When Stars Can’t Shine

March 1, 2009

It has been several weeks since I posted.   Life is racing along at an unearthly pace as we prepare to empty our house of belongings and move to a spot of land in north Minnesota for the summer plus.  Regardless of where our path takes us, it has been challenging and freeing to unload years of belongings.  Tonight Milt was sorting boxes of slides and wondering where, when, and why he took so many pictures.  Many hit the circle file. 

Today we had friends over for a bit of chanting and meditation.  As I was sitting in that age-old posture, I kept thinking about the rest of my life.  I want it to be both meaningful and free of stress.  Just being.  Last week I went for a drive in the Black Hills to give an hour-long presentation to a facility that “houses” young people in need.  The facility is part lock-up, part treatment, and part . . . I find I can’t finish the statement.  The question I had on my drive home was, “What do they need–really?”   When I first got there I was a little nervous as I realized that writing about adolescence-and standing and talking in front of 150 adolescents are two totally different things.  I wondered if I would be in touch enough to speak to them and not at them.  I wondered how they would receive what I had to say.  Then, as the counselors and demi-guards brought the groups of young men and women in, I wondered what I would end up saying that would be against the basic philosophy of this boot camp atmosphere. 

It didn’t take long, however, to just focus on their young faces and talk as straight as I could to them.  I talked about ancient rites of passage versus the leftovers we have in our modern culture that sometimes forces the young to “gang up” and try to initiate themselves.  I talked about challenges and tests and what happens when we gain the strength to go through them.  I asked them what they needed in order to be able to face those tests and challenges.  It was a powerful thing for me.  They gave me words backed up by need.  Money, jobs, knowledge, support, love, time, understanding.  Discipline.  Choices.

My question.  Are we creating a world where these kids in need can fill in those blanks? 

During the last fifteen minutes, I invited questions.  Most of the questions that came my way were about being a writer.  What motivated me, what discouraged me, how did I get interested in writing, how many books have I written . . .   Finally one young man asked me what made me want to come and speak to a group like theirs.  That question touched me.  I thought a moment and said, “I like young people.  I like your energy.  I like your questions.  I like your spirits.  I like you-and I want to see you bloom.”  At the end I invited the young people to write to me and tell me why they are there and what they want.  I told them I had this idea to do a kind of “teen monologue”, kind of like The Vagina Monologues but with a very young voice. 

Friday, I got 20 letters in my mailbox.  Milt and I sat and read every one.  Even though I realized that the letters had probably been “commanded” by the teacher or counselor, I was moved by their stories.  Since giving that talk my energy has been cycling around those young people.  I realized that my entire adult life has been focused around education, developing humans, adolescence, and what we can do to help them become strong, resilient adults.  My first job was in the “trouble” room at a middle school.  My second job was in an adolescent care center.  Both ended when I could see that the systems that employed me were not at all tuned into the young.  It hurt me to even be there-and it wasn’t great for the young people either. 

I don’t think I am too much of an idealist to think that we could take a new approach with American youth.  I don’t think it would hurt us to see them and work with them AS THEY ARE instead of criminalizing or diagnosing or sentencing them.  Damn, it frustrates me.

So, I think over the next however many days or weeks, I will post one of those letters (or portions of them) in my blog so you can hear from them, too.  And I plan to answer every letter that comes!  The beginnings of my “Teen Monologues.”

Stay tuned.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays, The Education Crises | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

For Nate

December 21, 2008

This post is for Nate.  I am amazed at how you were able to hold a job, parent five children, be a husband, and still get your MS degree in business.  It was such a treat to watch you wear your cap and gown.  I loved the way your baby son saw you sitting in the front row and would not be content until he could join you.  He sat there through the ceremony as content as a kitten.  The smile on your face was worth all the precious things in the world that we can imagine.

I know what a difficult path this has been for you, and I’m proud to call you my son-in-law.   There have been so many times that I wished I could rub the crease from your worried brow, to take away early pains and recent aches.  It is not my job, but I can want to do it anyway.  As you are learning, it is hard to watch your children make their way in the world. 

Congratulations.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays | Tagged , , , | Comment (1)

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 , , , , , | 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 , , , , , , | 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 , , , , , | 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 , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Falling

October 13, 2008

Yesterday we put the garden to bed for the winter.  I wasn’t sure if some of the plants agreed or not.  The peppers and green beans were still putting on fragile white blooms, wanting more from life than the season’s end will allow.  And today I found out that a cousin passed away-again probably wanting more from life than the season’s end will allow. 

Fall is a strange time of year for me.  I get reflective, depressed, and energized all at the same time.  What do I want to do before season’s end?  I am trying very hard to withdraw my energy from the college.  I begin, as usual, to care too much and want too much and do too much.  Soon all my other goals have gone to the side, and I am discovering that that is not okay with me.  I want to plant my gardens where things have a good chance of growing. 

Into garden metaphors tonight, I guess.  It is appropriate, however, because we all have the many seasons of our lives.  I have been through the young years, the mothering years, and the dreaming years.   Now I want to live my life savoring each moment.

Milt and I are making plans to do a film on education and the Natural Human Learning Process.  It is an issue that hits close to the bone for both of us.  I just don’t understand how we think we can plot children in stiff little chairs, limit their creative play, and then produce outstanding “citizens”.  I keep thinking back to when we were in Lincoln, NE and I was watching my 7 month old grandson try to get his hand into my big bead box.  I have one of those large plastic containers about three quarters full of beads.  We were at the Taekwondo Tournament with The Bead People.  Adrien’s little mind was entirely focused on how to get to those beads.  Finally I lifted him up and let him put his bare feet in the beads.  It was great-he started paddling as if I had put him in water and when I pulled him back out, there were beads stuck between his toes. 

Learning is fun.  How could we forget that?  Learning is as natural as breathing and eating.  How could we forget that?  I really want us to produce a film that reminds people that we cripple the learning process when we present too much information too fast and in a way that is deadly dull. 

 I’ll keep you “posted”. 

I figured out that to date there are now over 4000 Bead People out wandering the world working their tiny bits of magic on people.  That is so cool.  If you don’t yet have your own, you can go to www.thebeadpeople.org and sign up to spread the word. 

 Jamie Lee

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays, The Bead people Peace Project, The Education Crises | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)