Another life altaring experience for me was the relational and spiritual risks involved in some of the underlying aspects of my initiation.  Much of that I will keep to myself, but I do want to share a couple points about this, because taking the risks, having them be part of my year and some months' context leading up to the initiation week, and not knowing until the ceremony was over (and in some regard, not for nearly another additional month) how it would all turn out has been a profound opportunity for me to dance with risk-taking and live in trust.

I had done a lot of reading about certain types of initiations and other ritual practices over the last dozen years or so.  But, even though I have a sort of "community" with those writers and their adherents, I essentially practice my spiritual path alone.  It's me and Nature and the spirits, whichever ones show up when they do.  To ask to be initiated meant engaging in spiritual practices with another human.  And even though I knew from our conversations over the years that WhiteWolf and I hold many of the same values and beliefs regarding our individual spiritualities, we had done almost no rituals together. 

Echoing in my head during the months leading up to the initiation week was something he had mentioned briefly some 11 years ago:  doing ritual with others, even when you do it regularly, or with others you know well, can be tricky.  Would our two unique ways of enacting ritual for something as significant as an initiation be compatible?  There was no way to know.

At one point during the waiting months we met to discuss certain specifics of what we would do.  I enumerated things that would make the experience more difficult for me.   Most of these had to do with things that might create physical or mental distractions from the altered consciousness of being in the moment.  My basic requests were:  to limit any prolonged extreme physical pain, to make good and natural use of the outdoors and the dark of night, and to include only the two of us in terms of humans present in corporeal form. 

Beyond that, anything the spirits guided WhiteWolf to include in the ritual was up to him.  Essentially, I put my mindbodyspirit in his hands as a sacred trust, and I let go of all impulse for control over what I might experience and how things would go.

I've heard it said that relationships sometimes change, and not always for the better, between an initiate and an initiator during the prelude time, or in the subsequent months or years.  Not having been involved in groups that regularly do initiations for their members, I had no idea how my relationship with WhiteWolf could change, or what might happen that would cause one or both of us to view our relationship differently.  Although I tried to make clear that I was open to whatever he was guided to do, I really had no way of knowing what I might be opening myself to. 

Believing that as my spiritual elder where the initiation was concerned, whatever WhiteWolf did, or instructed me to do, or allowed me to do, would be sacred in the context of the initiation, I happily lived in the mystery.  But  that itself might have put our friendship outside the initiation context at risk.  In a way, that was an abdication of responsibility and personal power, and potentially a violation of wise boundaries that might have been unfair and too much.  I took that risk consciously, trusting that the spirits would guide us well.

As the week unfolded, I had some extraordinarily strong experiencings that I might now interpret as intrapsychic dynamics, or spiritual arguments, or some kind of insistent spirit urging, depending on which lens I wish to apply.   I kept these to myself, feeling that to disclose them would not only shatter the magic of the precious days on the land, but might also irretrieveably shift our overall relationship in a direction that I did not want it to go.  I struggled with both the dynamics and the decision to withhold, which sometimes felt like agony.

But knowing that withholding my interior experience is so much part of my old habit pattern, I also knew that I was being presented with a chance to embody my initiation by taking the risk to shift my old way of being.  The details aren't really important for me to disclose to all of you, but it was vitally important that I share them with WhiteWolf.  And I knew that either doing so or not doing so might be putting our post-initiation relationship and friendship at risk.

Suffice to say that I had no choice but to take that risk, and discuss what I had been experiencing.  I'm relieved and grateful to say that doing so has dispelled the forceful energy with which I had struggled.  As a result, I feel brought through yet another cauldron of transformation.