I’ve recently stopped attending a couple of groups here in Boquete Panama (where I live). There wasn’t anything wrong with the groups and the people were lovely people, but the groups weren’t what I had hoped they would be.
I was hoping to find a place where we could rotate facilitation, a place where I could be held in community by people who knew how to do such things. This has by-and-large not been the case.
And I don’t know why I expected it to be since I’ve spent almost 30 years learning, honing, and mastering this skill. It is unreasonable of me to expect
I will find that skill in others who haven’t done the same thing.
I wonder if you too are having this desire to be held by others – to be off duty. I know first-hand how hard it can be to find this space. My students also tell me these things regularly. One of the assignments I give to my ritual training students is to go to others’ rituals. They often come back with horror stories of energetically unsafe spaces, badly structured rituals, and unpleasant power dynamics. And this is why I want them to go – because they need to know what’s out there. And occasionally, they learn something new from the rare person who actually knows what they are doing.
But I digress. Here’s the deal. When you get to a certain stage of your work, it’s harder to find someone capable of holding you in your work. That’s just a fact. But there is still the desire to have it again. I miss being able to relax in someone else’s sacred space. I have friends whose space I trust, but it would be nice to be able to sign up for a cool retreat and know that it will be one.
I tried that last year. My husband and I went to Costa Rica for what was supposed to be a “do it yourself” retreat at a high-end retreat center. I thought this would be a safe choice since I was creating my own retreat. When I tell you that it was nothing like a retreat for me, I’m understating it. The rules of the space were broken almost immediately upon arrival, I ended up having to manage an entity on the land that was feeding on people, and the management and the site staff were in constant conflict. Let’s just say it was NOT what I was hoping for. And I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences.
So what’s my point? It’s this: we as advanced practitioners need to come together and talk about this. We need to vision a place where we can hold space for one another. We need to get out of the cocoons of our known people and expand our horizons by connecting with others to exchange ideas, practices, and experiences. This is how we grow.
It’s also how we stay sane as we support our students. We HAVE to have good self-care. We HAVE to take time for ourselves. We need to fill our cups to overflowing.
If you would like to talk with me more about this, I’d love to hear from you. I welcome your ideas about how to create this environment to support one another. Message me here, through my website, or on any if my social media platforms.
And if you’re a beginning or intermediate student who just wanted to know what the advanced people were talking about and now you want to know more about how to do good ritual (and not be one of the people my students were talking about), you can sign up for a discovery call with my team and we’ll be happy to talk to you about it.
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