How many times have you become a different woman without ever stopping to acknowledge the woman you were leaving behind?
We move through enormous transitions in our lives as women.
Our first period. Sexuality and relationships. Becoming a mother, or choosing another path. Creating and nurturing. Experiencing loss. Reinvention. Menopause. Aging.
These are often moments when we begin questioning who we’ve been and who we are becoming.
And so often, we simply keep going.
No ceremony. No acknowledgement. No moment to recognize that something has ended and something new is beginning.
A rite of passage is traditionally a ceremony or experience that marks a significant transition from one stage of life into another. It gives us an opportunity to acknowledge that something has changed, honour what has been, and consciously cross a threshold into what comes next.
In many cultures, important life transitions have been acknowledged through ritual, ceremony and community. Here in the Western world, many of us move through some of the most significant transitions of our lives with very little acknowledgement at all.
I know I did.
Recently, I had the privilege of co-facilitating a Rites of Passage Retreat with the Power & Grace Sisterhood.
Leading up to the experience had me reflecting on my own stages of womanhood and the many transitions I’ve moved through in my life.
So many of them were experienced without really understanding what was happening within me, and I didn’t acknowledge how much I was changing. And many I moved through largely on my own.
I became a young woman without really understanding what that meant.
I married and became a Mother in my early 20’s and learned so much about giving, nurturing, protecting and caring for others.
Motherhood changed me profoundly, and like many women, there were also times when I lost pieces of myself inside all that caring.
As my family grew and didn’t need me in the same ways there came another stage of questioning and reclamation.
Who am I now?
What do I actually want?
What do I believe?
What belongs to me, and what have I been carrying because I was taught that this was who I was supposed to be?
And now, as I continue moving through another season of womanhood, I can see that I haven’t left any of those women behind.
They are all still part of me.
And then there’s forgiveness.
Looking back at earlier versions of myself with what I know today, it’s easy to see things I wish I’d done differently.
I’ve had to learn to have compassion for the woman I was at each stage instead of judging her from where I stand now.
That’s where Radical Forgiveness has been so meaningful in my own life. It has helped me look more deeply at my experiences, what I made them mean about myself, and the beliefs and identities I carried forward because of them.
There is so much here for us to explore as women.
- What might still be asking for our attention?
- What are we ready to forgive?
- What wisdom have we gained that we haven’t fully recognized?
We don’t leave our earlier selves behind when we move into a new stage of life. We carry their experiences with us.
In my reflections from the retreat, there is something quite powerful about turning toward those parts of ourselves with loving kindness, honouring what we’ve lived, and being witnessed in the reclaimation of the wisdom that always belonged to us.
Our bodies have been there for all of it.
This is something I’ve been exploring more deeply for myself.
Too often we can look back on our life experiences as a collection of memories and stories, yet our bodies have been living those experiences right alongside us.
The times we felt safe and the times we didn’t. The times we listened to our bodies and the times we pushed through what they were telling us.
Even our pelvic floor has been part of that story. It sits at the very core of our body, below our womb, supporting us through every stage of our lives.
Until I began learning more about the relationship between the nervous system, the brain and the body, I hadn’t given much thought to how my womb and pelvic floor were tied to my own transition experiences.
I’ve since realized just how wise the female body truly is. Our breath, nerves, emotions, and physical tension patterns are not separate from our womb and pelvic floor. They are a unified system that catches and holds our subconscious experiences.
The more I understand the connection between these miraculous systems, the more I see the value in tending to ourselves as a whole.
Somatic work gives us an opportunity to slow down enough to notice what is happening within us and begin developing a deeper relationship with what we feel.
And I believe our feminine wisdom lives within that relationship too.
There are things I understand about myself now that I simply couldn’t have understood at an earlier stage of my life. That’s part of growing older and gaining wisdom through experience.
What I can do now is use that understanding to change how I move forward.
I can listen to my body more closely. Pay attention to what it needs. Trust what I feel and know. Recognize when an old pattern is influencing me. Give myself permission to change as I enter a new stage rather than expecting myself to keep being who I was before.
And I can become more intentional about how I cross the thresholds still ahead of me.
That’s the opportunity we have as women, and men for that matter.
Even if no one marked our earlier rites of passage for us, we can begin honouring them now. And we can choose to move through the next ones with greater awareness, support and connection to ourselves and with one another.
I think everyone deserves the opportunity to do that.