer jeans, a car, or better grades that will fill their need. Support them into this next level. Give them challenges, choices, models, and support. We are too quick to fear these dramatic changes in our children-changes that result from this expansion of self. We have been indoctrinated into fearing the changes and thinking our child has gone astray.

Unless we feed the need for knowledge, unless we provide models for further development, unless we willingly wonder with them, it is at this critical point that the spiritual energy nature so generously provides can go astray.

Level Three: Testing the Rules

Level Three of the life adventure is when the road turns inward. No longer can we just blindly accept the rules. Now we must make our own. Nature has built in an inner sonar of the self, like a tuning fork that vibrates or refuses to vibrate when a note is struck in the outside world. This vibration, if we make the transition to this level, becomes our personal guide.

I remember the emergence of this level for a brief period in my late teens, before it was driven underground for two more decades. I drove my parents and teachers crazy with my questions and opinions. War, racism, Vietnam, social structures, rules and rules more rules-all simultaneously came under critical attack. It is such an irony-my rattling of every cage was the very best indicator that my parents and teachers had done it right. I was exactly where I was supposed to be developmentally, but because most of society hovers comfortably in Level Two, they didn’t know what to do with my energy and endless questions or my strange overexcitability

In my earlier work as a practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming, these levels of development explained many missing links. I didn’t understand why my clients couldn’t reach for a larger vision, why they clung to the rules, or why they wanted me to spell out for them what needed to happen next. On occasion, I would get a client who actually was ready for Level Three investigation, but rarely.

The levels of development must be climbed in order. We complete Level Two and then we go on to Level Three (although the lines are not so clear). The astute parent or therapist must be able to recognize which developmental level the individual is approaching. Now when a client asks for the rules, I try to direct them toward healthy groups and structures. When they feel constrained and restricted by their groups, I encourage them to stretch out and make new rules based on an inner guidance.

Level Three is about defining the rules by which we choose to live. At this point, we choose our belonging and become self-defining. This can be a demanding and surprising examination that often requires action and change. We may discover earlier life choices were made for all the wrong reasons: to please others, for prestige, because we couldn’t say no or we didn’t know what we wanted. At this point, if we belong to a group that no longer fits, we must drop it. If our career was chosen with the criteria of former chaos or set of rules, we must leave it. If friends don’t fit, we move on. If we don’t like a person’s tone of voice or how they treat us, we speak (out loud and to that person) our dislike of the pattern. Every discovery requires risk and courage. It becomes increasingly painful to not be true to the self. Our familiar hiding places are fouled and useless.

There is no grand conversion to Level Three. Instead, we tentatively pick our way through a lifetime of old behaviors and beliefs. In Level Two we re-cover, but in Level Three we un-cover. Not an easy task.

The longer we refuse to risk this level of self-examination, the more life loses meaning and purpose. In Level Three we begin to strike a note that sets up a wonderful vibration in the inner tuning fork. From this growing inner connection with the self, we cross the border into Level Four where we display what Maslow termed “self-actualizing” behaviors.

Level Four: Making the Rules or Self Definition

Level Four is where we begin to grow solid in our new ways of defining life. Essentially, we now make the rules by which we live, but we make them from a greater sense of connection and compassion. The peak experiences and actualizing indicators Maslow spent much of his life studying are fairly common occurrences in Level Four. Dreams, intuition, inner communications, visions, ideas from nowhere are all a part of Level Four.

Science, unable to capture the elusive characteristics of this level of development, for the most part gave it up as an unlikely subject of study. Science cannot find the facts to support the existence of Level Four reality. In fact, even those of us that have had these powerful experiences are at a loss for words and have great difficulty not sounding crazy when we talk about them.

So much of the New Age thought would have us believe that there is no work involved at this level of development. This is wrong. There is no lazy way to realization, no short cuts. However, what we begin to discover is that if attitudes and beliefs change, there is tremendous pleasure.

Level Five: The Re-Evolution of Soul

The journey from the head to the heart is a long road. In Levels Three and Four, the rules and values salvaged out of Level Two settle into the heart and become (or already were) a part of who we are. They no longer stay in the brain as a thought but sift into the being and become our experience.

Love thy neighbor as they Self. Love others unconditionally. To thine own Self be true. In Level Five these are not rules but ways of being, deeply embedded in who we are. One of my teachers said that only one in a thousand arrive at this place-and only one in a thousand of those who arrive find real attainment.

M. Scott Peck, at a workshop in Billings, Montana, spoke of our tendency to consider Jesus Christ five percent human and ninety-five percent divine. Elevating him in this way makes his attainment impossible for the common man. If we reversed these percentages and considered Christ to be five percent divine–and ninety-five percent human-suddenly the pressure is on. It means that every human on earth has the potential to reach the same level of development as Jesus Christ. How much safer it is to continue to elevate him, to endlessly wish for high levels while cataloging all the convenient excuses and reasons why it is not possible for us to reach his lofty height.

Think of the implications if we were to take on actually living in this highly developed way. Can we risk building true intimacy without gossip, or blame, or judging others? The most common form of pseudo-intimacy is when two or more gather at another’s expense. Sometimes the discussion will even have overtones of concern but is still just gossip. Tight bonds form even as they wrap around another person’s neck. He, she, they or even it will permeate these discussions.

Do we dare to be different? Can we be our real selves even in the face of conflict and rigid disapproval? Can we be strong enough or will we simply comply? The responsibility of higher levels of development–of the heart– requires that we monitor thought, word and action.

Why have I presented this lengthy discussion on the Levels of Development here, in a book on adolescent initiation and rites of passage? When we bring this discussion back to our earthly concern about how to turn children into highly functioning adults, we are faced again with the need to challenge the child.

Most important to our discussion of youth initiation is that one characteristic of this upward movement is the tendency to question all existing rules and ways of being. The dark periods of adolescence-and the pushing against constraints-are indicators both that the child is advancing and that the parents have provided the right environment for that to happen. In other words, when we associate rebellion with adolescence this may be a good sign. Making the developmental leap requires that we question all that has come before and run it up against a world that we envision as ideal. Otherwise, how can we ever make real changes in this world?

I remember this feeling from my own adolescence. Out of the safe nest of my family, I awoke up one day with a million questions about the life they offered me. I drove my parents crazy challenging our society, our religion, and our government. My parents began to think maybe they had done something wrong as parents. My teachers tried to get me back into line with the current thought. Now I see that challenging existing systems was the natural movement for my own higher development.

Overexcitability as a Diagnosis

In our current culture over five million children have been diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disordered (ADD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Recently at Borders bookstore I counted thirteen books dealing with this issue. In A Blueprint for Success: ADHD and the Family, a booklet published in 2002 by The Shire Company (manufacturers of Adderall XR, a Ritalin look-alike) the company assures us that “We can now safely say that ADHD has a neurobiological basis-that is, there is a physical problem in the brain. Therefore, ADHD is not the result of bad parenting, divorce, sibling rivalry, or other family-related environmental factors.”

This is a terrifying and informative sentence. It frightens me that conferences and educational materials intended to educate are actually advertising products for the drug companies. This same booklet makes no mention of food, allergies, eating habits, educational systems, or ways to ensure our brain stays “balanced.” Of course human development has a neurobiological basis, but according to this statement, we must look for the problem in the brain when the child is excitable or distressed.

We are in a time when children are being diagnosed disordered by the millions. How terrible to consider treating the potential movements to the higher levels of brain development as if they were an aberration or illness. A recent issue of Time Magazine (August 2002) had an article about bipolar disorder and spoke of diagnosing a two-year old with this disorder and putting him on drugs. This trend must be stopped. Parents have a responsibility to read and study the facts of these potent psychotropic drugs before allowing their children to be placed on them-and not depend upon the research provided by the drug companies themselves.

The fragile, developing brain is still a relatively unknown creature. I anticipate a terrible backlash from this rising trend twenty years from now-but by then it will be too late for many of the children now taking these drugs. In all fairness, I don’t deny the existence of true neurological problems. The brain is still a great mystery. In a recent conversation with a psychologist friend, he reports that in the twenty years of his practice, he has never before seen the level of disturbance that he sees in some of the children that have come to see him in the past two years. “Some of these kids are crazy,” he said to me. How does a six year old get crazy? There are many factors that need to be studied in open, independent research (not product based). We should be looking at the food and water supply, the actual neurological effects of video games, television, and other imputing sources. All are players in this game of the brain.

My reason for including Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is to emphasize that when things look darkest, sometimes that is the moment before the greatest leap of development. We have to take care not to abort the new birth before it has a chance to complete itself. Our young people should question and challenge. And we should question and challenge them back. Diagnosing their distress as a psychological disorder is a fundamental error that we can’t afford to make. Our world needs their bright minds and highest functioning brains. We need them sharp, ready, and fully initiated.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, adolescent rites of passage, human development, parenting, Patricia Jamie Lee, teens, Washaka--The Bear Dreamer | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage, Chapter 6

October 22, 2008

It seems almost unfair to try to explain Family Constellation Work in one condensed chapter like this. I’ve been doing this work for the past ten years and have never experienced such deep, soul-level work. If my botched explanation touches you in any way, please do look further into this approach. It has changed the lives of hundreds of people that I have worked with. It has changed my life.

I’m tired and my son’s wedding is looming (we leave a week from today). I am excited about it but also looking forward to it being behind us. Tom and Erica are going to Hawaii for their honeymoon. Wish I was heading to the Global Passageways retreat next week myself. Instead, I’m sending a Bead Person for each attendee. I’ll be there energetically!

Jamie

CHAPTER SIX

The Art of Separating

I once heard a Lakota medicine man give a wonderful talk about how the tiny spirit finds its way from the spirit world and into the body of his or her mother. This wisp of life travels a great distance and then, at conception, is given a human body following an explosion of sperm into the fertile womb of the woman. At birth the body of the woman mobilizes for another explosion as the child enters this world and is separated from the mother. This separation is necessary if life is to continue.

Adolescence is like a second birth, perhaps even more complex and difficult than the first. In this second birth the child is not an unaware infant but a participant in the separation. A tremendous tension builds between hanging on and letting go as the child, once again, attempts to separate.

In the work of people such as Bert Hellinger, Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and many other insightful engineers of this important event, they observed that the failure to separate from the parents and the family of origin could bring about neurosis, mental illness, physical illness, and even death. As I’ve deepened my study of this important developmental moment-of separating-I’m willing to risk saying that 98% of the clients I see are trapped in the tense pull of this separation either from their own parents or from their children or from a way of being that no longer allows for further growth. This movement away from the family and into our own universe touches some deeply fundamental force that seeks resolution.

In fact, there is a universal tension that builds within all of us between the need to belong and the need to separate. In the age of adolescence, this tension is like a guitar wire, tight and singing. We seek a firm membership in our culture and family-and simultaneously seek to wander off alone into the forest to discover the higher truth of our aloneness. This becomes a combustible mixture that, when left alone and uninitiated, will burn its own trail through the forest.

On September 11, 2001, we were all shocked by the terrorist attacks and the subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center. Strangely, just three days before this event I’d checked out a book called The Psychology of War, by Lawrence LeShan. The skinny little book was riding in my van the day of the attack so I picked it up and began reading. All around me there was the trembling energy of a nation about to either collapse, as the towers did, or to rise to something new. I wondered which it would be.

Dr. Lawrence LeShan speaks about a universal tension between the desire to belong and the desire to be an individual that is shared by all human beings. Since our country was on the edge of war, I read on, surprised at how clearly he explained this tension:

Historically and anthropologically, there are two different means (both of which appear in nearly every known human culture) available to us that promise to satisfy both of these drives, simultaneously and without contradiction . . . . A very small part of the human race turns to one of the schools of esoteric or spiritual development . . . .There is a second means of resolving this tension, between our need for singularity and our need for group identification. This means also appears in nearly every culture, and it too promises to fulfill both of these needs simultaneously, without contradiction; it promises to enhance our individuality and heighten our existence and, at the same time, increase our sense of being part of a group; to lessen our separateness at the same time it increases our individuality. Further, it pro-mises to do so with full social approval and without the arduous discipline required for meditation, which apparently can only be followed by a few. This second path is the way of armed group conflict-of war.

LeShan says we resolve the conflict in one of two ways: by seeking spirit-or by making war.

One of the largest whales our children will have to hunt is that which will insure the safety of planet Earth. If we are to survive all of us, both young and old, need to become conscious of our own belonging and the forces that drive it. I hope someday to explore the full impact of blind belonging versus conscious belonging but, for our topic here, it’s enough to say that teaching our youth about this powerful tension system is an essential part of initiating them into adulthood.

The Power of Exclusion

In ancient native cultures, the greatest punishment meted out to a member of the tribe was to be excluded. In some ways, even death was more merciful than full exclusion. We, in our archaic souls, understand the power of inclusion and exclusion, yet we also seek separateness.

Most romantic literature and poetry is about finding what the heart most desires only to lose it again. Coming and going. Essentially we are programmed genetically, biologically, and spiritually to find ourselves safe and embraced by what we love only to turn and leave it behind. It’s the driving force behind initiation-to leave the known, familiar territory and to discover something new.

The Power of Mother and Father

In adolescence, this tension between belonging and aloneness can take on mythic proportions. To let this dynamic tension unfold and allow the child to be born again into adult life, we need to understand the subtle forces at work within the family.

Many tribal societies recognized the intensely deep pull that a mother has on a child. Separating mother and child, as we have explored, was often the first part of a rite of passage ritual. It’s as if a second umbilical cord, invisible and made of steel, needs to be cut. We think of adolescence as the time when the child pulls away from the mother, but mother must also be willing to let go of the child. If, in the early years, the bond between mother and child has been fully formed, the child can move more easily away from the mother. If for some reason the bond was incomplete, both mother and child find separation difficult.

In The Magical Child, Pearce (1986) explores this mysterious bonding process in full detail. He recognizes that many innovations in our modern society have succeeded in weakening the bond between mother and infant; medical births, drugs in childbirth, mothers at work, day care centers and television are just a few of the intervening forces he examines. When I first read Pearce many years ago, I found this bleak picture of the future of the human race to be almost unbearable. All of the eroding factors he lists have been the standard for decades. Even in choosing to birth my own three children naturally, without drugs or extreme medical intervention, I still had to fight the hospital staff to allow nursing on demand, in-room care etc.

What does this mean, for our society, I wondered? Although natural childbirth is in vogue again, is it enough? Our economic structures still force women into full employment. They return home exhausted and overworked, their children warehoused in childcare centers day after day.

The Family Constellation Work of Bert Hellinger

When first introduced to the intensive family work of German psychotherapist, Bert Hellinger², I recognized that he had, perhaps, found a solution to the incomplete bonding within families. By returning to the deep river of love and connection flowing beneath families, we can restore what has been broken. The truth is parents love their children. And children love their parents. On the level of the soul, there is no stronger force operating. Whatever negative factors have influenced the way we act in the world, this love remains true. Hellinger (2001), in summarizing his decades of experience with family systems wrote:

The most important thing I’ve seen is that love is at work behind all human behavior and, however strange this may seem, behind all our psychological symptoms. This means that it’s essential in therapy to find where the clients love.

Working energetically with the family system, Hellinger recognized the soul’s desire to complete what has been incomplete. He discovered that the obstacles to love flowing within the family could be resolved and removed by a variety of means.

Consider the young infant wanting only to reach out for mom and to be taken. When this natural movement is interrupted somehow, through sickness or separation, the infant enters childhood constantly trying to complete the movement. Hellinger observed that he could place a surrogate or representative mother in front of a client and that the client could, at last, complete the movement that the soul has longed to make for a lifetime. He calls this “a completion of the reaching out movement”³.

Hellinger developed a tool now called the family constellation as a way of working with families. The family constellation makes visible the hidden ties and connections that flow naturally out of love and loyalty within a family. He called these connections “the hidden orders of love.” According to Hellinger (1998):

The systemic orders that allow love to thrive in families are difficult to define precisely. They have far greater flexibility than social or moral laws that have been invented by societies or individuals and that must be obeyed to the letter. They are also different from the rules of a game that can be modified to suit the circumstances or according to whim. The orders are simply there.”

A family system includes children, their parents, the grandparents and great grandparents on out. Others may be considered part of the system as well, such as former spouses or partners or someone whose fate affected the system. For example, someone from whom a member of the system gained something significant either by their death, loss, or misfortune.

Within this loosely defined system, there are certain natural orders that must be maintained if the system is to thrive and flourish. Hellinger (1998) wrote,

As we have seen, love succeeds in our relationships when belonging, a balance of giving and taking, and a good order can be maintained. This is also true for the extended family, but five additional dynamics constrain the success of love in family systems: (1) honoring the right to membership, (2) maintaining the completeness of the system, (3) protecting the hierarchy according to time, (4) following the order of precedence between systems and (5) accepting the limitations of time.

Such a concise summary of these hidden orders of love can be misleading. When applied to the depths of our family systems, they become a complex web of ties and loyalties that give rise to our life experience. The suggestion is that a family system is just that, a complex system of relationships that are in a constant state of balancing, forming, and reforming while always flowing forward toward the next generation.

For our purposes here, we’ll focus primarily on the orders of belonging and precedence.

We all have a place within our system and must keep that place and be included if things are to flow in a good order. When we lose our place, a disorder or an imbalance is created and the larger system automatically begins to adjust for the imbalance. In other words, the first to enter a system takes precedence over those who enter later. For instance, Mom and Dad enter a system before the first child, and the first child enters before the second, and third, etc.

Hellinger also explains carefully that there are orders of precedence between two separate systems. For instance, when a man divorces and marries again, his second system takes precedence over the first. To complicate matters further, however, if there is a child from the first marriage, that child still holds first place before the second partner. If the new wife attempts to take first place over the child, the marriage will begin to rock and roll.

The goal of this discussion is to stress that each member of the system holds a particular place and love flows more easily when the orders of precedence are honored. In fact, everybody just feels better when all who are a part of the system are included.

Likewise, each member must carry or be responsible for their actions or feelings. When an important event causes grief, guilt, or other reactions and the responsible person doesn’t take their part, the event may begin to echo through the system. When this happens, a younger member may take on the feelings of an earlier member thus becoming entangled and unable to move forward.

Hellinger’s vast inquiry into such systemic disturbances gave me an entirely new pair of spectacles with which to view adolescent development. It’s possible that many of us can’t separate from our system of origin or our parents because, through no fault of our own, we are entangled-caught in the web of love, loyalty and strong emotions. The issues are multi-generational and thus very complex. I also want to stress at this point that Hellinger was very careful to advise us not to attempt to rigidify or formalize these orders of love. Each relationship system must be approached individually and with a willingness to see what that system has to say.

Having said this in such brief terms, we find that tracing a disorder or disturbance is not a simple task. The tool of the family constellation provides us with a way to see what may be invisible within the hidden orders of a system. A constellation uses representatives to set up an energetic picture of the family within what is called by some facilitators the knowing field. A trained facilitator learns to read the movements within the system and adjust, by trial and error, as a means to find and restore the proper order and resolve the imbalance.

Here is a simple example. A man had struggled his entire life with a deep sadness for which he can find no reason. In a constellation, he chooses representatives for himself, his mother, and his father and then intuitively moves them into the open space of the circle without thinking about it. He places mom facing away and looking far out of the circle, dad at the opposite end looking on, and himself in the middle watching mom. The facilitator then gathers a verbal report (and nonverbal) from all representatives to see what feelings or thoughts come to them as they stand in place.

We find that mom’s representative feels very sad and has a strange longing in her heart. Dad’s representative feels disconnected and helpless. The son’s representative is angry-longing to get mom to look at him. The client has provided information that mom lost a little sister to early death and so a representative for the little sister is chosen and brought into the existing picture. Immediately, Mom’s representative feels a great relief and love for the little sister. At last, she can now see her husband and her son and feel love toward them. The resolution is to make sure the place of the little sister is firmly held in the family and then mom can be more present for her family.

This is an extremely simplistic example of a very complex process, but it is intended to give you a picture of what a constellation looks like. By way of explanation, we surmise that the early death of the little sister caused a painful storm of grief in the mother’s family of origin. Her parents found it easier to not think about the loss but to set it quickly aside. The place held by the little dead sister eventually closed up and her place no longer held in the family. However, the soul of the older sister (our client’s mother) felt the loss and sought to hold a place for her little sister. This created a sadness and depression in mom that stopped her from being fully available to her new system. She was entangled in the grief and loss and had passed that burden on to our client. To resolve the entanglement, we put the little sister back where she belongs or “longs to be”.

Signs of systemic disturbances may be chronic sadness or depression, a loose anger or violence floating around the system, an inability for an individual to go forward into life, and even illness or suicidal thoughts.

The powerful suggestion of this work, and one that is consistent with many traditional native cultures, is that we do not operate alone but are intricately connected throughout our lives to those who came before us, both the living and the dead. It is possible for us to be intimately and invisibly connected to the fate of an aunt, grandfather, or even a great grandmother who suffered a difficult fate. This connection, formed out of deep love and loyalty, is the cause of our current life circumstances.

Although we did not suffer this fate, we willingly and lovingly carry the burden of it. These burdens must be passed back to whom they belong if we are to go free into our own lives. It’s the tender hearts of the young that are most vulnerable to taking on the sad fate of those who came before. I see that these heavy entanglements are often at the root of suicide, mental illness, physical distress, chronic sadness, depression, or rage. Such entanglements stop development in its tracks. Instead, we give a significant portion of our personal energy in service to the system and thus have none left for our own life struggles.

When a family member seems caught in depression or loops of anger or self destructiveness, scan the family system for any who may have died early, been pushed out, or have been otherwise excluded. Take special care if you divorce your child’s other parent because they will remain loyal in the soul. Hold firm to your place as parent and simultaneously as the child of your parents.

If, as you have read these many pages, a child (or yourself) may be entangled in this web of family, I strongly suggest you learn more about Family Constel-lation Work. I feel in my heart that when a young person does a suicide or suffers severe illness, they often serve some hidden purpose for the larger system. If a child is so entangled, we must do all we can to release them.

Likewise, look to your own entanglements. Are you caught in a web of loyalty to your family of origin? Do you feel somehow unable to be fully present to your spouse or children? Do your relationships end prematurely or seem deeply dissatisfying?

We’ve only begun to research and look into these larger, echoing effects within the family system, but to witness a family constellation is to become aware of these larger forces at work.

Search for repeating patterns as you scan your system. There can be some strange surprises. For instance, my oldest daughter was the only great grandchild to be born on her paternal grandmother’s birthday. Grandma had married on August 15, and my daughter got married on August 16. Grandma had five children by age 22, and my daughter had four children by age 22. Some of these coincidental patterns can be just plain interesting. Occasionally, they can be a warning signal that the child has taken on the fate of another.

Ultimately, our job as parents is to do all we can to prepare the child to leave us. It sounds somewhat callous but that is the truth. When systemic issues prevent that separation from happening, all will suffer. We can’t attempt to explain how or why these hidden orders of love operate as they do within families. Hellinger calls it “phenomenological” because it cannot be explained. The tribal ancestors, perhaps, understood it more clearly.

During our time with Bert Hellinger in Austria, I asked if he felt that the family was the kernel from which all else grows and he said only, “Yes, of course.” In 2002, the international conference on systemic work was on ethnic conflict. It was entitled Fields of Conflict-Fields of Wisdom. From our deepest entanglements and conflict, comes our greatest wisdom.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Bead people Peace Project, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, Family Constellation Work, global passageways, jamie lee, rites of passage, teens, The Bead people Peace Project | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 5

October 21, 2008

It has been a challenge to eek out this time each night to proof and prepare this post, but it feels right and good. Sometimes it seems like my thinking is about a decade ahead. This book feels even more important to me now than it did when I wrote it. Just today a good friend of ours who has worked in the healing arts her whole life told us that her son tried to commit suicide a month ago. The young people need everything we can muster to help them gain strength and place in the world. Even though I can’t attend the Global Passageways retreat in Hawaii next week, it excites me that 100 great thinkers from across the globe are coming together to address the very issues that I have spent 20 years pondering. I know from reading many of their resume’s that they have put their beliefs and observations to work in real, active programs in many nations. We need to multiply their efforts and get to work.

Today I made my first trek of the week to Pine Ridge to teach my classes. It was so windy out there that half the prairie was blowing across the road. I’ve never seen so many tumbleweeds. They looked alive-dancing across the road-and I thought maybe I should have included a “prairie clan” in my little Bead People book. By the way, we have just had The Wind of a Thousand Years translated into Spanish and ordered the first copies. We’d love to have others with language ability help us to translate it into other languages. It is a short book so not too large of a task. You can see it at www.thebeadpeople.org

One more note-Milt and I went to see a speaker who is a psychic and healer tonight. It was fun-we had him hold one of The Bead People and he said it would be used for a charitable purpose and that he saw “upper 7 figures” coming in to the right organization using it for a fundraiser. I think he may be a real psychic!J The other day in my mind I visualized 1,000,000 Bead People out wandering the world. Naturally, I don’t want to build them all myself-so get on board. Order a kit or instructions, a pile of Wind books and pitch in and help. In November I plan to offer a special on kits and the instructional DVD. Visit the website a week from now to see it.

Good night-God Night. Remember, Chapter 5 is below this wordy post.

Jamie

CHAPTER FIVE

Where Have We Been?

Today, although we know so much more about what happens in the wiring and firing beneath the skull and the blood flowing in the bloodstreams of our young, we’ve grown stupid about what is going to happen when the child reaches a certain age. We hope it can simply happen without us.

What is this strong, powerful force that enters our young and changes them from happy, light-hearted children to a brooding, changeable alien species? Don’t misunderstand my words; I love the power inherent in this reservoir of youth. I simply want to better understand it, to move consciously through its twists and turns. We know that adolescence is a confluence of many forces at work including biology, spirit, mind, social environment, and something even larger and more mysterious. Many fields of study have attempted to unravel the mysteries of this confluence. As Furstenberg (2000) noted:

Our disciplines have drawn artificial boundaries that are not extant in the natural world. Many disciplines have left biology out of the picture and have acted as if individual differences do not matter. Others have focused on individual differences while neglecting the culture and social structure. This balkanized approach to the study of adolescence serves us poorly.

As parents and teachers, we often turn to the sciences to assist us in deciphering the coded mysteries of this powerful period of human development. The information sifting out from these sources, however, can be conflicting and confusing. The sciences, when they split and turn and separate from one another, truly do “serve us poorly”.

What’s It All About, Mr. Natural?

When I was in college we had a little cartoon called “Mr. Natural”. Mr. Natural was a wise old hippie man who had many things to say. In one cartoon (this has stuck in my mind for decades) a devotee came to the sage and asked him, “What’s it all about, Mr. Natural?” The old man turned to the younger and said, “It don’t mean shit.” Often, in moments of profound confusion, I see this cartoon in my mind again and laugh. It gives me breath and relief once again to reconsider the nature of things.

Attempting to understand the vast fields of science and research relating to the brain and to human development can be vastly overwhelming. It would, perhaps, be to our great benefit, both with our own health and the health of our young people, to return to a simpler and more obtainable path. The path of natural observation and simple inquiry can take us a great distance toward the desired outcome.

To begin with, we know that the human brain and the path of human development move from the simple to the complex. Beginning with Piaget’s (1970) well-known definitions of childhood development, we know that the movement is from concrete operations to formal operations spanning the first decade and a half of life. His observations, oddly, end at the very moment that these forces gather. It’s as if adolescence itself makes the most dedicated observer speechless. If we consider that the formal thinking stage is not the end of development but is simply another beginning, it makes sense. Pearce (1992) calls this stage postbiological development, or development beyond biology.²

Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, the child is being prepared for something greater, something perhaps unheard of. Joseph Chilton Pearce (1992), in Evolution’s End, wrote, “Just as the failure of bonding at birth is the adult’s responsibility, not the infant’s, the failure of adolescents to follow our discipline is the fault of the adult models.”

In other words, the vast amount of developmental research suggests, as this book does, that our young people need support, care, and initiation from and by their Elders. The brain may not be the seat of the soul, but it is certainly one of its containers and requires care, feeding, rest and stimulation in order to hold the contents of human spirit.

Instead of the support and care, we have, as Pearce wrote, “created a holding stage that keeps young people in a limbo, into which children enter earlier and adults stay longer year by year.”

Michael Meade (1993), author of several books on adult male initiation, commented about the men attending his gatherings:

It is no accident that the average age at these gatherings is about forty-no accident because the ‘midlife crises’ represents another period of initiation, when all the smoldering issues of previous life stages as well as those of the present are ignited.

Although we explore primarily adolescence here, it’s important to recognize that all of life is a series of initiations. With each new change we enter, initiation to that change must happen. I remember standing at the foot of my daughter’s hospital bed as she gave birth to my first grandson. It was terrifying. For the first time, my daughter went to a place completely alone. I couldn’t follow her and there was nothing I could offer her except my presence. Birthing that child was her territory alone. This experience caused a deep break in my life as mother and plunged me into the life stage of grandmother.

The other day I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in several years. She’s a counselor in the school system and we were both attending a program on suicide prevention. G. walked up to me and said “Oh my god, Jamie. I’ve thought of you so often since that day you were out to my house. I made it back, FINALLY.”

I had no idea what she was talking about and thought perhaps she’d moved far away for a period of time or taken a long trip. She laughed and said, “You don’t even remember, do you?”

I was still confused. Then she told me that the last time we met we’d been talking about life issues over a cup of tea in her kitchen. Evidently, I told her she should go into the furthest, darkest corner of her being and stay there for a while. I’ve no recall of having said that or whom I stole that wonderful advice from. My friend explained how she took these words to heart and had spent the last several years clearing out her darkest corners-and that it was damned difficult. She was amused that something that had brought such a profound change for her I didn’t even recall. It was clear, however, that it was good advice. She had a bright and shining look about her that she’d not had previously. Initiation is being courageous enough to go into those dark corners and to see what may be hidden there.

The Lakota people have an ancient teaching that once guided and directed all of life’s paths. It is, “As above, so below”. The teaching is that all that happens on earth has a corresponding response in the larger universe, and vice versa. We are intimately and forever connected to the larger forces that operate outside of our physical or visible awareness. In order for life to go on well, we must align our selves with these higher forces. We don’t exist in isolation from all that is around us. It’s up to us to find out in what ways we are connected, or not connected, to the natural world.

Reaching For God

Below is a passage from a novel by Sue Harrison called, My Sister the Moon. It relates the story of the rite of passage of a young Aleut whale hunter in the far north. In the ritual, Samiq must become the whale that has been speared and is being pursued by hunters on the great sea. To prove his manhood, he must take on the pain and injury of the whale itself, to follow the giant beast into the sea as it suffers and dies from the poisoned spear lodged in its side. His thoughts as he enters this pain offer us a glimpse:

How long would he be in the hut, one day, two days? How long since he had eaten? Since the day before his ceremony? He should sleep; though sleep seemed elusive, pushed away by his need to become the whale.

But perhaps the only way to become the whale was in the same way he had become otter-through his dreams.

Samiq, Whale Killer, closed his eyes; let his thought go to the cold gray of the sea. He saw waves, dark as shale, solid, shining like wet rock. But then that image was swallowed by the pain of his hunger until the pain grew into something that stretched beyond himself, and it pulled him down, into the darkness, through the waves, away from the wind.

I use this fictionalized account both because it is beautiful, and because it exemplifies rituals in which the young person is carefully tutored then removed from his society and urged to enter into the transforming experience from which he re-emerges as a man. In this, as in many rituals, it is the goal of the ritual to connect the initiate with both natural and supernatural forces. In this story, the boy must become the whale before he can become a man.

Without any knowledge of biology, neurological processing, or genetics, the Elders of thousands of years ago knew from experience what would happen when a child reached a certain age. They knew that the time would come when the child would put aside childish things, leave the sphere of the mother, and move into his or her rightful place as a productive member of the community. Ventura (1994) said, “Unlike us, tribal people met the extremism of their young with an equal but focused extremism from adults. Tribal adults didn’t run from this moment in their children as we do; they celebrated it.”

Meeting the extremism of the young with our own equal but focused extremism-this phrase speaks to the heart of initiation. We can’t be soft and safe with initiation. We can’t spare their feelings or do it for them. Softness from parents causes the young people to disrespect their Elders. We are weak when we should be strong, and they see this. The young challenge-and we fold.

We see this again and again and again. Instead of initiating them, we allow them to become master manipulators and “too big for their britches.” How often have you stood in a checkout line and seen some tyke win the battle of the checkout? Whining, crying and screaming, with mom yelling no, no, no-and then the toy, candy, or whatever, ends up in the cart. The child is rewarded for bad behavior, and the parent is weakened by the exchange. This is not the power of true parenting. Children can’t develop fully when they are given too much power.

What is it in our current society that allows us to think that if we give the child anything he wants, we are somehow a good parent? There is a joke in our family about me sitting on my children. This story came out of one or two events in which my daughter got out of control with her anger; she was quite young, maybe eight or nine and to insure her safety and my own, I sat on her, held her hands down and waited it out. My reasoning was simple and basic-I needed to win this one. Eventually she calmed down, and we were able to reason with one another again. That I only had to “sit on her” once or twice is a testament as to how effective it was, but the story has become somewhat of a legend in our family. My daughter now tells her children to be good or, “Grandma will sit on you.”

Spirit-The Greater Goal of Initiation

Initiation is about coming of age and taking the full challenge of adult life. Our Elders once recognized that initiation was also a unique opportunity, a moment in time in which the young could be connected and linked to the larger sources of life itself. Not only do the Elders of the community guide the young, but those Elders also look to the Ancient Ones to assist the process.

In our travels into Indian country, we encountered many traditional people who still talk to their ancestors and the spirits that they sense are easily within reach. Often we could not record a community member without the Elders first praying and gaining permission from the spirits. This reliance on the larger forces, on unseen ancestors and spirits, is something that science and even religion have too often forgotten or abandoned.

Once we were asked to produce a video for a project on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The organization cares for children and adolescents who were struggling, but before we were allowed to do anything, the woman in charge asked if we would be willing to make offerings to the spirits and ancestors before beginning. She explained that in her culture the children are sacred and that the spirits must be involved in anything having to do with the children. This was not a simple request on her part-but an integral substructure to their healing plan.

Later, I began doing constellation work with another Lakota group. Again, before I was required to do an Inipi ceremony so we could ask the spirits if this was the right time to do this work-and if I was the right one to do it. The spirits agreed, and I began working with their group. The spirits had some conditions, however. They said that before every session we were to pray and smudge and, following the work, we were to enter the sweat lodge (Inipi) to thank the spirits and ancestors for their help.

Whether we call that great mysterious source God or Wakan Tanka or Allah does not matter to me. Never has a human word adequately named such a mystery. I only know that communication with higher forces, the ancestors and the Creator, are fundamental to many tribal cultures and to all cultures.

A second common element we encountered often in Indian country is the deep and loving care of the earth. The tribes who still honor the old beliefs recognize that it is the earth that provides for us-not the other way around. The land is the Mother. She wipes our tears, heals our wounds, takes us to the center of life, and then allows us to rest with her until we return to the earth once again. We can take the energy of both our ancestors and the earth as a form of guidance in caring for both our children and ourselves.

For example, Elena Avila (2000), the author of Woman Who Glows in the Dark, tells her story as a psychiatric nurse who returned to her tribal roots in Mexico. She became a traditional healer or Curandera. Curanderismo is an earth-oriented medical practice grown out of the blended indigenous cultures of Mexico at about the time the Spaniards arrived. Avila began to integrate her ancient ways into the modern when caring for her patients. In her book, she speaks of using the earth to heal the trauma of a woman who had been raped:

I would bury the woman in the earth, all but her head. Then I would stay with her throughout the experience, protecting her from being hurt, wiping away any insects that might come hear her face, and reassuring her if she felt any panic. When a person has been so badly traumatized, being enveloped in the earth for a few hours is purifying and allows us to surrender our heaviness to the earth.

On reading this passage, I felt an intense inner comfort at the thought of giving such pain and sorrow to the earth. It seemed right, somehow.

During one of our trips to a small village in Mexico we were allowed to participate in an ancient Amazonian ceremony that is performed to renew the earth so that we can continue to live on her surface. I can’t speak of the intricate meanings of this ceremony but can only share the effect that it had on me.

The ceremony began at midnight under a full moon with three dancers coming out of the dark wearing some kind of fronds that clattered like sticks as they walked. They wore cone-shaped hats and were completely covered in the regalia (they looked like small huts). Humming a low rapid chant that sounded breathy and rhythmic, the three dancers were then joined by a woman. They bowed to the woman and chanted and, at some point in the chant, the woman began to wail. Her wail reached far out into the night and caused my heart to skip a beat. I thought of a woman birthing a child, bringing new life into the world. The wail came from so deep within that the woman coughed and choked and then began wailing again. This went on in rounds for over an hour until I felt suspended in some faraway place, contemplating the very universe coming to life. I walked away from this ceremony truly feeling renewed.

It may seem strange in this age of science and technology to consider returning to the ways of taking our learning from spirits, nature, or from the very earth. Our belief systems and our minds want to minimize the power of these natural and supernatural forces and rely instead only on science or medicine to give us our answers. The suggestion here is to take both-but to recognize again that nature (earth) is the mother of all science.

It’s as if we are making a full circle from the seventeenth century when scientists broke out of the straitjacket of religious dogma to forge their own way. Now, centuries later, we find ourselves wearing another straitjacket-the dogma of science. There is no suggestion in these words to reject all the wonders of science and return to the land, but only to expand our thinking out to include, once again, the larger forces at work.

Earth, with her natural cycles, patterns, and solutions, is a great teacher. Water, wind, fire, earth-leaves blowing, trees growing-all have the ability to touch our soul and make it strong again. We have also witnessed her fury when care is not taken with the natural resources-the air, water, soil. When we read the work of Galileo, Einstein, David Bohm and other great minds of science, we see that they also have learned their most important lessons at Earth’s knee.

A Hopi man we interviewed for the Oyate series told us a story. He and his grandfather were out tending a field of corn. He was about ten-years-old at the time, and he went to get a drink of water from a jug. His grandfather stopped him and said, “You’re children are thirstier than you are”.

The boy said, “But, Grandfather, I don’t have any children.”

His grandfather pointed to the young corn plants standing in the field and told him, “Those are your children. They do not have the legs to go to a drinking place to get their water. You do. So you, as a parent, must give them water first, and whatever is left out of that water, then you can drink. If there is none, then you can walk to a place where you can drink.”

In Hopi Country, that way of being is called the hardway. I was very impressed with this teaching. In mainstream society, we make life too easy for our children when we should be teaching them the hardway. We should be meeting their extreme energy with our own extreme energy in order to prepare them for all that life will hand them later. To do this, the parent must have great strength.

What I’ve come to understand, as this decade-long book project has unfolded, is that we can find the right way toward initiation and a culturally appropriate rite of passage if we return to our own common roots, that of the land, the spirits, and the ancestors. In our souls, we are all indigenous, tribal people. We don’t have to figure it out alone. The true goal and the ultimate prize of a rite of passage is to recognize the larger spiritual forces at work, and to understand that, ultimately, we are not alone.

As a people, we yearn to shift away from the purely mechanistic thinking of the age of science and find again our metaphysical and mysterious links with nature. This movement back toward the natural forces of the earth and the universe appears not just in the crystals and essential oils of the New Age but in books on education, ancient healing arts, and modern physics as well.

In the late eighties, I spent a year and a half living in Tucson, Arizona. I was actively seeking something, both for my soul and for my career. At that time, the “New Age” was considered the seventh largest industry in Tucson. I remember chuckling at that. Who but Americans could turn soul-seeking into an industry? And yet that bit of trivia also says something about what we desperately long for in this new age.

Even some big business books speak of care of the soul, such as Stewardship by Peter Block (1993), The Soul of a Business by Tom Chappel’s (1993), or Spiritual Enterprise by Marc Allen. The movement is toward holism-seeing the totality and interconnectedness of a system-and not just its small component parts operating in isolation.

Hunting the Whale in a Modern World

Our children face a very different world than that of our ancestors or even the world into which we were born. The changes are astounding. When I took college algebra, I couldn’t afford a calculator. Now I can buy a sophisticated calculator at any checkout counter for three dollars. Technology, the Internet, the sophisticated weaponry-all of this is new to this age. Our children have to deal with the changes these things are bringing. Added to this, we must recognize how technology has affected the climate, the food supply, and the earth itself. We have one challenge stacked upon another. Our young may not have to face a whale on the open sea, but there are other whales that they must be prepared to hunt. And they depend upon the parents and Elders for this guidance and preparation.

The chapters to follow examine several different models of human development that I’ve found to be the best tools available for assisting our young people (or ourselves) into becoming strong adults. I choose these models because they are consistent with the idea of standing and observing the nature of things and with whole system thinking. They also help us to become better and better at reading the book of human behavior and being. This examination begins with the large generational systems of family and then moves into smaller and smaller observations of patterns of human behavior. See them not as separate models, but as many threads on the loom that will help us to weave something beautiful for our children and our selves.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, coming of age, cultural change, global passageways, human development, jamie lee, Many Kites Press, rites of passage, spirituality, The Bead People | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 4

October 20, 2008

This is night four and here is Chapter 4. I love this chapter and feel like if we paid attention to this, we really could recreate a vibrant initiation and rite of passage ritual for our young. It would, however, ask a lot of us. We’d have to shut down some equipment, say no more often, and spend more time talking to our children. As I was proofing the chapter, I was thinking again of Dr. Rita Smilkstein’s book, We’re Born to Learn. Do check out this book at www.borntolearn.net And as usual, send me a note or sign up for my blog. To those of you preparing to head to Hawaii for the Global Passageways retreat-keep me in your thoughts.

Jamie

CHAPTER FOUR

The Five Common Elements of a Rite of Passage

Bear Butte sits alone on the prairie along the western edge of South Dakota. Something in the wind at Bear Butte simply makes you want to pray. On one of its upper slopes is the now-closed cave where the Cheyenne spiritual leader, Sweet Medicine, is said to have found the four arrows that were the foundation of Cheyenne law and tradition. There are endless stories of sudden storms arising following the sweats and ceremonies on Bear Butte. Pairs of eagles may suddenly land mere feet from visitors and hover above the ground for several seconds before sailing off. Bear Butte is considered a place of power, the cathedral of the Plains Indians. The trees are adorned with the tobacco ties and colored ribbons from those who have come to pray.

It is to this mountain that Rick, a Lakota medicine man, now brings the young men and women who are battling against drugs and alcohol. In traditional Lakota culture, “going up on the hill” is called a Vision Quest or Humblecha Ceremony¹. This ritual, as well as the Apache Sunrise Ceremony and many others, are performed to introduce the young person to the other worlds where spirit and vision replace parental guidance. The rite of passage may also include instruction on practical skills and values needed to survive in the modern world.

These beautiful ceremonies are culturally specific. We can’t snatch what has been practiced for thousands of years and plug them into our own culture as if it would have meaning and purpose for us. Besides, that would be stealing, and our native cultures have lost enough. However, we can study these remaining rituals to see what it is that works to initiate our youth.

The common age for performing a rite of passage ritual is fourteen to sixteen years of age. This, as we know, is a potent developmental period for young people. These rituals were performed for centuries long before psychology and science had any observations to make about human development. The Elders just knew this was the right time. For women, the time was determined by the onset of menstruation. For boys, the age was simply chosen by the Elders. Even in modern society it is at about age fourteen that the young person passes from middle school to high school.

When I first punched rites of passage into a browser on my computer, the Internet sent me 25,000 possible entries. I narrowed the search by entering ‘adolescent.’ It gave me 555 entries. I spent a great deal of time scanning these entries as well as other sources on traditional rites of passage ceremonies from many cultures. While they vary widely, I noticed that several common elements of initiation and rites of passage ceremonies emerged over and over again. The five most common include:

1. A period of initiation with preparation and instruction by the Elders,

2. A time of purification of the body and mind,

3. A time of separation from family and community,

4. The undergoing of a test or challenge given by the Elders,

5. And finally, the welcoming back of the young person into the family and community and a recognition of his or her changed status within that community.

In the following pages, we will examine each element separately with the intention of helping parent or adults to create stronger rite of passage rituals by incorporating the elements into existing rituals and initiatory moments.

Please note, however, that we must also be respectful in planning any ritual movements for our youth. Whatever our worn-out ideas might be about a tribal ceremony, we should be careful not to make the event humiliating. One young female client told me of a ritual her mother and another woman did for her when she began menstruating. Whatever good intentions her mother had, the girl found the ceremony humiliating and embarrassing. It is best when the ritual comes out of natural events after a long period of initiation-and not simply imposed on the young person in an unnatural, New Age way.

One summer Milt and I did a simple ceremony with a group of boys camping with their counselors. There were no fires or drums, no feathers or costumes. We simply had each boy make a ritual crossing over bare ground from the “sphere of the mother” to “the sphere of the father,” a crossing that Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist, suggests is the natural movement in adolescence. It was amazing how seriously those boys took that simple ceremony. Many of them had not seen their fathers for a long time, and some not at all, but their desire to make that crossing was powerful.

Don’t try to fake an Indian ceremony. Keep it simple and beautiful without too much fuss. Keep in mind what the intention is-to steer your child toward maturity.

For example, a very simple construction of a ritual that contains all the elements is to have your young adult make a trip alone across several states. This could be flying or driving but should be to go to something that he or she really wants to attend. Allow plenty of time for planning, and spend the time talking to him about how to get along alone. Tell him stories about your own initiatory moments and what they meant to your life. Have him earn all or most of the money himself, as well as make all the preparations. Don’t even let him go with a friend. This is the challenge. When he has completed the trip, take the time to celebrate and give him a place of changed status within the family. I use “he” here only to simplify. The same applies for girls as well.

Many parents worry about liability and the dangers of the big, bad world. We’ve become programmed to believe that the world is a stark and dangerous place. If you believe this-and it rules your choices-you are not yet initiated yourself. What could be more dangerous than to contemplate a half-life entirely free of challenge and risk?

Initiation

Initiation, the main topic of this book, is a multi-varied training conducted over the early and middle years of childhood. Initiation includes instruction, tools for problem solving, a stirring of confidence, and a push toward self-identification. We are preparing the child to take his or her place as an adult in our society.

In essence, initiatory moments are what fill the days and nights of our lives. Each day is ripe with opportunities to guide our children toward making choices, taking their strength, and even making mistakes. Sometimes it is difficult to recognize these moments as developmental turning points. We are too quick to do everything for them, make life easy, and take the conflict away so they can be more comfortable. When we do this, they cannot grow into adulthood. Initiation takes place from early childhood on. We must not wait for adolescence but raise the bar day after day, week after week so the child can stretch both physical and spiritual muscles.

Initiation takes place within the total sphere of the child, from parents to grandparents, and teachers to religious leaders. We are all responsible for that child.

I want to distinguish this long developmental period from the critical initiatory moments mentioned earlier. Our ability to take large steps only comes after we have taken many, many small ones.

When I was fresh out of high school, I went to college in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The summer after my first year I wanted to travel, so I arranged a trip to New Mexico to see a cousin through a ride service at the U of M. The trip went fine, but my ride only took me to Albuquerque and I needed to get to Farmington. I hitchhiked (a stupid thing to do) and managed to get safely to my cousin’s house but realized, later, that I’d done a dangerous thing. However, this trip prepared me and gave me the confidence to travel alone and spend six months in Europe two years later.

We are not parenting a child but initiating him. In one sense, the act of “parenting” was done in a few quick moments. We are also initiating and preparing ourselves to let go of that child. We have to take a lot of deep breaths and deal with our own fears in order to let them take chances.

Major initiatory moments are preceded by smaller initiatory tasks. For example, in many native cultures a special ceremony requires the young person to undergo special preparations such as performing prayers and rituals, collecting certain plants, sewing ceremonial regalia or items, preparation of the site for the ritual, or the completion of intellectual tests.

For those of us who do not belong to such cultures, we can still create specific initiation tasks prior to an important event such as a trip or graduation. Encourage the young person to consider the upcoming event in terms of how it will affect his or her life. What are his expectations, what does he hope to accomplish, how will he accomplish this, what resources does he need, what does he lack? Push them to go deeper than whether they have enough socks or traveler’s checks. Allow them to make the preparations, raise the money, and become ready for the trip.

Purification of Body and Mind

Most rite of passage ceremonies include a time of ritual purification and preparation for the ceremony. This may include many different processes from entering the Inipi or sweat lodge, to fasting and/or ritual cleansing in baths. The hair and body must be cleansed, special foods prepared, and often it includes adorning the body or wearing ritual garments and jewelry. All of these move-ments are intended to enlarge the significance of the event as well as to prepare the initiate, inside and out, to receive what the ritual may have to give.

Certain teachings may be offered as well as advice on what to expect and how to meet the challenge. Each small step takes the young person closer to his or her entry into the new role prescribed for them. Part of the purification may include music and chanting to clear the mind and body of residue and to create a harmony within.

How does this purification ritual fit into our modern world? Obviously, we all have habits of purchasing new clothes for special events or bathing and adorning our bodies. It is not a stretch to make the moment even more significant for our young person by caring about what is beneath their skin as well as what is on top of it. Ask questions-many, many, questions. How is he feeling about this upcoming event, what changes does she foresee, does he know what he hopes to obtain from this trip/ceremony/ritual?

When my two youngest were growing up, we were fortunate enough to spend several summers in an Ashram, a beautiful spiritual center in the Catskills Mountains of New York. It was a wonderful experience to see my children prepare for this time. Sure, they wanted to look nice, but they also sensed that we all had a greater goal in traveling so far and taking this time to deepen our life experience.

One night at the ashram, when my son was about eight, we had participated in a feast and celebration with a dancing circle. There were probably three to four thousand people at the ashram at the time and my children had made some friends. During the celebration, Thomas and another little boy went around and around the dancing circle. I was enjoying watching them dance when suddenly they both broke away and went running off. I caught up with them and asked where they were going. “We’re going to the temple to give thanks,” they yelled. They looked half-intoxicated from the dance.

Like other spiritual establishments there was a certain protocol about going “to the temple” and I was afraid my son and his friend would raise a ruckus, so I followed them. These boys were wildly high on life. They didn’t know I was watching them.

When they came to the door of the temple, they suddenly dropped all their wild energy, quieted their bodies and their minds, touched the floor in a gesture of respect, went into the temple and, in complete hushed silence, bowed deeply before the alter.

I was shocked at how quickly they had contained that wild energy. I stood outside watching in awe, touched and weeping for their tender souls and hungry spirits.

We needn’t fear introducing ritual and ceremony to our young people. They understand it. At the level of soul or spirit, they understand and desperately desire it.

Separation from Society

Another common element in a rite of passage ritual in traditional cultures is a time of separation. The Elders literally or symbolically separate the youth from the protective umbrella of family and familiar territory. This time alone acts as a preparation for moving into a new level of being. It is a time to leave the old structures behind and embrace new structures that will guide the individual into further maturity.

Separation is the beginning of the journey toward adulthood. In America, however, statistics indicate that the kids are staying home longer, living with Mom and Dad, or running out briefly only to return to the fold without winning the grail.

Perhaps one of the reasons our young are having trouble separating is that the moment, the passage, is unmarked and unguided in our society. A first break from family is often haphazard and unintentional; a school trip, a weekend get away, spring break, going off to college, or camping. All of these informal occasions allow the young person to leave home, but are often heavily influenced by peer initiation.

This critical period of separation is not just a chance to party. No, the solitude and separation required during this time has an entirely different quality to it. In this contained space and time, the young person is often given tasks to complete or specific thoughts to hold and con-template. All distraction is carefully removed to allow the process to unfold from within. Separation might include long periods of seclusion and isolation that can last as long as 24 weeks (the Okiek people of Kenya)² or a brief seclusion of hours or days.

Separating the child from his familiar (and comfortable) world seems to be an important beginning of the rite of passage ceremony or ritual. It is both symbolic and literal. It brings to the surface the fears and doubts buried within us. Can I make it alone? Am I strong enough? What will it take for me to survive? The separation period is both a breaking of old dependencies and the formation of a new state which includes both independence and a greater dependence on higher realms.

In some tribal societies, taking the child from the mother is an integral part of the ceremony for both mother and child. Mother must also separate from the child and deal with the fear, grief and loss that it brings. She undergoes her own rite of passage as she leaves one stage of life behind and enters another.

For youth, the separation may be isolation in a hut or lodge, time spent on a mountain or, as we have seen in many adult initiation stories, a trip or journey. We find this most essential theme in all literature, poetry and mythology throughout time. The Three Little Pigs must go off to seek their fortune, the prince must undertake a challenge to prove himself, or the youth must leave the home of his or her parents to go on a quest. This theme is universal across cultures. In order to discover what is next, we must leave what we know behind.

Although we mark this with ritual in a formal youth rite of passage, we actually undergo this many times throughout life. This adolescent rite is offered only as an early teaching on how to separate and go on.

As I have grown in my work with individuals and groups, I see so many who suffer from an incomplete separation from the parents. This separation is necessary to continue on the human path. We must leave the parents and grandparents behind us, taking only our learning and our connection to the earlier generations. When we stay too long, we become entangled in the past, unable to move toward the future.

In my last year of college, I decided to study in Europe for six months. When I got on the plane to leave, my mother and father followed me right out to the plane. I was terrified but putting a brave face on things. I felt as if I had an orange in my throat. It took everything I had not to rush out of the plane and back into Mom and Dad’s arms. How important and how necessary that movement was for me. It allowed me to stretch and grow, to find my own imprint in the world.

The Task or Challenge

Most rite of passage ceremonies include the undertaking of some task or challenge that forces the initiate to face fear and doubt of his or her abilities. In ancient tribal societies, this was generally more severe and dramatic for boys as I mentioned in an earlier chapter. Historically, it has been the job of men and boys to protect and shelter the women and small children. In tribal societies the Elders knew that the woman would undergo her own challenge in giving birth to a child.

The inner intricacies of many still-existing tribal rite of passage rituals are often not shared with outsiders. They are closely held secrets that only the Elders know. Milt and I found, as we traveled in Indian country, that native people carefully guard their rituals and ceremonies. Generally, non-tribal members are not even allowed to attend or participate.

However, we don’t need to intrude on other cultures in order to design or discover the right test or challenge for our youth. Throughout antiquity we find numerous stories of great tasks and challenges. Of course, many involve confronting dragons and Orcs and such, but our modern world has its own equivalent scary creatures. We must all find and fight that demon we fear most. For some it is talking to a neighbor about his noisy dog, for others it is the job interview, for still others it is going six months without a boyfriend or girlfriend.

The test or challenge is the thing we must go through in order to get to the other side. When we have done this, we are changed forever. Offering a true test or challenge is difficult in our fear-riddled society. We are immersed in news and advertising messages that teach us to fear one another, fear our own inner being, fear the food supply, and fear the very world that contains us.

Recently I was in a Wal-Mart rest room where a young woman had taken her two small children. She had her hands raised like a surgeon who has just scrubbed for an operation and was yelling at them with a panicked voice, “Don’t touch anything.” Her little ones were fearful-both of her and of the hidden enemies in the bathroom.

Fear has become a controlling factor in how we parent and challenge our children. It’s disgusting. We’re under a wicked spell, controlled by fear. This is, perhaps, the meanest dragon we must face-fear.

In the fall of 2002, Milt and I made a trip to northern Austria to interview Bert Hellinger, the grandfather of Family Constellation Work. I was stunned at the easy pace and relaxed atmosphere of the small town of Kufstein where we stayed. The shops closed for lunch, kids roamed the streets at all hours, and there was a general feeling of safety around us. I hadn’t realized how fear-driven we’ve become in America. Muggers, shooters, germs, bankruptcy, the IRS, job loss, smallpox, terrorists-we are bombarded with messages of fear. We’re afraid to touch one another, afraid to challenge our children appropriately, afraid for our lives it would seem. The first time I went to New York City, I was so under the spell of television that I expected muggers to be handing out business cards at every subway stop. Instead I saw only friendly people going here and there. Never once did I feel threatened.

Fear is not the answer. One of the goals of the test or challenge embedded into the rites of passage ritual is to overcome fear. Castenada (1968)³, in his classic journey book, The Teachings of Don Juan, is told by his teacher that fear is the first of four enemies that we must be overcome in order to become a person of knowledge. Don Juan tells Carlos that the “four enemies are fear, clarity, power, and old age.” When Carlos asks Don Juan how we can overcome fear, the old man answered:

The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop.

In my own experience, fear is often the stuff of illusion and not based on current reality. Fear comes from what we imagine will happen, not what is actually happening. To overcome fear, we must be based in reality.

Early in my training in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), I made plans to study out in Santa Cruz for five days with two competent practitioners. My plan was to travel to California, rent a car in San Francisco, and drive south to Santa Cruz. While having a cup of coffee with my neighbor lady, I told her about my trip. She was completely baffled, even horrified, that I would make this huge journey all alone. “Aren’t you terrified?” she asked me. I wasn’t-but clearly she was.

Parents and adults need to confront the reality of their own fears. Robert Fritz (1989)⁴ wrote about how “fear of imagined negative consequences” can rule our lives.

Much of my work with clients these days is more coaching than counseling, and I’m struck by how many people feel that making a real life change in career or relationship will destroy the world as they know it. Within ten seconds of contemplating the change they imagine themselves homeless, broke, living under a bridge-and all alone. This unreasonable fear, I believe, is caused by our own lack of initiation. Perhaps we should occasionally destroy life as we know it.

Challenge yourself. What is that thing you fear? What is the reality of that fear? How will you be able to challenge your children if you are unwilling to challenge yourself? If we take our fears and inspect them closely, they generally disappear, melting into the bath of non-reality.

A Public Welcome and Acknowledgement of the Changed Status of the Youth

The final element of the formal rite of passage ceremony is when the youth returns to the community with public acknowledgement of his or her changed status. This, for many tribal communities, is a time of feasting, dancing and celebration. With this change comes recognition, acknowledgement, and a shift both in position within the community and expectation. The child is now an adult-expected to take his or her place as such.

How our modern youth must long for that! The high school graduation ceremony is perhaps the strongest link we have to this element of the ritual rite of passage. Our children are polished and cleaned, adorned in colorful robes, gathered together before the entire community and honored as they take their hard-earned diploma. There is a moment in the ceremony where the entire class switches the tassel from one side of the cap to the other as a visible signal that this change is now complete. After the public ceremony, there is often feasting and parties in the homes of the graduates where the adult child again is celebrated by family and friends.

There is no intention here to disparage this very important moment in the adolescent’s life. They’ve worked long and hard to obtain that diploma and paid a price for it. However, it is possible to boost this important movement by paying careful attention to the above elements and perhaps add (in the senior year?) a more significant challenge that would test them not only on the level of intellect but on the level of personal integrity, spirit, and soul as well. We could simply call it “The Senior Challenge” and make it as holistic and all encompassing as possible with special status recognition for those who choose to undergo it.

What is the ‘Whale’ in modern culture?

Always, I come back to the loaded question of what a modern day rite of passage ritual would look like, After the many years of working on this book, I have come to despise that question.

What would a modern day ritual look like if it contained all the above-mentioned elements? In how many ways can we steer this sinking boat of culture toward one of our own design? It’s here that we lean our heads toward one another and ask the following questions:

What is the modern day equivalent of hunting the whale?
What would make a rite of passage relevant and meaningful to young people?
What is the right age for a rite of passage in our modern culture?
Should there be a process that begins earlier as well?
Is the rite of passage ritual different for girls and boys or the same?
Should the final rite of passage ritual be individualized or done as a group?
What characteristics, values, and challenges do our young people most need in today’s world?
How can we create actions that satisfy the need for initiation and rite of passage, and cause positive ripple effects into the future?
How can we sweep our current culture of the broken shards of dead ritual-and strengthen the remnant rituals?

Unfortunately, I have no easy answers to these questions and invite you to join me in attempting to redefine our culture. This is no easy task. There is no quick pill to swallow, no page to turn, no buck to pass-not any more. Our children are dying or entering adulthood unprepared to deal with its challenges.

Several years ago I went back to my hometown to work with a group of community members interested in revitalizing the downtown. It was a strange experience, walking those streets the afternoon before I was scheduled to speak. Cass Lake, Minnesota, is a small town on the Leech Lake Reservation. It’s a beautiful bit of earth with lakes, rivers and forests, but the town suffers economically and socially. The school I had attended is gone. The stores I wandered in as a child are burned, boarded, or demolished. Grass grows wild in the places that still mean something to the child in me. It was profoundly sad-and yet somehow liberating at the same time.

When I rose to speak to the community that night, I felt very lighthearted. I looked out across those people who were my friends, teachers, and family and told them, quite frankly, there is nothing here to rebuild. What we have is a blank canvas. This community is free to become anything it wants to be. We are free-free from whatever it once was, free to be creative, inquisitive and energetic.

I feel the same about our American culture. We keep trying to fix old failing systems and boost weak structures when we could be focusing our energy and vision on what we want it to be now-in this time and place.

Cultures are constantly razed-and constantly rebuilding themselves. The sooner we turn from the razing-the sooner we can rebuild. The past one hundred years have so dramatically altered the slate of our communities that we can, essentially, pretend the slate is blank and begin anew. It’s time to create a new culture based on this new world. We can begin by asking what do we want rather than what is wrong?

How creative can we be with educational systems, economic systems, rituals and rites? It will take a lot of work between us. It will take a lot of energy and ideas. We will have to stop simply measuring the problems with endless task forces and committees. Measuring the problem does not solve the problem. Instead we should analyze our existing rituals, whether they are church, school or family-related and strengthen what is already being done.

As this book has evolved, I’ve discovered that many great minds are at work on this issue. It will take many great minds to begin to shift the culture away from one that dismisses the needs of its young to one that encompasses and enfolds them.

I’ve chosen to focus my own work on strengthening the core of the family with constellation work, which is described in a later chapter, and my writing and teaching. Others are working at the legislative level, in politics, in business, and in schools.

Perhaps critical to this discussion is the way in which we approach education. When I entered a graduate program at St. Mary’s University program in Human Development, I had the richest educational experience of my life. I was allowed to choose my courses and, essentially, to track the course of my own learning.

Learning does not happen in slotted chunks but should flow naturally. In this modern world, the entrepreneurial mind-the mind that can see patterns and connection-is the mind that will take us to a new level.

Initiation, the test or challenge, purification, the ritual moment, and the celebration of a changed status-all are part of the whole treatment of the child. As a culture, we have a giant whale to hunt. We must kill off old systems and create new ones. I welcome hearing about any and all means that communities are currently doing to create this new world. The following chapters outline a few of the worst and a few of the best approaches I have found.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, culture and community, initiation, jamie lee, Many Kites Press, rites of passage, The Education Crises, Washaka--The Bear Dreamer | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 3

October 19, 2008

So far I am keeping my promise to post a chapter of this book every day. It is always an interesting challenge to re-visit an early work. My urge is always to begin revising, simplifying, adding or taking away. I’m not sure there is a writer in the world who does not do the same thing. In this work I can tell that I did a revision while working on my Master’s degree. The language is headier and more convoluted than I would use if I were writing it now. Hopefully, it does not hide the message too much. I just don’t have the time I need to do a total rewrite and even if I did, I would probably turn that energy toward some new work.

Chapter Three

Pseudo and Remnant Rites of Passage

What happens to our youth when the need for initiation and a rite of passage is not met, and they are left to fend for themselves?

Paradoxically, two opposing forces are at work here-the need to belong and the need to separate. The young teen simultaneously wants the comfort and protection of childhood, and he or she also wants the risk and challenge of adulthood.

Parents, too, are caught in the same push/pull. They want the child to move forward-and they want the child safely home and in bed.

This tension between two equally powerful forces, belonging and separating, plays its music in so many different ways from the total development of a new tribal subculture (gangs) to the almost innocent (but still deadly) challenges of who can drink the most Southern Comfort. This broad range of responses is our best indicator of the powerful force behind the need for initiation.

Additionally, young people are vulnerable to advertisers, vulnerable to one another and the pressures of their peers, and vulnerable to the turmoil of their own attempts to do soul-building. No one is exempt from this time-not the pretty girl who gets perfect grades, conforming beautifully to what Mom and Dad want and not the young male with spikes in his hair and an earring through his eyebrow.

What is most amazing is how well they manage alone. Having been mostly denied the company of adults and Elders, as Furstenberg (2000) described, they manage to create a structure that does the job, more or less. In fact, the subculture of adolescence contains all the important structural elements and subsets of the mainstream culture. Unfortunately, self-guided initiation can sometimes have painful and tragic consequences.

The following pages explore the many ways that we, both young and old, have attempted to hang onto some form of rite of passage rituals and to guide our youth into adulthood. I call these the pseudo and remnant rites of passage.

Peer Initiation-The Pseudo Rite of Passage

In this uneasy age, young people are initiating one another and creating rituals of their own design. Risk and challenge are still evident-but the venue has changed. They challenge one another with such tasks as who can drink the most, who dares to drive the fastest, who will lose their virginity first, who dares to do drugs, pick up a gun, or take on another in a violent fist fight. In the absence of an Elder-based initiation and rite of passage, the young people have made up their own.

Peer initiation is a pseudo or false rite of passage. In peer initiation the young person is both separating from the parent culture and finding a new belonging in his or her peer culture.

The pseudo rite of passage contains most of the same elements (which we will examine more fully in a later chapter) as a traditionally constructed rite of passage. There is a separation from the mainstream community. There is the opportunity to undergo a test or challenge, and there is often a hierarchy of leadership from eldest to youngest (or coolest to not-so-cool). Finally, the peer community supports its new members in achieving new heights, however misguided those may be.

The primary element missing entirely is Elder guidance. In the pseudo rite of passage guidance comes from within the peer group itself, as does the celebration of the status of the new member.

Essentially, well-formed peer groups become a tribe. This new tribe with its peer initiation allows the young person to define personal identity and form community. We find these new tribes taking the shape of gangs, cliques, clubs and other socially-organized groups.

For instance, an entire culture can grow around the computer hackers and gamers-or around the chess club. These cultural groups can be either loosely organized or very sophisticated and complex. The behaviors that arise from such groups, as we have seen in both large cities and small towns, are dictated by the group and can be either very innocent or take bizarre and violent forms. A group may have its own code which includes language, dress, and behavior as well as initiation and ritual practices. The codes and rules of belonging vary greatly within the strata of adolescent life and will form around common characteristics within the membership. The tribe creates the accepted codes.

Unfortunately, young people are often willing to pay a heavy price to belong. The group may challenge the new member to undertake a task or feat in order to gain membership. This can be anything from becoming sexually active, to shooting drugs, to killing another child. What, we must ask, are they seeking that they are willing to pay such a heavy fee for their membership?

It’s important to note here that there is a universal tendency in all human beings to seek to belong to a group. We are social creatures, after all. This behavior is not pathological in and of itself. From preschool age on into old age, we take membership in many, many groups, often simultaneously. However, it’s when we must compromise our humanness in order to belong that the question of belongingness takes on larger proportions.

Most cliques and peer substructures are fairly harmless. The rules for belonging revolve around wearing the right clothes or hairstyle and speaking the right passwords of that particular group. However, even these benign subcultures often require the youth to give up a significant percentage of their own personality and development in order to belong.

Statistics indicate upward trends in gang membership, adolescent crime, drug and alcohol use and adolescent suicide. This is an indicator that these pseudo rites of passage simply don’t work. When young people initiate each other, there is no substance, no deeper morality, and no inward push toward building character or soul. In some instances peer initiation can lead to death, as we have seen in stories of college hazings, street gang activity, etc.

Youth cannot initiate youth. They haven’t gained the skills, depth, or experience necessary to do the job. True initiation must come from a higher level of development than that which the initiate has obtained. True initiation must come from the Elders and adults within the culture.

This is no light topic of discussion but one that requires further research and questioning. With even a cursory glance, we can see that this willingness to sacrifice self to pay a price for belonging continues often far into adulthood. When adolescence extends itself into the adult years, we find fertile ground for individuals like Jim Jones who took 900 of his followers into a group suicide, or David Koresh who stood off the FBI in Waco, Texas to sow his destructive seeds. As these two extreme cults indicate, our vulnerability does not end with the biological stage of adolescence.

I remember an intense period of disillusionment in my own early adulthood. I realized that I had done all the right things, yet I was deeply dissatisfied. I’d gotten my college degree, married a nice man, had three babies, and taken my place as a woman in my culture. Why, then, did my soul still ache with intense longings and dreams? This dissatisfaction extended well into my thirties because my initiation was incomplete.

When my first daughter made me a grandmother, I found myself entering yet another life stage and period of initiation. For human beings this ongoing development travels all through life and ends only with death.

Remnant Rituals

Families have attempted to keep old rite of passage rituals in place. We send our children to church school catechism, have them take their ritual places in churches, or see them off to each new level of schooling. Somewhere between ages fourteen and sixteen we tentatively turn over the car keys and, later, we stand aside as they wear a colored robe and receive that longed-for high school or college diploma. If they make it that far, we consider ourselves lucky and successful parents.

Remnant rite of passage rituals include acknowledging the girl’s first menstrual period, the first boy/girl party, the first prom, the first job, the boy’s (or girl’s) first deer-a whole list of firsts marked too often with small sighs of relief rather than with celebration. Included in these remnant rituals are also the child’s first extended band trip and the stronger religious rituals such as the Confirmation, the Bar or Bah Mitzvah, and others. Many of these rituals are still very much intact, and I honor their place in our lives. However, they generally mark only one small part of the child’s passage into adulthood. This important period of development is spiritual, physical, emotion, and psychological.

In the home many of our initiation challenges are weak and sometimes offer mixed messages. Ours is a culture of contradictions; we push the little ones to read and write faster and sooner, and then pull them back from any true challenge. We give and give and give until our kids are fat and lazy-and then berate them for not achieving more.

This picture of current parenting is not a pretty one. We hand out chores and post to-do lists on the refrigerator so the kids will see them (hopefully) as they go for a snack. We enact arbitrary laws and regulations more as a way to control than to instruct. We study the popular books or we turn over the task of initiation to an educational system that has lost touch with what is relevant and only causes boredom and unrest. All in all, we rob them of the fierce experience of hunting and conquering their whale one moment-and push them off a ledge the next.

When our children reach adolescence and this fierce need for initiation arises, we begin to think our job of parents has become that of a police force constantly monitoring the movement of our young people to insure they do no damage to themselves or others.

If we were to re-examine the remnant rituals, we may discover they contain the potential to gain strength and force as true initiation and rite of passage rituals. Because they happen within the family, community, or church, we could make them grow in intensity and strength to match the intensity and strength of adolescence itself.

When my first daughter was about twelve, she wanted to go to on a trip to Hawaii with her aunt. There was plenty of lead time, so I made a deal with her. If she could earn half the plane ticket, I’d give her the other half. It was amazing to watch how resourcefully a twelve-year-old girl could raise money. She babysat, did office chores, and worked for her aunt. Her focus was astounding. When it came time to get on the plane, she was there, ticket in hand. Interestingly, the trip itself was less rewarding for her than the enjoyment she got from taking the challenge necessary to obtain the trip.

As parents, we need to be constantly scanning the current moment for opportunities to appropriately challenge our children. These remnant rituals of getting a driver’s license or taking a band trip could be made stronger and more powerful by raising the stakes, by making them reach a little higher for what they want. If you are going to hand out the dollars, or the keys, or the trip to Germany, what are they going to do to earn it? We need to quit being soft as parents and make our children work for what they want. Somehow having the goods has become a replacement for having the guidance.

Replacement Rituals

In addition to these many pseudo and remnant rites of passage, there are a number of honest attempts to reinstate a way of initiating and testing our young people. I found many such approaches on the Internet and in publications such as organizations that take young people on a challenging trek up the Gunflint Trail in Canada or Outward Bound and other camp programs that put the young person through a strenuous course to build strength and confidence. Most of these programs engage the natural world in a powerful exchange-as they should.

These organized rites of passage programs often contain many of the right elements: a learning period (initiation), separation from the parents and family, an extreme test or challenge and a welcoming back. Perhaps the one drawback is that they are not sustained over a period of time but are usually handed out in short bursts by teachers and coaches outside of the child’s own Elder culture.

There are also many modern challenge rituals such as fire walking, bungee jumping, skydiving, river rafting or rock climbing that test at least one area of a young person’s endurance and skill. We also see many adults whose initiation is incomplete undertaking such challenges and benefiting greatly from them. It’s amusing to see how popular some of these crazy television programs are like Survivor and Fear Factor. What we see is additional signs that our adult population is, as yet, uninitiated.

One weakness of these challenge programs is that they don’t necessarily strengthen the link between the child and his family, Elders, community, and personal history. As we’ll explore more fully in a later chapter, successful separation emerges from the strong bonds with these key relationships.

Additionally, these created rituals tend to test only one aspect of life and for a limited moment in time. Initiation is not just a physical test or challenge but must unfold concurrently in our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual worlds. In order for initiation and the rite of passage to be truly effective, it must come from the family and community of the young person and touch on all of these important areas.

Organized sports and other activities within school and the community may also pick up the loose threads of initiation and provide a form of a structured rite of passage. Activities such as band, choir, theater, sports, debate, etc. often have adult leadership along with the intention to build skill, intelligence, and confidence in one or more areas of a young person’s life. These groups are most successful when there is one strong adult individual who takes the time, energy, and effort to treat the whole child and his or her needs. These groups provide a peer group and membership but with adult guidance. They also can provide a program of personal mastery combined with the long-term challenge of winning a competition, making enough money to take a trip to Europe, or moving to a new status within the group as in sports or band. These activities are also recognized in a positive way by the family and community.

However, nearly all of the above replacement rituals generally grow not out of the family but out of other people and places. Once again, there may be ways to strengthen these replacement rituals to encompass more of the young person and his family thus providing a stronger movement toward adulthood.

Initiation as an Act of God or Fate

Sometimes nature or fate itself takes over the initiation of our young. The early death of a parent or sibling, a car accident, a serious illness or other acts of God can significantly impact the developing youth. Such events force the young person to consider all that he or she is and to seek answers to difficult questions. We should be very attentive to the needs of such a youth. They, through no personal choice, must confront the beasts of fear, sadness or anger. The traumatic event itself becomes the test or challenge which forces their initiation and the movement toward adulthood. In a paper on higher levels of development, Shuppin and Silverman¹ wrote:

Many of those who do make the transition to a higher form of existence do not consciously choose this path. Rather, they are ‘thrown into their destinies’ by circumstances which seem beyond their control.

This simple ten-page paper by Shuppin and Silverman was instrumental in my own development. It suggested that a personal crisis is often followed by a powerful burst in spiritual development, a process termed “positive disintegration” by Kasmirez Dabrowski²whose work we will explore in a later chapter.

A divorce between two parents, while not an act of God, can also be a time of crisis and trauma in the life of a child. Divorce is like a little death of what is familiar and comfortable and is usually intensified by the strong emotional content that often attends divorce. Parents are estranged, sometimes angry, and each one is certain that he or she is right about the reason for the divorce. Children can be pulled into the struggle through no fault of their own and become players in the couple’s game.

Please, if you must divorce your spouse, leave your children out of it. Allow the child to love both parents freely and equally. When we force a child to choose, we split his or her soul with our own personal angers and failures.

Self-Determined Initiation

Occasionally a resourceful young person will identify a weakness in his or her private sphere of life and set about a course of self-determination to alleviate or resolve the issue. This happens more frequently than most adults realize. The youth operates from an inner resource that he or she may not recognize until later in life, those critical turning points we all have.

Life richly presents opportunities for initiation and advancement at every stage of life. Such life-changing moments can come from a single sentence, a dream, a book or an action he or she has witnessed. It also comes from having enough maturity and development (no matter our age) to recognize an initiatory moment and act.

I also suspect the self-determining young person finds more support and knowledge from adults than he or she may recognize at the time.

For example, as I mentioned earlier, when I was in seventh grade I was so shy I couldn’t answer questions in class. I was tired of being stuck in this shyness and determined to get over it. I auditioned for a part in an all-school play, The Robe. After barely surviving the audition, I was shocked to find myself cast in the role of a slave girl who in one scene was supposed to strut out onto stage alone and do the dance of the seven veils. It was impossible. There was no way I could go onto the stage and shed scarves while wiggling my bottom for the audience. The director saw my dilemma and quietly recast me as a silent slave girl feeding grapes to a soldier in Galilee instead. Having a part in that play completely changed the course of my life, and I had a little help from an astute drama director.

Along any difficult path we take, there are helpers. This is true for our youth and true for all of us. We take the help we need at the time we need it.

Completing Initiation as an Adult

In the many years of writing this book, I’ve spoken to dozens of adults and asked them how they initiated themselves or what was a rite of passage in their lives. It usually takes only a moment for people to connect with their own initiation stories. An interesting phenomenon happens when they do-they come alive.

Telling a personal rite of passage story reconnects us with the powerful initiatory moment, those moments when we felt both apart from everything that has previously supported us-and wide-awake and open to what is coming. We can recall the smallest details-what the earth smelled like, what time of year it was, who was around us. Initiation stories sometimes take on mythic proportions in our memories.

What was that moment or moments for you? What was that time when you suddenly realized you were no longer a child, no longer dependent upon the opinion or actions of others for your wellbeing? When was that time when you were caught by circumstances and needed, suddenly, to find your own way out?

Adult initiation stories often revolve around taking a trip and being forced through circumstances to resolve issues of food, sleep, money, and travel (the basics of life) in some challenging or imaginative way. We can easily gather these stories ourselves by looking at our own lives or asking friends and acquaintances for their rite of passage stories.

A common element in initiation stories is the moment of extreme aloneness when, disconnected from all that is familiar, we feel connected to something larger than our own small self. This enlarged sense of the world is the true prize of initiation and one we will explore more thoroughly in this book.

Also common is the initiatory moment that comes from an important encounter with an older adult. At a time of trouble or disconnection, we meet that important coach, teacher or neighbor who takes an interest and guides us in another direction. When I was in tenth grade, my world history teacher, an eccentric and intelligent man, made it his mission in life to push me out of my complacent way of being and into a different realm. His strong views, when mixed with my watery personality, created something new in me. Without him I might have sunk more deeply into the dark pool of my youth.

Who is that person (or people) who came along at just the right moment and threw something new into the mix of your life? If you think back, it was probably not their gentleness that moved you forward-but their push. He or she didn’t let you rest but threw you beyond your present capabilities.

Try to do the same for a young person. Look around and see whose path you have crossed, and then be willing to step in and take an active role.

Initiation via The Mentor

A mentor is an older individual who becomes involved with the initiation of a young person. Although similar to the close encounter in the previous section, this person plays an ongoing role. The mentor may be a family member but is often someone outside of the family. This initiation story is so common that it’s a popular theme of movies and stories throughout our culture. Think of the movies Good Will Hunting or Dead Poet’s Society. Often when we hear of people who have attained a high level in life, whether in sports, business, or other areas, we soon discover the shadowy influence of a powerful mentor behind them.

The mentor recognizes the sparking life force of a young person and somehow brings that spark into substantial flame. They push, shove, hold, or support depending upon what is needed. Often the mentor recognizes himself in the youth and through some mysterious hidden process, completes his own initiation by helping the young one.

We should be alert to mentoring opportunities within the sphere of our own lives. This does not have to come from a federally-funded program or be a formal relationship in order to change a child’s life. Often it is simply offering the right stuff at the right time. We should watch for these opportunities.

Initiation Via The Military

Finally, the military can be a burnishing force that brings a shine to the young person. It has long been a practice for parents to encourage the child, particularly male children, to enter the service for this specific reason-to finish them. However, the Vietnam War (and now the Iraq war) have forced many of us in the current generation rethink this method of finishing our children-sometimes the finishing is permanent.

Dr. Larry LeShan³ in his book, The Psychology of War, reminds us that the original purpose of government in ancient times was to make war. LeShan (1992) wrote:

Governments are built on an original design whose major function was to make war, not to maintain or make peace. As an obvious holdover from this past, every government today has officials in charge of ‘war’ or ‘defense’ at its highest level. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is there an official at similar levels in charge of ‘peace’.

In this fascinating book, LeShan says that we engage in war because it satisfies something essentially human in us that has to do with both being separate and belonging to a larger group or cause. Like the initiation stories mentioned earlier, war brings a sharp focus to all the blurred edges of life and makes the soldier come alive in a way that he (or she) may never have been before. In simplest terms, LeShan says we go to war because “we like it.” We like being fully engaged in the larger movements of the world. The military, likewise, serves all the functions of a rite of passage; there is separation, initiation, intense training, travel, a difficult challenge and the hero’s welcome (usually) upon return.

A critical question could be asked here. Is it possible that our government could polish our youth with peace as well as war? What if young adults were required to serve their country but were allowed to choose the track most appropriate for them-allowed to serve the global family in some way? The Peace Corps was an attempt at this, and the model could be strengthened as an alternative option to serving with guns.

As we’ve explored, our modern culture still contains many elements of initiation and a rite of passage. We are not so very far away from being able to provide what our youth need so desperately.

All of the pseudo and remnant rituals presented in this chapter work in odd, interwoven ways to somehow bring maturity and further development to the young. Many of us can recognize our own patchwork passages. These initiatory moments create a coat of many colors that we wear the rest of our lives. We value those significant moments that led us in a new directions or took us to our current place in life. Imagine if such remnant rituals were strengthened and brought into sharper focus with conscious intention. The question is can we boost these remaining rituals in order to assist our young in making the leap to adulthood?

For help in considering this question, the next chapter explores the most common elements of formal rites of passage rituals used by indigenous cultures across the globe. By keeping these elements in mind we can examine the remnant rituals to see if they could be made stronger and more relevant to today’s young people.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, gangs, global passageways, parenting, rites of passage, suicide, teens | Comments (0)

Re-Visioning Adolescence Chapter 2

October 18, 2008

Here is the second chapter of Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage. I’ll continue to post chapters until I’ve given you the whole book. Again, I welcome your comments and ideas. For those of you who prefer fiction, many readers have told me that my novel, Washaka-The Bear Dreamer is the fictionalized version of this book. You can order it at www.manykites.com

CHAPTER TWO
Challenge-The Heart of Initiation

Malidoma Some’ (1993)¹, a medicine man of the Dagara tribe in West Africa, was taken from his village at a young age and raised by missionaries. Later, in returning to his own people, Some’ discovered that his place in the village was lost to him. In spite of his advanced age, and with great determination, he underwent the arduous six-week initiation and rite of passage ritual of his tribe. When he completed it, he felt as if he was home again at last. Some’ (1994) said of our culturally disconnected country:

I don’t know yet what the content of American initiation will be, but I do know what it’s going to look like. It has to have a moment of separation from the family and the community. It has to happen in nature and be a genuinely challenging ordeal. Whatever the initiates feel before entering this cycle must be deepened to the point of transcendence, giving them the opportunity to feel whole. Finally, and most importantly, there has to be a strong community ready to welcome the survivors of the ordeal. This welcoming must be massive, not like a simple ceremony of giving a diploma, but a recognizable, wholehearted embrace and valuing of the initiate’s power to contribute to the community.

In just a few sentences, Some’ summarizes what we all need and want, no matter our age. However, it’s a real Catch 22. We can’t successfully borrow the traditions of other cultures, but many of us can’t recall our own traditions either. Are we then doomed to go through eternity performing empty rituals around meaningless Hallmark holidays or marking our progress in small, ineffective ways while we continue searching for what we long for but cannot find?

There is a hunger in us. We need connection. We need ritual, guidance, mysticism . . . we need initiation. The more alienated and alone we feel, the more we seek a culture that can guide us. Our young, as we will explore further, feel bereft of this support. In the absence of it, they cleverly create their own subculture and design what is missing.

I recall the significant moments in my own life when an important passage was obtained. In seventh grade I bravely auditioned for a school play in order to overcome a severe shyness. With sweating palms and a pounding heart, I took that script in hand and recited the lines. In my early twenties I spent six months in Europe. At one moment I stood alone before a train schedule in Switzerland deciding whether to take a train to Rome or Paris. What a giant moment that was! There were also times of suffering, of being uneasy and depressed, entangled in the darker underbelly of my youth culture. In the late Sixties, my friends and I sat under full moons with kegs of beer and a campfire on a beach. We sat in dark rooms reading Lao Tzu with joints of marijuana burning. As I look back at the settings we chose, the things we did, it is now clear to me that we sought a tribal presence in our lives.

One day, long after I had moved out of that treacherous era, I was substitute teaching in a high school classroom when a young man walked in with his hair in stiff, rigid spikes rising from his scalp like a helmet. I smiled inwardly. He looked both like a magnificent warrior-and a ridiculous boy-but I admired him. Oh, how I wanted to sit beside him and explain why we now-grown kids of the Sixties are so difficult to shock-our generation wrote the book on self-initiation.

On one of our collection trips we visited Atka, an island along the Aleutian chain in Alaska. The island is home to about 100 people of the Unangax³ (aka Aleut) tribe. Milt and I stayed in a small guest trailer next to the school. The wind was so fierce at times that I thought that poor trailer would tumble over. The Unangax² people have blended the Russian Orthodox Church with their own native traditions. We noticed many of the people, young and old, wore a small gold stud pierced beneath the lower lip. Ethan, our host, explained that there is a ritual piercing that happens in puberty to signal the beginning of adulthood.

I thought of all the young people piercing and tattooing body parts in our modern culture and saw again the driving urge we have to find a tribal sense of ourselves. Both piercing and tattooing have, for thousands of years, been part of initiation rituals in many tribal cultures across the planet. The Lakotas pierce the skin as part of the Sundance ritual; the Samoan traditional men undergo extensive tattooing over the entire lower part of the body.

Like so many other things, this trend toward tattooing and piercing seems to be a visible signal from the young people expressing their need to undergo some tribal ritual of belonging, a test or challenge that may even include pain in order to win their place. When that place is given too easily, without effort and challenge, it is not easily taken. At the risk of sounding trite, many of today’s youth are too soft, drowning in a false sense of entitlement resulting from the prize being given-but not earned. Adults often scorn these alternative practices among the young, yet offer no viable alternatives.

What is this web of culture we’ve created? Does it satisfy? Does it feed not only the body but also the soul and spirit? Are you, sitting here reading this book, finding your life to be all that you had hoped it would be? The truth is, many of us are none too sure of this culture we have created or inherited. We scurry to and from jobs and activities that don’t challenge and don’t change, a dull landscape of days passing by. We make money so that we can buy stuff, and then run ourselves ragged taking care of the stuff. We seem to just go along without seriously questioning this creature of culture that we have created. We long for our own deeper initiation into something big and mysterious. We are, in fact, the uninitiated.

Is it any wonder that the young look in our direction with doubt and mistrust in their eyes? Sometimes I simply drive around looking at the monolithic houses we’ve built and wonder what portion of body and soul (not to mention the earth’s resources) does it take to simply keep those houses standing?

When was the last time you were assaulted with a challenge so great that you were completely uncertain if you could make the grade? Did you take the challenge-or slither back to safety? How, then, can we uninitiated adults determine what a young person needs to learn? And then how do we teach and initiate them?

Asking these questions caused me to look more deeply into my own life. It wasn’t pretty. I had a dozen books on my computer that had not even been submitted because “what if nobody liked them”? I was afraid to make phone calls that could get me work and support my life. I had an obsession about being a nice girl. Mustn’t make anybody angry or upset. I passively waited for things to come to me instead of deciding what I wanted and working toward it. I selfishly didn’t want to do what I didn’t like to do.

Rather than wallow in my uninitiated swamp, I undertook several challenges myself. I began to speak more bravely, made a few people angry, finished my master’s degree, sent the books out and about, etc., etc. I haven’t died yet from taking risks-and life advances. Perhaps the hardest part of my initiation was to stand beside my young children after their father died and allow them to grieve knowing I couldn’t fix it or change it. All I could do was be there to watch them bear the unbearable.

Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

Initiation of the young and the final rite of passage, the event that marks the movement from childhood to adulthood, is the stuff of stories and myths found across the globe and in all forms of literature, religion, and culture. Consider Jack confronting the giant at the beanstalk, David slaying Goliath, the three little pigs off to seek their fortunes, or Hansel and Gretel facing the wicked witch who would have them for supper. Consider Odysseus standing on the shore of a massive lake undergoing one trial after another. Every culture is rich with hero legends and the mythologies intended to guide our lives.

This mysterious passage is not only through time or space but is an interior journey toward a stronger sense of self, a deepening of our human experience of soul. It is the young boy facing the whale on a gray sea or the giant buffalo on a sea of pale grasses with nothing but a tiny weapon. It is the young girl moving into the mysterious arts of her sex in preparation for the great moment when she will give birth to the next generation. The themes play over and over again across the globe. A child enters a dense, dark forest-and emerges an adult. The movement has an inevitable timelessness to it.

Initiation is not just for teens. Any time we enter a new stage of life or go through a transition, we again enter a period of initiation. We must all undergo these passages. Essentially, we are climbing the ladder of the soul.

Challenge-the Heart of Initiation
As we have explored, challenge and risk-taking are the twin moons of this passage from childhood to adulthood. It is the times when we are suddenly forced to reach deeply into our reserves of memory, knowledge, and experience. With appropriate challenges, the triune brain begins to branch, grow and explode into the frontal lobes to bring about a higher level of experience. If there is no risk and no challenge, there will be no growth.

However, growth requires incremental challenges, small steps that move ahead but do not overwhelm. When the risk is too great, we freeze. Children, especially, need strong families and a wise culture around them to guide these steps. They need to feel firmly connected first to the family and then to the culture in which they live. This web of connection provides the safety net that later allows them to walk the tightrope high above their heads. As the child grows, the level of challenge and risk can also grow and, in adolescence, there is a leap forward.

Who better to provide the safety, challenges and the basic necessary skills than an adult or Elder who has gone the route? Throughout human history, the initiation of the young has been the responsibility of the Elders and parents.

In ancient tribal traditions, initiation and the rite of passage for the male and female children was guided by life itself. Guidance varied according to the role each was expected to play within that culture-and the roles were determined by the needs of the community.

For instance, in a culture dependant upon the land for sustenance, the use of tools and weapons and methods for successful hunting and fishing took precedence. Survival wrote the subtle laws that evolved over many, many generations, and these natural laws were then passed on to the next generation through the initiation process. However, in spite of many cultural variations, the biological laws took precedence.

Boys were taught to provide food and safety, and the girls were prepared by their Elders to have children, although all members of the community gathered food. Often the boys were challenged with harsh and stringent initiation practices. The girls generally underwent a more subtle initiation. It was not because the girls were the “weaker sex” but because the Elders knew that the young women would undergo their own trial by fire in the birthing bed. In childbirth, a woman faces death. The boys, however, needed harsher measures in order to prepare them to protect those women and children. Without this basic division of labor and expectation, there would be no clan or tribe or next generation.

I use the past tense here with some tense confusion and want to remind the reader, and myself, that there are still many existing traditional cultures that continue the rituals much as they have for thousands of years. However, there are also many tribal communities struggling to redefine themselves in the modern world with almost total cultural loss. They stand with one foot in an ancient tribal way of being, and another in the realities of this modern world. Both past and present tense are appropriate when speaking of tribal cultures.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about the state of your youth. She is Lakota and was incensed by the rate of incarceration and suicide for Indian youth. I pointed out to her the rates are extremely high for all young people. We finally agreed that if you are Indian-and adolescent-you are doubly damned in this culture.

To tribal cultures struggling to hang on to their traditions, the modern world poses a difficult challenge. For instance, the small community on Atka, while still a very closed community, is also globally wired to the modern age. They have Internet access, computers and a link to all the resources of the mainstream culture. The globalization of our modern society is becoming a major factor in how communities define themselves-and also how they can lose a sense of identity and connection. Paradoxically, the growth of the global family also demands that we redefine how we do culture and belonging.

Regardless of our rapidly changing world, it is still the family and the culture which are responsible for the many processes that transform a child into an adult. Unfortunately, we are not doing a very good job.

In this modern world, the roles between men and women have been muted and blurred. The giant Gap or Calvin Klein billboards show the girls looking like boys, the boys looking like girls and none of them looking too happy about it. Our roles are confused. This gender confusion is exacerbated by several other factors of the newly emerging world.

For instance, risk and challenge have been neutered in our liability-conscious society. We are afraid to let our young stray out into that dangerous world. We are afraid to let them risk anything for fear of being labeled a bad parent.

Organized and professional sports have replaced the hunting and warrior societies. Our collective memory as farmers or hunter/ gatherers has turned us into obsessive shoppers, constantly roaming the aisles, baskets in hand, to survey the wares provided so abundantly for us.

And sexual initiation, once a beautiful and gentle unfolding of natural procreation, has either become just another sport or a source of worry, fear and shame.

The goal of all ancient rites of initiation was to bring the child into the community as a contributing member of that community. Rather than being initiated into the role of providing assistance to the family and community, young people now hoard their first paychecks from McDonalds and Wendy’s, and plot how to spend the ‘me’ money, thus entering the role of consumer rather than contributor.

Is it any wonder that our young people are unable to determine the role they must play, unable to feel the value of their own contribution to the family and community in which they live, and unable to move fully into their own open-ended potential? In this new world, our forests have been laid over with concrete, the giants are long gone, the lands have been tamed, and the mysteries banned. We raise the sword of our own skills and find nothing huge and scary upon which to turn the blade of our own courage and character-and so we turn it on each other.

Malidoma Some’ (1994) said, “Initiation is the bridge between youth and adulthood. In my village, a person who is not initiated is considered a child, no matter how old that person is. Without initiation we cannot recall our purpose. To not be initiated is to be a nonperson.”

Extending Adolescence
It is clear that today’s adolescent is having a tough time growing up. In a summary of research on adolescent development, Frank Furstenberg³ explains that use of the word adolescence only emerges in the mid-20th century when the children no longer took their working place within the family and community but went to school instead. Furstenberg (2000) described a central paradox in this cultural shift. He said:

To a great degree, the problematic features of adolescence and the transition to adult-hood are structurally created and maintained by social institutions that isolate youth from adults; ironically, this is done to prepare them for future roles.

In other words, we’ve created institutions designed to advance our youth but find now that, when isolated from adults, they will grow their own subculture.

Adolescence as a stage of life was created by the shift in our culture toward formal education for all children-and away from the natural movement of the child into the role his or her parent occupies. Educational systems, as has been well documented, were created to prepare children to serve the industrial age. Unfortunately, this isolation and the creation of adolescence as a life stage have not advanced our development-they have delayed it.

Robert Bly, a well known poet and contemporary teacher, suggested his book, in The Sibling Society, that the vast majority of our population is frozen in adolescence, forever stuck with making limited choices based on “me and mine.” While Bly’s assessment may very well be correct, it presents a terribly bleak view of human development at the beginning of the new millennium. However, in societies as in individuals, crisis, breakdown and chaos are often the forerunners of transformation. Perhaps we can take hope in that and wonder what new uprising of human potential is about to unfold. Ventura (1994) said:

Adolescence is a cruel word. Its cruelty hides behind its vaguely official, diagnostic air. To say someone is ‘adolescent,’ going through ‘adolescence,’ or worse, ‘being adolescent’ is to dismiss their feelings, minimize their troubles and, (if you’re their parent) protect yourself from their uncompromising rage.

I’ll not spend a great deal of time here analyzing what has caused society to weaken in this way. There are already enough committees, task forces, and other entities spending precious time and resources attempting to analyze the factors at play. We could spin the bottle and it would point at government, schools, television, rising divorce rates-and it would change with each spin.

Playing spin the bottle won’t solve the problem. It won’t bring back what has been lost or chase away what has arrived. We can only begin by looking at what our society has become-and then take advantage of our unique, human ability to adapt to our surroundings and go from there. Biology won’t change. Adolescence won’t go away. However, culture is man-made. We determine what it is and what it will be.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, cultural change, family, global communities, global passageways, parenting, rites of passage | Comments (0)

Kids on Fire

October 17, 2008

My thoughts have been drifting toward Hawaii this past week. About a year ago I was invited to be a member of an advisory council for Global Passageways, an organically growing network of folks concerned about our youth and rites of passage. I was honored and have been involved in several phone conferences. I’m impressed with both the scholarship and the passion of this coming of age group. They are planning the first ever gathering of the group in Hawaii at the end of the month. Since the dates clash with my son’s wedding, I won’t be able to attend. (please visit www.globalpassageways.com)

Even so, I can feel my energy heading that way. More and more I see that the educational issues, youth crime and suicide, depression and a general sense of lost-ness seems to be taking over many of our young people and it saddens me. Some of this comes to the forefront as the election grows nearer—but it is not enough to make it a “political” issue. It is nearer to the heart than that. And it is not enough for me to just obsess about the young people but to do whatever I can to help us shift our awareness. Milt and I are beginning to work toward creating a film on the Natural Human Learning Process and what happens to little ones when we try to force learning in a way that is NOT natural.

So, in honor of the Global Passageways gathering, over the next week or two I plan to post the chapters of my book, Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rites of Passage. It is a little known book but one so close to my heart that I have to get it out there. I welcome any and all of your stories and ideas so please do post your thoughts. The strength of our youth is something that concerns us all. I will post a chapter a day until the book is done. I may even include a “missing” chapter. (P.S. This book is available at amazon.com)

Keep in touch,

Jamie

Re-Visioning Adolescence

And The Rites of Passage

By Patricia Jamie Lee

Introduction

For the past several years I’ve been haunted by a young, fourteen-year-old girl who I didn’t even know personally. Gina Score died in a boot camp training school in Plankinton, SD¹. The Score family, from a small eastern South Dakota town, sounds like many families from the Midwest. We are a simple people, generally. Gina somehow got off on the wrong foot–like others of us did at her age. She did some shoplifting, skipped school, and got herself into trouble with the police. In July of 1999, she was put in the boot camp in an attempt to shape her up and get her back on the right trail. Fashioned after the model of military training, boot camp for teens is not summer camp.

Five days after Gina arrived in Plankinton, the girls from Cottage B, fifteen of them in all, went on an early morning run down a road outside the complex. Both the temperature and the humidity were about seventy. Gina, weighing over two hundred pounds, couldn’t complete the run. When she collapsed, the staff counselors thought she was faking it and let her lie there in the sun. They left her there on the ground for three hours Eyewitnesses reported that Gina roused her self one time, tried to make it the last 100 feet to her cottage, but collapsed again. Her skin was pale, her lips were blue, and she had urinated on herself. Still the staff did nothing.

When the paramedics were called at last, Gina was taken by ambulance to the hospital, but, on the way, her heart gave out. Paramedics tried to revive her, but the damage was too severe—her internal body temperature had topped the thermometer reading 108 degrees.

This will be the most depressing and devastating story I’ll tell in this book because Gina’s story is the reason I finally finished the book. I can’t get her off my mind. After I had analytically researched the topic of kids and culture for over ten years, it is Gina who pushes me out of analysis and into action.

Our children suffer. A shocking five million of them have been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD and placed on Ritalin². Suicide is now the third most common cause of death for young people³. Two hundred thousand young people are incarcerated each year, with 84,000 of them placed in solitary confinement for twenty-four hours or more⁴.

There is, of course, no easy answer to the social and cultural challenges that our society presents to its young. We can’t just stick feathers in their hair and send them off to seek their fortune. Something much more complex is required. As the research for this book deepened, I found myself grappling with fundamental questions sweetly reminiscent of my own youth.

Why am I here? What have I come to do? Do I have the right or the duty to decide for anyone what is best for them—even my own children? Is it possible to be guide, mentor and eventually elder to those who now travel the paths that I passed on earlier? What are the golden links between mind, body, spirit, family, and culture? It’s as if in my search for the right initiation for my growing children, I became initiated myself.

This is not a book, but the story of a book that took ten years to write. This journey has brought me to many canyon edges only to look across at the wide space and back off again. A single image such as a program I saw on a violent video game called, “Grand Theft Auto,” throws me over the edge. We are training our young people to be violent, alone, and dead to the world. We do this unconsciously, without thought, as if we have no responsibility to them. This topic of growing children into conscious, healthy adults is a sticky web that connects to all aspects of our current culture. There is no easy answer. This book, I hope, is part of a long, honest cultural conversation about what we need to do to insure a healthy future for our children.

The messages of the book will seem confusing at times. They will push against the tidal wave of negative energy that seems to flow out from the adult world toward our young, and examine the dissing of our youth through pathological diagnoses and the criminalization of the adolescent. They will challenge parents and organizations to search within their own development for signs of the uninitiated adult within. I will also contradict myself by suggesting that we do as the Lakota mothers do for the littlest ones—call them dear, sweet, and precious one to pull their little spirits tightly to us. Then I’ll tell you that, for the older kids, we must assault them fully with strong tests and challenges. And finally, for those on the edge of adulthood, I suggest we bless them–and then get out of their way.

Throughout the pages of this book I wander through the many fields of science, medicine, psychology, and spiritual thought. At one point I dip into the “hidden orders of love” as the German therapist, Bert Hellinger⁵ describes them. At another point, I build a map that orients us to the higher levels of development. The desired end result of all of these topics is to build and strengthen the cultural cradle that ties the child to his family and culture.

In the chapters to follow there are many references to the public radio series my husband, Milt, and I produced called Oyate Ta Olowan—The Songs of the People⁶. The series is a fifty-two part documentary series on Native American music and stories. To produce it we traveled deeply into Indian country to meet and interview The People. This incredible journey taught me much, and I gratefully acknowledge all the Elders and my teachers who have contributed to the information presented here.

CHAPTER ONE

Through The Tipi to the Rising Sun

On a slope of Bear Butte, a gentle mountain in South Dakota, a young man awaits the vision that will organize and guide his life. For four days he will fast, pray, and sleep alone under the night sky. At the base of the mountain, his family and friends wait for him.

On a sandy stretch of land in Arizona, just north and east of Phoenix, a young woman dressed in white buckskin wears an abalone shell like a crown on her forehead and carries a crooked staff. For four days she chants, prays, and dances as her family and friends gather around to support her.

On a beach in northern Minnesota, a young woman takes a dare and drinks a quart of Southern Comfort. She nearly dies. In the emergency room her family and friends wipe tears and pray—that she will live through the night.

On a street in Los Angeles a young man takes a gun and shoots a rival gang member. His buddies accept him—but two families gather now—one for a trial, one for a funeral.

As unlikely as it sounds, there is a common denominator. All four young people are performing a ritual, or a rite of passage, that has developed in the culture that surrounds them. All four of them have responded to something deep within themselves that says there must be a passage from childhood to adulthood. The difference is that the young man on the mountain and the young woman in white buckskin were raised in a culture that recognizes—and prepares itself—for this powerful event.

The need is real. It captures us all, sending us through a second birth canal toward the makings of soul that gives our life meaning. I still remember that gnawing feeling of restless desire, wanting answers, and pushing against constraint. As young people we walked lonely roads or beaches, staring out at starry night skies and wondering what . . WHAT . . . does it all mean? What have I come to do? We found all of our boundaries and then tested them. We forced our parents to lie awake far into the night wondering and praying that we would make it home . . . this time.

It happened to all of us, but somewhere along the historical trail, the massive, brilliant energy of adolescence became something to fear and dread rather than to nurture and guide. Society began the nasty game of passing the buck; the church should take care of it, the family, the schools, and the politicians . . . no . . . it’s up to the law. And while we quibbled and blamed, our children stopped becoming young men and women and became teenagers.

This topic was of special interest to me not just as an educator and scholar, but also as a parent. I watched my three children moving toward adulthood, and I was consumed with the question of, “What do they need?” in order to make a strong passage from my home to one of their own making.

During the recording of the Oyate series, we had the opportunity to attend an Apache Sunrise Ceremony¹ performed as an initiation ritual for a young girl. This beautiful and complex rite of passage ceremony is filled with small, intricate pieces of which I can only give you my experience as an outsider to that culture.

We arrived at sunrise on the second day of the ceremony at the ceremonial grounds just outside of Ft. McDowell, Arizona. The young girl being initiated was dressed in a beautiful white buckskin dress, tall moccasins, and a piece of gleaming abalone adorning her forehead. She looked ageless, a portrait drawn into the lost pages of some beautiful storybook. Family members, mostly women, surrounded her. The sandy, desert ceremonial grounds were filled with her community, there to share her experience and to support her through it.

The ceremony went on day and night with a dozen or more male singers chanting endless repetitive melodies that stir the blood and awaken the senses. At night, a huge bonfire was built. Mysterious crown dancers came out dressed in dark regalia and wearing tall, elaborate crowns. It’s said that the crown dancers take on the spirits of the surrounding mountains during the ceremony and, when it’s over, the crowns are hidden in the mountains and never used again.

Throughout the long days of dancing, the girl carries a crooked staff with a feather dangling from it. As she steps the endless beat, she pounds the staff on the earth. I watch, wondering is she tired, how long has she danced . . . can she go on? I also wonder what private things her aunties and grandmothers have told her about becoming a woman. It is said that, during the time of the ceremony, the young girl becomes a healer. Members of the tribe bring their babies and their ill elderly family members to be healed by her. During the ceremony I can see the girl is transformed by this whole experience. She is no longer a girl—and certainly not a teenager or an adolescent—but someone else. Her eyes appear to see far beyond the ceremonial grounds and the people around her.

Toward the end of the ceremony the girl is placed on her knees facing the sun. An aunt, her mentor, supports her from behind as the girl dances from her knees, raising her hands again and again towards the sky. At last, the Medicine Man brings out a basket of corn pollen paint and a brush, and paints her face and head with this thin yellowish mud. I watch this and am transfixed. As the mud dries, she looks ancient, timeless–as if carved on a sandstone wall and left there for eternity. When the painting is completed, the Medicine Man turns to the crowd and flicks the loaded brush at us until we, too, are painted.

This astounding ceremony has only one purpose—to assist that young girl into her maturity, to guide her in the passage from girl to woman. The weeks of planning, the tremendous expense of feeding the crowds and preparing for the ceremony, are all taken on by her family in order that she may have this important experience of the soul.

I was touched to the core by this ceremony and longed deep in my heart to offer such a transformation to my own daughters—or to myself. Grieving for the young girl in me still awaiting such an event, I wanted feathers and visions and long dark nights in a tipi under a wide, black sky. Grieving for the parent in me, I wanted heavenly creatures to dance out of the dark and speak to my children in mysterious languages that only he or she would understand. I wanted the mysteries of the universe to unfold their secrets for my young ones so that they might suffer less from this human condition than I have. When comparing this beautiful ceremony to my own passage, I found, sadly, that there was no comparison.

Standing on the brink of womanhood, for me, brought only an unexplained feeling of shame. Beginning menstruation was a fearful time. Getting breasts brought only disrespect, sexual innuendo, teasing, and crass new words like “boobs” and “tits.” In sixth and seventh grade, we had a gym teacher who would not allow a menstruating girl to swim. She sent us to an open study hall filled with taunting boys who knew exactly why we were there. There was no honor in that moment.

After attending the Sunrise Ceremony I felt robbed of this experience, ripped off by a culture that couldn’t see me at that age. I also walked away from that open tipi on the desert determined to discover ways to strengthen the cultural cradle so that my children, and their children, could experience this important transition like the young Apache girl stepping through the tipi to the rising sun.

In addition to the Sunrise Ceremony, our extensive travels into Indian Country gave my husband and me the chance to see what many native people are still doing for their young—rituals and ceremonies that have no equivalent in the melting pot of mainstream America. We watched dedicated young Hopi girls and boys learn the Butterfly dance. We stood under a star-studded sky on the northern coast of California watching a young Hupa girl perform her first ceremonial dance, dressed in buckskin stitched heavily with glowing white shells. We attended small community powwows and watched the young native boys and girls shed their baggy jeans and T-shirts and adorn themselves with the fine regalia of their ancestors.

When I compare all this to the little that we in mainstream America have to offer, it nearly makes me weep. Our culture and, sadly, many remaining indigenous cultures, are no longer connected to tribal ways. What remains of our rite of passage rituals have been badly diluted, reduced to such minor markers as getting a driver’s license, going to prom, getting a diploma, etc. Today our culture is riddled with the shards and pieces of initiation rituals. I view these remnants as an archeologist might view an old city buried beneath a windswept, sandy plain; there, in the humps and bumps that remain, is the record of what was once a living, active civilization.

Exploring the way a youth emerges out of childhood to take his or her rightful place as an adult in the community is not a simple task. It asks us to make a deep inquiry into both modern and ancient ways of being, to evaluate and determine what is important and what is simply flotsam. It also forces us, as adults, to look into the hidden corners of our own development.

As a culture we have fallen into the bad habit of shunning and discounting the vibrant and sometimes aching needs that young people have. Adolescence is not an aberration, not just a loud squawk on the human behavior scale, but a potent and sometimes agonizing leap toward adulthood, an event that crosses all cultural boundaries, from country to country, race to race, and past to present. Making this leap requires every ounce of courage and strength we can muster. Michael Ventura (1994)², a provocative therapist and writer, said of our society:

They fail to understand that a psychic structure that has remained constant for 100,000 years is not likely to be altered in a generation by stimuli that play upon its surfaces. What’s really going on is very different. The same, raw, ancient content is surging through youth’s psyches, but adult culture over the last few centuries has forgotten how to meet, guide, and be replenished by its force.

If the event itself (adolescence) remains unchanged throughout history, then the problems exploding in our young people must come from the way that we greet the event. We won’t erase adolescence by ignoring it or by dismissing it—we must meet it head on. Not only that, we must meet it with great respect and love.

During the early stages of research into this project, I had my seventeen-year-old daughter take a tape deck to her high school and ask her classmates, “What do you think adults think of you?” The responses were shocking. “They think we’re losers . . . nothing . . . worse than nothing . . . deadbeat . . . worthless.” One young man said that when he walks down the street, the adults sometimes cross the street to avoid meeting him head on. Ventura (1994) said:

When we don’t have apt words for something it’s because of an unspoken collective demand to avoid thinking about it. That’s how scary ‘adolescence’ is. Which is also to say, that’s how scary our very own unspeakable adolescence was. …What we cannot face when we cannot face the young is, plainly ourselves.

Are we afraid to face our own undeveloped, uninitiated adolescent selves? How many of us are still caught in the cusp between childhood and adulthood, unable to fully make the crossing, stopped by fear, unpolished understanding, and selfish, childish desires? It would explain the current dilemma. Ventura reminds us that “Tribal adults didn’t run from this moment in their children as we do; they celebrated it. They would assault their adolescents with, quite literally, holy terror; rituals that had been kept secret from the young till that moment….”

Fascinated by what Ventura said about assaulting our young, I thought of the students of Stevens High School, the school my children attended. They drive around in their SUV’s and new Hondas wearing designer clothes and carrying cell phones. This image and the word assault clearly don’t line up.

During this same time I spoke with several classes of juniors and seniors at the local high school. After some discussion of rites of passage, I asked them outright, “Suppose I gave you a task that was so difficult and so challenging that, when you had completed it, you would know without a doubt that you had been completely transformed. How many of you would take the challenge?” Confined to their tidy desks, the hands of nearly every young person shot into the air. It still raises the hair on my arms to recall that energy. These kids want—no, need—the defining, transformative experience.

The dilemma defined. How can we create what we did not experience and can no longer recall from our own cultural roots? This question stopped me cold for many years. For the most part our current culture, particularly in America, has shallow or broken roots. Ancient rite of passage rituals arise from a deeply rooted traditional culture and many of us have lost that connection. Can we fake it until we make it? Would such a manufactured ritual look like a silly cartoon beside the real rituals I’d seen? That was the question that drove my inquiry. What would a modern day rite of passage ritual look like? How would it take place?

The Cradle of Culture

Culture is a multifaceted word. For some it means such things as art, literature and theater. For others it means the social structures and morals that bind us and, for still others, it is ethnic, tied to our ancestral roots. For most of us, however, our culture is unclear and blurred like a watercolor painting on which a glass of water has been spilled. If we are to explore, with any effectiveness, the building of a strong culture that knows how to respond to its young, we must know first of which we speak. Culture, community, society—what do all these words mean?

Chevak, Alaska, is a small Chup’ik village planted up near the Bering Sea that is accessible only by small plane. On a collection trip for Oyate, we stayed in the home economics room of the local school, sleeping on nap mats and cooking our packaged food on one of the many available stovetops. The village children, young and old, followed at every turn, drilling us about who we were and what we were doing there. Their trust and openness were astounding. I yearned to know what right combination of community gave them such faith that the world was a good and safe place.

The first evening several of the young teens were preparing to perform a traditional dance at the Alaskan Federation of Natives in Anchorage. We joined the elders and community members watching them dance. The boys wore white chuspic smocks and jeans, and the girls had on calico chuspic smocks and headpieces trimmed with caribou fur. It was amazing to watch them dance with precise, disciplined moves to the loud thrumming of four wide-rimmed drums. It was graceful, beautiful . . . peaceful. The image that stayed with me most strongly, however, was the row of Elders against the far wall, many holding wide-rimmed drums, all there to train and teach the young people. There was something so right in that image; the young under direct tutelage of the elders. At the end of the line of elderly men hitting the drum was a single young drummer following their moves.

A few nights later I lay awake in a hotel in Anchorage thinking about this book on adolescent rites of passage. Oddly, I found myself jealous of the Chupiks, the Inuits, the Athabascans, the Lakotas–so many indigenous people who, in spite of the ravages of the past 500 years, still hold fast to a culture that includes far more than the language and music. They have a sense of identity that stretches back thousands of years. They have their elders lined up against the wall watching them dance and sing. I thought about my own mixed-blood background and realized that all that remains of my original culture is the knowledge of how to make lefse. There are no Elders, no rituals, no safe borders to define who I am and no cultural memory beyond my own generation. Rather, I’m liquefied in the great melting pot that is rapidly reaching melt down. I’m an American.

Most Americans of European decent are several centuries away from their own indigenous cultures. There is no memory of the rites and rituals that may have been practiced in small German, Norwegian, or Irish villages. There is no shared knowledge of ancestral stories, and no recollection of the mysticism or songs that led their own ancestors into maturity with a sense of identity and connection. With the great migration from Europe to America—often driven by famine, hardship and war—the ancestral, indigenous cultures that were perhaps thousands of years old were broken in a single blink of time as the masses boarded those ships and left their homelands. This is true also for many who left their homelands in Africa, Spain, Asia, and on and on. Only a few American ethnic cultures still have elder-based initiation and rituals to support the young person in his or her passage into adulthood. My Internet searches uncovered many movements within the African-American, Latino, and native cultures to return to the use of these ancient rituals of initiation for the young. I celebrate these movements and demand the same for all children.

The primary question here, however, is can we recreate what has been lost? Is it possible to establish a new traditional and tribal culture where children are valued and not lumped into the amorphous category called teenager? Can we put the Elders back in the position of respect as guides and teachers of the next generation? Can we fashion a culture where adults once again feel connected to the land, to themselves, and to the great mystery and presence that is generically called God or The Great Spirit? Can our modern culture, shattered like a broken mirror, regain or recreate a cultural cradle rich with rituals and traditions that return us to the natural rhythms of the world? And finally, if such rituals and traditions could be brought back into force, what would they look like? What would this modern day initiation and rite of passage look like?

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush

Frustrated, I at last turned to my own adolescent children, listening to their struggles and closely watching their movements. If I’m patient and take the time, I thought, they will show me what they need most. Over several months and then years, I stopped giving them the answers and instead found myself telling them more stories about my own rough waters, about the choices and decisions I’d made in my life. We talked late many nights about life, about how a person fashions a life out of the raw materials we are given. Their level of inquiry and interest in philosophical and moral issues impressed me. My daughter was struggling with several friends who were using crack cocaine and ecstasy—into the rave scene. She was worried about them. My son, a pragmatist at heart, wondered why they didn’t just knock it off.

Also, I began taking the advice of the Elders we’d met in Indian country. Let the young people do the hard stuff, they said. Let them do all the little tasks and decisions buried within each day. Don’t do it for them! I started to see doing it for them as a way of cheating them of their initiation period. Young people need to test their wings, to discover the scope and range of their own ability. When, as a parent, I take over their tasks, development stops and they become dependent children once again.

One spring I sent my son on a road trip alone to Lincoln, Nebraska to see his sisters. Before heading down the road he grinned at me and said, “Think of it as a rite of passage, Mom.” He was sixteen years old. It was clear he was excited. Making the trip alone was a challenge. Whatever came up, he would have to deal with it. Later, he spent the summer working with his father on a construction site, and I saw how beneficial it was for him to be in the good company of his father and other men. He matured greatly during that summer and the two summers to follow. Sadly, in the fall of 2002 his father was killed in a plane crash. How grateful I was that Tom had those three summers working with his father.

Over several years I realized something good was happening in my subtle attempts to link my children more closely with their own development. That something was not happening from my studies or from knowing the research on human development—or even from attending such rich ceremonies as the Sunrise Ceremony. The something good was happening in my own home, swirling around the many hours spent with my children talking and sorting out our daily lives. I still wanted the wide-rimmed drum, the abalone shell on my daughter’s forehead, but what I was doing was working.

The Initiatory Moment

Finally, during another collection trip to Hupa³country in northern California, I met a teacher named David. I asked him what their tribe does for the young people in terms of a rite of passage. David was not overly talkative but eventually explained to me that the rite was not nearly as important as the right initiation. Initiation, he explained, is the teaching of the young by the elders and parents that begins at a very early age and continues on until the child is ready to take his or her place in the community. Children in his culture, David explained, are valued as holding the future of the tribe itself—but they are also firmly kept in their place by the elders, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

Later, it was made clear to me as I studied the work of German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, how important place is within the flow of generations. Our children are often out of order, required to care for Mom and Dad, one moment taking on too much, the next too little. My father used to keep us in our place by saying we were getting “big for our britches.”

Talking to David helped me understand that chasing the pretty ritual or formal rite of passage was not the answer. Without initiation, the ritual is empty. Wearily, I went back to the 100-plus pages of this book stored on my computer and deleted all but six pages. Shifting my focus away from the difficult question of what a rite of passage ritual would look like in modern culture, I began instead to contemplate the full meaning of initiation.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, The Education Crises | Tagged adolescence, cultural decline, getting it right, human development, parenting, rites of passage, teens, youth | Comment (1)

Patricia Jamie Lee

Monthly Archives: October 2008

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Conclusion

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 9

Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage, Chapter 8

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 7

Stages Versus Levels of Development

Level One: Chaos

Level Two: The Rules

Level Three: Testing the Rules

Level Four: Making the Rules or Self Definition

Level Five: The Re-Evolution of Soul

Overexcitability as a Diagnosis

Re-Visioning Adolescence and the Rite of Passage, Chapter 6

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 5

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 4

Re-Visioning Adolescence, Chapter 3

Re-Visioning Adolescence Chapter 2

Kids on Fire

Introduction

Through The Tipi to the Rising Sun

The Cradle of Culture

The Initiatory Moment

Categories

Recent Posts

Spam Blocked

Login/Register

Archives