A Call to Evolutionary Leadership

A Discussion on Vision Quest Ceremony and ROPC’s Program for Guiding Initiatory Experiences

Rites of Passage Council Founder, Kedar Brown, talks about answering the Call to Evolutionary Leadership including his initiation into guiding rites of passage and Vision Quest ceremony. This interview is an introduction to the Vision Quest Guide Training program offered through ROPC.

What will we learn? How is the training structured? What framework is this based on? Is this right for me?

If you have engaged in, or will soon engage in, a ritual initiatory experience in the tradition of the Vision Quest, and would like to bring forth this medicine in your community, this talk is a great first step.

You can watch the video above, or read the edited transcript below.

Transcript: A Call to Evolutionary Leadership

Kat Houghton 0:01

If any of you have questions you want to talk about, we are recording. So if for some reason you don't want your face on a recording, feel free to turn off your video. But otherwise, we'd love to see you and see your video and be able to hear you.

You're all on mute. But you can unmute yourself at any time. Or I can unmute you, if you want to say something asked a question or make a comment. Any questions before we jump in?You can either raise your hand like just wave at me, or there's a little zoom button that says raise your hand, which I'll see

Kedar Brown 0:34

Also, if you want to get my attention, please use the chat box, which Kat will be monitoring, because I'll be able to keep track of that. But if you have something you want to write down, put it in the chat box, and Kat will see it.

Kat Houghton 0:48

All right, Kedar.

Kedar Brown 0:50

Beginning With Gratitude

All right. Well, thank you for joining us, those that made it live and those that registered and will be watching this later. It's great to have you all with us. And I just like to begin these conversations with gratitude.

And that is gratitude for the the ones that have come before us the ancestors of all peoples human and non human people that on whose shoulders we stand. And that enabled us to sit here and have this conversation and talk about what you know.

What is evolutionary leadership? What is that about? What is this particular way of stepping into that form of leadership?

So when I acknowledge our ancestors, those seven generations and beyond behind us and those seven generations and beyond in front of us, and thank you for the way that they have lived their lives that enabled us to be here on this evening with each other and in the circle.

The Nature of Leadership

So welcome again, I was walking around the lake the other day thinking about this, this conversation, and I just wondered where to begin. And a few things came to mind. And, and I love it, you know, stories are like, they're like things that look for you and find you and grab you.

They aren't so much things that we seek out but they seek us out and this story found me walking around the lake. And it was Gosh, I don't know how many years ago probably early 2000s. I was going to the YMCA. And I walked in the front door. And they had this fishbowl sitting on the counter there. And inside the fishbowl were all these little pieces of paper. It was like if you if you like 14 cookies, this was like a treasure because you didn't know what they said.

So the idea is is you come and you just reach in and pull one out. And so I did. I reached in and I pulled one out, as I walked by the counter and I looked at it and it was a quote a belief by Max Dupree and it said, the first responsibility and I'll paraphrase it slightly, the first responsibility of a leader is to define the road ahead. The last responsibility of a leader is to say thank you. And in between those two things, the leader is a servant.

And that really spoke to me about what leadership is. And this idea of leadership being not something that we first offer others, but something that we first navigate our way to in our own lives. How do we become that leader, that tip of the spear as they say in our own life.

And so rites of passage, rites of passage ceremonies, initiations, by all the various names around the planet throughout history that those things have been called. Whether it's been called vision quest ceremony or walkabout or hillwalking - that these methods of going into the wilderness, otherwise they go up on the mountain or to fast and pray for vision that you bring it back for your people.

And so it was never simply about yourself. But your medicine is that that gift that you carry in yourself, that gift that you're born with the medicine you're born with, that you came into this world to deliver. And so this way of leadership - being the first to connect deeply to the sacred and to the the depth of medicine that we each carry in ourselves - and then to come off that experience come off that what we are called to brush up against the sacred which is really the same thing.

Its brushing up against death, that there's old concepts of death as an ally. So to brush up against death or brush up against the sacred is to... to encounter an activation of a memory of these agreements you would have made with your ancestors before coming here, but who you're coming here to be. And so that's a context of how I'll hold this initiatory passage, the rite of passage.

Becoming A Ceremonial MidWife

The other story that came to me walking around the lake when I thought of all this brush up against the sacred, brushed up against death, it's all the same thing. And in the way that globally, we are brushing up against those sacred moments is quite some challenge for many people.

I remembered a time back in 2012. And I was, I was , I'm sure that you've heard the term dark night of the soul. Well, this was like a dark two years of the soul. I was going through a separation and divorce period at that time and just couldn't extract myself from the turmoil of it.

And a friend of mine, invited me to come down to Australia, to Perth, Western Australia, and then up into the Northern Territory on a walkabout. He was an Outback survivalist. And so I went down there with him. And in one of the weekends, we were there, we were out on this, this freshwater lake.

And we were guiding the this group of Aboriginal kids and other kids just through a weekend experience. And I had, I had the real blessing of having my daughter at the time, I forget how old she was like 21, 22, was there with us. And so we were out on this lake, and we're canoeing.

Now, if you know anything about crocodiles in Australia, there are what they call the salties. Very bad. And then there's the freshwater crocodiles - very, very scary - but they say not so not so bad unless you step on one. And now these these things are like dinosaurs. They're, you know, when I say 20 feet, 25 feet, those are not exaggerations.

So we're in this freshwater lake and we're canoeing and, and as we're canoeing, my daughter's probably about 50 yards ahead of me in another canoe with some kids in her canoe, and I'm canoeing with my kids in my canoe, and there's others behind us some distance.

And I see way off to the left, these these long ripples coming through the water right toward her canoe. When I say long, I'm guessing like 20 again, 20 to 25 feet long rippling across the top of the water.

So I know what this is. And I've been assured by my friend Bob, who is the Outback survivalist. He said don't worry about the freshwater crocodiles.

So I see this thing coming toward her canoe. And I'm watching the Aboriginal kids in her canoe glance over and look at it. And they don't seem impressed at all. So I'm thinking that's a good sign. And, and then I'll watch it. And about 15 or 10 yards right for her canoe, it disappears and the ripples go underwater. And then 15 yards on the other side of canoe, they reappear and keep going.

So the next day I had got a little bit of dehydration. So I was in the boat with Bob in the lead boat, a little motorboat. And so we're out on the lake and it stopped for lunch. And we throw over the anchor, and it's just he and I and we had lunch and it was time to go in, you know, rally up the canoes again.

So I go to pull on the anchor and it won't come on, it won't come loose. And we work it and work it still won't come loose. And we're in about I'm guessing it was 20 to 25 feet of water. And it's black water. Dark so can't see anything. And there's a bit of a pull on the boat. So the boats pulling back so that the line is tight.

And so Bob looks at me and says "Well, we'll have to go down there and get it and undo the anchor, kind of pull it up from wherever it's stuck". And I said, "Okay", and he said, "Well, I'm going to man the boat, and you'll you'll need to go down there". And I said "Well why is that?" He said, "Well, one, it's my boat. And I'm going to loosen the tension on the anchor line. So when you get down there, you can you know, find it and loosen it".

And so what's going through my mind at this point is, you know, visions of this dinosaur monster that I saw just the other day. And the other is that I trust this man with my life. And, and he's my guide. And he tells me that freshwater crocodiles are not interested in, you know, dining on humans the way saltwater crocodiles are.

And because we've had many conversations, so I just, he handed me a mask and spit in the mass, what you do when you're going into the water, he spits in and rolls the slug round, so you can see and rinsed it out and put it on. And I dove in and grab the anchor line and I just poke poke, poke, poke as fast as fast as I could go with horrible visions of monster dinosaurs moving all around, got down to the anchor.

And sure enough, he moved the boat. So it was loose, and I pulled it up and turn around grabbed the line and came up the line as fast as I could go, it seemed like an eternity going down because I couldn't see anything. And I got back up in the boat.

And the reason that story I think came up when I thought about this, this this conversation about, one, about this training and about becoming a ceremonial guide, a rites of passage guide, is that in that moment, I leaned in strongly to my trust in the sacred, my belief in him and his expert knowledge.

Because I had come to the edge in the end, of my own knowledge and resourcefulness. So I had to reach out for something greater than my own. And in the essence of an initiatory passage, we all come to that place.

I think globally, we are in that place now. Where we have to reach out for something greater than our own limited capacity to drain our own limited resourcefulness and allow ourselves to be guided by those who have walked this path before us. And by something even greater than that.

So when I think about this training, you know, it's a, it's a training in becoming a ceremonial midwife. Because that's really the essence of it. It's not doing something but it's more of a midwifery of ceremony to usher somebody through their own passage.

So when they turn to us and say, you know, it's dark down there, there's monsters, big crocodiles down there. And you tell me, it's okay to walk down there. You know, to have somebody to turn to that can guide us.

About the Vision Quest Guide Training

So, its just a powerful story kind of launches into this conversation of this particular training. So this is a 16 month long training Kat spoke about it earlier, she's at the tail end of the training, it's about to finish up for her session. Next week, and then I have another group, I see a couple of people or at least one, one person that's in that in this circle. And then another one that starts in August that will run to November of 2021.

And so it's a the logistical framework of the training and it's 16 months, and we meet six times over the 16 months for a different training module or session. I've been guiding, my own initiation into guiding rites of passage began, really began in 1992, when my father died, and something woke up in me that had not been awake since I was 14.

And I began to navigate my way back to a trailhead that I actually was at back then, I just didn't know it. And I found that trailhead through a series of calling experiences that I may name in a little bit, and then into an apprenticeship with Steven Foster and Meredith Little at the School of Lost Borders to apprentice in this work. And then too, I came off the mountain with the knowing that you know that In a rites of passage guide, a vision fast guide, was the work I came here to do.

And then over the course of the next however many years that is, began to blend the clinical mark, because my background since I was 25, is that I've been a psychotherapist in clinical mental health since 1985. And so began to blend the clinical awareness and perspective with the indigenous.

And so, we blend the clinical lens with the indigenous lens, what what what we might say is going on here, and then what they would say is going on here. And then over the years, you know, that it wove together like braided sweet grass, and very and very, eventually just became one thing.

And so it's holding those two lenses, and so with the training, and you don't have to be a clinically licensed practitioner of some kind. But the training is divided up into six training modules.

Introducing: The Medicine Wheel

And the first one is, is presenting a, a version of the medicine wheel that is, that we overlay with both, I would say, an ancient wisdom, and a psychological wisdom.

So that we deeply learn that, so that if somebody comes to me, or if I'm just find somebody out there, so I see Grace. So if Grace came to me and sat down and told me a story about you know what was going on with her, what I'm doing is I'm listening through the wheel. And, and I will find her on that wheel somewhere in her story.

And if I find her on the wheel and her story between the South and the West, or what would call the initiatory, shield of the South, and the initiatory, shield of the West, then that tells me something about the challenges she is facing at that place. It also tells me what particular kind of rituals address that thing.

And so we learned the wheel, the first two training sessions are really deeply learning the foundation of what I call, what we could call medicine, wheel diagnostics, and ritual prescriptive response. And so I feel that it is foundational to any nature-based or soul-based guide is that we be able to listen through a framework or cosmology that's anchored in nature.

And from that place, to hear their story, hear their challenge, and then be able to offer a ritual prescription that will address that specific thing.

And so that learning that framework, you know, again, we spend the first two sessions, learning and practicing on each other so that after the first two sessions, the apprentices are adept that at doing that something to bring a story.

You can you know, if you do work with people, you can say, you know, I want you to go take a walk in nature, before I see you next time, and then come back and tell me about it. And then from that you can draw a whole framework of what's going on with them and also offer them a ritual prescription.

Ritual Prescriptions

Maybe an elemental-oriented ritual prescription, maybe an ancestral-oriented ritual prescription to go and act and then come back and tell you that information. So, and guiding people in a ceremonial way, and the use of ritual, I think it's essentially important to have a very precise foundation and cosmology of what I would call diagnostics.

And then a very precise response in terms of ritual prescription. There are, when we think about rituals, and you think about elemental rituals, for instance, water ritual, fire ritual, earth, ritual and nature ritual, mineral ritual, air ritual, mountain ritual. There's precise reasons why you would go one way or another based on where somebody lands on the wheel.

So somebody's stuck. As I say, if we go back to the example of using Grace as our guinea pig stuck between the South and the West.

The questions in my mind is, has she brought enough energy to manifest whatever vision she's holding? And if and if not, then we'll back up into the wheel armed into the south, and maybe work with fire, if she has completed that, and then this difficulty in moving into the West, which is equivalent to difficulty of receiving West being associated with autumn, with the harvest with bringing in nourishment. And if there's a stuck place in the wheel there, then we we look at what are the gatekeepers, as I call them, what are the gatekeepers that interfere with the ability to receive so that one can fully move into the west to fully receive the bounty of the harvest of their creative endeavors.

And that's just one example. And if that was the stuck place, then I'm thinking we are probably going to be doing a water ritual. And a certain kind of water, I mean, gets very precise in our, maybe not waterfall, but maybe still water or, or gentle river water there. And so the, and in the prescriptive ritual response, you think of the elements as the active ingredients, as it's called to the medicine.

So a ritual without an elemental presence is a ritual without its active ingredients. So to bring it in, what particular active ingredients, moves one into that next initiatory shield of the wheel.

And similarly, if someone might let me pick on someone else in the circle, we'll say, Elaine. So if Elaine was, was stuck between the North and the east on the wheel, what that would tell me is that there's some uncertainty about how to show up in their life, maybe even some fear some hesitation, about how to show up or what the next step is, there's generally confusion that a person manifested that place, maybe they even have internal messages around, it's not okay to see or be seen.

And so I'm tracking for all of these things. And if I see that, that's where they're on the wheel, then one thought is, do they need to back up into the North, to the place of Earth rituals to the place of stillness, and the place of letting go, and, and letting go being proportional to self acceptance on a psychological reference, you know, the degree that we let go is proportional to the degree that we have self acceptance.

So this, this place in the north have deep surrender, deep, letting go what I say, surrendering so deeply, that spring simply shows up because we let go enough, that's the East that's the movement around the wheel.

So I'm asking as I'm listening to this person's story, is this a movement into the North, might we be doing Earth rituals, or rituals of deep release and surrender, in order to touch the sacred, you know, to fully move around the wheel from west to east, there's this necessity of surrender. That is, to have a real complete passing, I say it's not a surrender you choreograph yourself, because by the very nature, if you choreograph, it is not surrender.

Sometimes it feels like being broken open from the outside, but outside forces of life, that that, that strip us to the bone, and we feel broken open. You know, what I call empty palms and open heart and, and it begins with,"I don't know what to do". That place, in that place of surrender. That's, that's necessary for grace to enter our lives.

Because without that place, grace doesn't have any wiggle room to get in there to find us. And so, the rituals, elemental rituals are ways of responding to those kind of awarenesses with people.

You know, I mentioned elemental rituals, there are so ancestral line clearing, ancestor rituals that are different. They involve elements but they also have a different type of or added focus. Along with the elemental presence.

There's another focus in terms of working with ancestral lineage traumas or disconnections or losses, lostness, or grief, that can travel through a family line. There are certain ritual ways of responding to those things as well.

So the first is in the training, the first two sessions are really about diving in deep to, to have that map, to have that orientation of understanding. So that as you do guide people, which is the eventual, you know, where we're headed with all of this as a ceremonial wilderness guide is what I call it, that you have a framework and a map for how you arrive at it. What you do with people, like there's a system of cosmology, of information that guides you to understand where they are, in offering any ritual prescription for someone, and then...

Where Did The Medicine Wheel Come From?

Kat Houghton 25:46

Kedar, But before you go on to Elaine just posted me a question about wanting to understand more about where the medicine wheel had come from, like, which traditions that draws on which cultures, did you create it? Like, where did it come from?

Kedar Brown 26:01

So that the truest response I have that comes to me immediately is it came out of the ground, it came out of the seasons, it came out of the bones of our ancestors, it came out of our, our humanity's way of orienting ourselves toward understanding creation and ourselves.

So it had to do with any ancient culture, when we go back far enough, the way that they drew their cosmology, or cosmological understanding of themselves and others was, was where they stood. So you stand on the land that your people your ancestral people are from or they lived, and you orient yourself to the east.

And what is the East, like the, if this the place of the Rising Sun, and what is the land like the plants like the orientation to creation, like as you face east, and then turning south, you know, we orient maybe seasonally toward the summer, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And again, I'll stick with the the northern hemisphere, I don't know if anybody out there is in a down below, but in the Orient, elementally, to a direction to a season.

So turning the wheel, turning the seasons, turning the directions, turning the elements. And then there's the axis mundi, you know, the grade above the grade below the heaven and earth that this demonic tree of life that connects to the end then the center place, which is of course everywhere.

Kedar Brown 27:49

So,you know, to say all ancient cultures, when you go back far enough had a cosmological way of understanding themselves and creation through a wheel of that we say first begins, in a way I'd say it begins with the directions. And so we orient ourselves in a place in a direction. And so we say, East, North, south west, or east, south west north, kind of move around the wheel this way.

And then from that place, the next thing is from a direction you might think of, then a season. Now, this is where it gets different, you know, you switch hemispheres of the planet, and things are going to be different because down below, if you go north, it doesn't get cold, it gets hot.

So the next place is, you know, I would say a seasonal imprint. And then beginning to orient yourself to all of creation is existing on a wheel, whether it's a Celtic wheel that, you know, around the Celtic wheel, they would have the, you know, maybe that beginning place at Samhain, and then we have the winter solstice, and then we have Imbolc, and then we have Beltane and then we have the summer solstice, and then we have Lughnasadh and then we're back around the wheel. And so it's a circular eight shields orientation. So we can find this, this way of relating, you know, in ancient indigenous cultures all over the planet.

So the other part is one of the earliest people to psychologize a wheel, at least in Western society, or or more modern society was Carl Gustaf young. He began to study indigenous cultures. And what he noticed in these cosmology systems, he began to overlay a psychology to it. So he might in the east, put infancy or, or spirit, you know, spirit kind of on this edge in infancy right here, this place of showing up.

And then in the south, he put reactive emotion in the physical body. And in the West, he put the psyche or adolescence turning inward the way nature begins to turn inward on itself in autumn. And in the north, he put the mind clear thought. And so, you know, from that we begin to extrapolate a whole psychological awareness that is also overlaid and integrated in, in these wheels.

So, you know, I guess I go back to my first answer, Kat, where does it come from? I think it comes out of the ground, I think, our consciousness and our own dreaming, being dreamed here from the earth, essentially in and it's like turning back towards the ground from which we've come from which we've evolved in and beginning to understand ourselves and the rest of creation.

Any other questions?

Variations of Medicine Wheel

Guest participant 31:38

Can I? I want to get more specific. Yeah, question. So from an academic standpoint, because that's how I approach things from I mean, I approach it from the heart intuitively, but also from a scholarly and intellectual direction. So basically, yes, the teachings come from the ground, grandmother spider Earth. However, for the purpose of this training, and you what you're sharing with us? Did you synthesize this from all of your various teachings and put it into a new creation for this? Or was this what was taught specifically to you from the Fosters? Excuse me, Foster and Little? And Malidoma? Or how exactly what, who synthesized all this?

Kedar Brown 32:24

Yeah, lots of different places, my synthesis of it and a lot of people have synthesized their wheel, you know, Steven Foster, Meredith Little, you know, first time I sat with him, he took four stones, red, yellow, black and white, set them on a stump and just started talking about the wheel.

You know, there are many people in West Africa - Malidoma Some - they have a five elemental cosmological wheel that looks a little different that learn a way to translate between what might be more consistent kind of wheel we might see on this continent.

There's no definitive way of organizing a cosmological Medicine Wheel -it's it's different. So a lot of it also comes from all of my experiences being in nature. When I go down to the river at sunrise and sing and offer some milk and honey to the river, as the sun's coming up and the mist is on the water. It's like Ah, that to me that's East that the new day that's that's, I can feel it, you know.

So we have that kind of experiential orientation or going out at night in deep snow under under full moon in winter and so you get a visceral experiential memory of of this and it becomes more personal so yes, there's the the academic reference points but the, but the wheels themselves are like rabbit holes you know, they, you can go down and down and down and having a map of understanding - it helps you navigate it but there's there's no bottom to it really.

So definitely Steven Foster , Meredith Little, Malidoma Some, Carl Jung, my own experiences, psychology and looking at different ways that psychology overlays onto it. And then working with people.

Like for instance, I was doing a ritual process piece of work and helping somebody prepare for Death Lodge and I can say... At least one person, two people, three people that were at this Death Lodge - Death Lodge is kind of a preparation place for getting ready for vision quest ceremony. And the person sat down and they said, I feel something in my stomach in my abdomen. Okay. And my question to them was, tell me about is it? Is it like a pressure? Or is it like an emptiness?

If they would have said pressure, my mind would have oriented toward the south and toward fire, and toward the possibility that this is going to go toward a fire ritual before we're done here.

If they say emptiness, my mind is going to turn toward Earth toward North, toward belonging toward place. And likely, you know, we're going to end up working with Earth in some capacity.

So a lot of the experiences, you know, learn kind of how to navigate the wheel and how to navigate people's story and their orientation toward ritual prescription based on what's happening in the moment. So I would say that people I've worked with have been also the greatest teacher.

This person said, actually, it was a different different Death Lodge, not not ones involving the three of you. But another one that happened after that, it was he said, emptiness. And as he talked, I just took a handful of Earth and put it in his hands. He had a memory of, of something from Israel, that his grandfather said at that moment, and before we were done, he was painted in earth, and we were walking to the river and we went into the river, and, you know, it just unfolded.

And so it's Yeah, it's experience gives you a lot of it too just having the basic map and then use it, start working with it. So let's, let me move on and save some time at the very end for questions going around looks like 19 minutes. Wendy has a question. But we can we can come back...

Cultural Appropriate vs Pan-Cultural

Guest participant 37:10

Just quickly I was awan and I entered at the end, maybe when you're doing all your rituals, I'm surrounded by different, you know, First Nations people, I'm always aware of having to be so sensitive that you're not being accused of of cultural appropriation.

That Yes, we all have a birthright to spirituality. But you know, we're drawing from from different areas in different cultures. I'm just curious, have you? Have you ever had to address this in the work that you do.

Kedar Brown 37:45

And it's part of the first session of your training, we talk about that.

Guest participant 37:49

Oh, okay.

Kedar Brown 37:50

So that's included. If you went on the website and look at what's included in each training module, you'll see all of these things spoken like that's in the first session. So there are those things that I would consider to be pan cultural, and not specific to culture, tribe, village.

And that is relationship to the elements. Relationship to initiatory rites of passage, in some form and process. And there are common elements, even even in a rite of passage around the world, there are common themes and elements like fasting, exposure, and solitude are always in there.

So relationship to the elementals, or elements, relationship to the spirits of place, nature, one like the place ones in how to be grateful and be in relationship with the spirits of place. And that's a big kind of global net when I say those words, as you know, Wendy, but, and then ancestors, these are certainly having relationship and understanding that community, the word community refers to the living and the non-iving. And we've lost that, in many ways, at least in modern society.

This understanding of relationship with ancestors is a crucial important piece and how we navigate forward. So those are those are things that considered to be a cross culture, relationship to nature, to the spirits of place, to the elementals, to ancestors to rites of passage.

They didn't belong, maybe a particular form, or structure of doing it belong one place, but the presence of itself has no specific place it just belongs without being everywhere. So I distinguish those things, it's different than, you know, in my work with Malidoma, and going to Africa with him, I learned the process of grief ritual the way that he does a grief ritual.

Now, even he took what they did in the village because you can't do exactly that, and, and translated it to a model that could be delivered here. But I also consider even offering that, like, I don't teach that, that's something, you know, he taught me and gave me permission to do, among other things, so it's, but there's so focus on that, which is pan cultural, and, and this idea of developing relationship to, to those things that we have gotten out of relationship with, it's caused the mess that we're in.

And this, there's a thread of connection that goes from that, that can go out here and connect to racism, it can go out here and connect to climate disaster, to economic injustice, social injustice, it's like this disassociation of relationship with the other.

And, and so again, so much of the first session is to reconnect here. And with dealing with any unresolved wounds, traumas, turmoils, that's, that's the beginning place. And then from there, extending it out to the other, the other being not just human.

So thank you.

Working With Ancestors

Kedar Brown 41:58

So that speaks of some of the other things in the sessions that we we lean into and teach. And so in the third session, not just understanding my story from an elemental, where they are on the wheel and what's going on, but to really understand this concept of working with ancestors.

And as some of you know, that I always like to say that, you know, being an ancestor doesn't, or being dead doesn't make one an ancestor, no more than being alive, make somebody healthy, conscious, and well.

And that, like the old Irish proverb says, that the troubles in the other world can only be healed from this world. And the troubles in this world can only be healed from that world. And so there's this in that proverb. There's this reciprocal understanding and relationship that's necessary, that as they tend to fire there, they help us here.

And as we tend this fire, we help that the ones that are stuck in between heal. And so I present it in more of that fashion. And if somebody wants to have a conversation, that's more psychological like epigenetics or family constellation work, you can frame it that way.

But I'm framing like, no, we're actually working with the the unresolved ancestors, and we're working in connection with those that are well in spirit to assist us in healing those difficulties and turmoils.

A Guide’s Awareness

And so there's, I think, as a as a ceremonial guide, you, it's extremely important to have that awareness. So everything doesn't simply get psychologized into a person's personal biography. That it can extend beyond that. And whether it's, you know, generational trauma or things like that, but just being aware of that lense, and how do you work with that, in terms of accessing support, and from those realms and calling on assistance, like it, say, like to personalize this, you know, to call on your great grandfather or great grandmother, the one who lived well and died well.

And I'll have time to share lots of stories about all that, but it's that concept that, you know, we're working in collaboration with our ancestors, for our descendants, you know, in the lives that are to come.

So, we spend that the third session with that, and in that session will include things like basic journeying techniques, working with the drum and how to journey - also techniques that I've both learned in practice and honed over the years around what could be called remote viewing, or remote tracking. Or if I borrow a psychological word, we could call it intuitive resonance.

But you know, you think of somebody and they call you on the phone, that's always kind of their favorite example, like, how do you do that intentionally? How do you focus your your, your intent, and your receptivity to attract that kind of information from somebody you're working with? Intentionally.

So it's not just oh, this happened, it was really neat. You know, I thought of them or thought of this and this thing happened. But the methodology behind tracking in that fashion, and reading in that fashion, and it always, I love, I love that this particular practice session, because it always surprises people, how, how skilled they actually can be, when they learn a few techniques of how to do that.

One of the things I'll do after teaching a few things to the apprentices is they'll have one half the line stand here and the other half stand here in front, everybody's facing somebody central about three feet in front of them. And they'll say, all right, everybody on this side of the line, I want you to blindfold yourself, close your eyes, keep your eyes closed, and then everybody that's on the other side, I want you to go stand in front of somebody else.

And then those with your blindfolds on, now, I want you to do these steps that we've talked about. And then notice what what you pick up all by itself, thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, images, anything at all that starts to come into your field. Just notice it and remain silent, the other person will remain silent.

And then after three minutes, take off your blindfold and tell the person everything you know about him. Everything that came up. And so to use a Barbara Brennan word, people begin to learn what is their particular method of high sense perception. Way more people are kinesthetically oriented than they would aware like then they are aware of that you can track things in your body that don't belong to you.

And it's as information about the other as one of my native teachers said to me said, You know, I was relating something I was feeling or thinking and he said, Is that yours? And I realized what he was asking me, like, Okay, let me check in No, actually, it's not mine. It comes from this other place. And so it's just a simple exercise.

So when you're, when you're guiding people, you're expanding your awareness of what you're tracking, not just simply from them, but also how do you track the greater environment around you. So that, you know Hawk flies in from the north and lands in a tree and in squawks three times, and all of a sudden, you're getting information about some and you just bring it into what's going on.

You just check it out. Literally, I've had stuff like that happen. bird flies in touch, the top of somebody said flew out of the lodge, landing in a tree, disappeared. And an hour later when the person is out there in the woods, standing under a tree in bracing, say their child self. That bird is nested now eight feet above them standing in the nest feeding babies. Like how does that happen? That oriented working with many, many things.

Kat Houghton 49:25

I wanted to let you know we're at seven minutes.

Working With Elementals

Kedar Brown 49:27

Okay. So third third session is a lot of that beginning to enter people's awareness into that field of information and how to work with it. The fourth session is dedicated to working with the elementals. So we focus each day on one of the one of the elements, do teachings and then that night we'll do like radical fire ritual and then we'll move to earth the next day and really focus on on working with earth and all the aspects of Earth.

Spirit as elemental medicine, and then do a radical Earth ritual that night. And then so each each one of those days of that session is really focused on deepening our relationship with working with the elementals in a very visceral personal way.

Importance of the Unfamiliar

The fifth session is, is the quest itself for the trainees, for the apprentices where we go somewhere else in the country. And when I say that, for those of you who don't know where I am, I'm in Asheville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. So all of the training sessions are here in this area on our land, except session five.

And my commitment to the training group is to take them somewhere else. Hopefully, that is unfamiliar territory. So you'd be a little off balance, you're not simply going to be questing in your backyard or on the same ground, we've been doing all the sessions, we want to go to a land that's unfamiliar, when we haven't been on.

How To Realize Your Calling

Taos, and we'll quest there. And then the last session, at the end of the training is we call the giveaway. And so we kind of bring it all together and begin to look at you know, as some people would be deeply called into this, this form of guiding.

But it's not simply what I like to tell people, this is not about teaching you how to take somebody into woods for two weeks, and given them experience from over 11, 12 days of preparation for a four day night solo, and then bringing him back and listening to stories and teaching people how to do mirroring and storytelling and personal forming your own personal mythology.

It's not just about that, it's also about if, if a father walks into your office, and you know, says I'm pulling my hair out, I've got a 17 year old daughter, I have no clue what to do with, you know, their mom died, you know, four years ago, I'm lost. What do I do about this.

And so you quickly can put it into a rite of passage framework, and begin to work with him on developing a, an initiatory rite of passage that would really serve this young lady. So it's something that can be applied on a one on one again, with somebody just comes to you in your office, and you work with them from that framework, and offering ritual prescriptions, and they do them and come back and you work with them like that.

Or, it also includes being able to being prepared to take somebody out for an extended period of time, or take a group out for an extended period of time. In the nuts and bolts and form and process of holding space, in a good way like that. Everything from what goes in your first aid box, to site selection, you know, when you're looking for land to do this kind of work.

So it's it's applicable applicable-ability - to stretch that word out, is much broader than say you you end this with being able to take somebody on a vision quest experience.

It's much broader in its application, and simply just that - I've had professional singer, you know, come through our program. And although I'm not sure they're not going to end up guiding one day, but they certainly took this work and began to weave it into their music. And their, when they would do concerts around the country. They also they have these new songs that are coming out of this.

I have school teachers that begin to develop curriculum for certain grades and how to begin to create a kind of a rite of passage scenario, you know, for certain grade levels. So it's how it shows up in one's life can can look quite varied.

It doesn't have to just look like this one thing. So I know we're at the top of the hour. I'm also remembering Kat that you have to exit for another thing soon. I'm willing to stay on and answer questions and delving a little deeper.

If folks have questions more specific about the experience and while Kat's on here she's about to finish. If somebody wanted to send a question her way, before she takes off, she might be able to speak to her own experience of going through it. Thoughts, questions, curiosities?

Wow.

I've harangued people into silence.

A Recent Trainee’s Perspective

Guest participant 55:31

I'll just ask Kat, because you've gone through it, just the person that you were before, whether it was you know, mentally, spiritually, whatever, and where you're at now, what, what is some of the, if you wish to speak to some of the evolution you have experienced in going through the process?

Kat Houghton 55:54

I think we'd need another hour for me to really answer that question. I'm gonna try and pick up a couple of things. I mean, I came into this training program, I was pushed in by a death of a very close person to me. So I was already sort of pushed into this life and forced death and forced rite of passage. So, so much has changed over the last two years that it's really hard to separate it out.

One of the clear things to me that at that time that I was experiencing the death of it was my partner. I was having a mental internal conversation with myself. So I'm a psychologist, PhD in Psychology, highly trained in the Western worldview of the mind and how we function.

So I was having this internal sort of conversation with myself about how to reconcile how I understand I function as a psychological being with, with the sense of the spirit world, and like, now, my partner is not in physical form, but I feel him, I know, he's here I can, I'm still reaching for him, I can still like, sense that connection.

So I was going through a period of like, how do I make sense of that for myself. And then, and I've made it, I've made a very deliberate, intentional decision that I was going to suspend what I had been taught about those kinds of beliefs, and actually allow it allow myself to believe that he still existed and was in a different format that I could actually communicate with him.

I made that decision very consciously, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna try this and just see what happens, I can always change, just go back to thinking how it was before. So part of the making that decision was part of what opened me into, like, being able to then step into this apprenticeship with Kedar because I was like, Well, if I'm going to go, I might as well just go deep, deep and right, I might as fully explore that.

So I think that's one of the biggest things that's changed in my life is that is allowing myself to experience that to be able to still hold my kind of Western understanding and then to be able to hold this whole other understanding and still on the journey of like, putting those together. How do I weave those together into something that makes - that I can articulate it makes sense to me inside but how can I articulate that is still part of my my ongoing process, but you can probably imagine that sort of ripple effect that that had on my life, I'm not going to go into the details of it.

But that is one of the sort of more profound pieces that I think has really changed for me.

Guest participant 58:36

Thank you, thank you for sharing that. Welcome. Beautiful.

A Closing Poem

Kedar Brown 58:42

Alright, anyone else, any other questions or want to end with a poem and also state that I know on the website, I know the early registration discount ended on the 12th, but I'm going to extend it to anyone okay Kat, take care - thanks for being, on to anyone that is you know, signed up registered and got this, this particular webinar to just simply extend the discount for another week.

For those that are considering it, in terms of you that are registered, which are all of you and some more. Now the poem I want to end with, let me find it here.

Okay.

I'll share it with you if I can get it on the screen. Before I put it on the screen... ...I'll give you a little background to this poem. Before I put it on the screen. Some of you have heard this.

It's called Follow Your Name. And it came as an inspiration to me of a 17 year old man that I work with some years ago that was from South Africa. He was born there, too. And then he moved from there when he was eight years old, he moved to Washington, DC. So already, you can see the whole disruption and cosmological view of everything, going from a village in South Africa to Washington, DC.

And so the initiatory path that he followed, took a turn from where it would have followed and ended up in gangs and, you know, substance abuse. And those are the reasons he ended up in front of me because he had followed that societal map of initiation.

But he told me the story. I think that one of the first days I met with him, he told me this story. When I asked him, I said, Do you have another name? Because I knew about some of the tribes practices. I said, Do you have another name? And he said, Yes. And he looked at me kind of odd. I said, What is it? He said, Well, when I was little, I went to live with my goji, I think is what he called her, his grandmother. And I lived with her for a while, and she gave me a different name to give me another name. And I said, Well, you write it down for me.

And so he wrote down this really long name across his his notebook. And I said, read it to me. And so what he read were elements and animals and features in the landscape is what was embedded or inscribed in that name that she had his grandmother had given him. And, and then he got a sad look in his face. And he looked away, and he looked up. He said, You know, when I left when I was eight years old, she told me, she said, Follow your name.

And I said, Have you been doing that? And he said, No, I've not been following my name. Since then, I've also learned talk worked with a teenage girl from the Seminole tribe down in Florida told me very similar story, told me her name. So this practice of receiving a name, either from an elder or following a rite of passage, that these these names are not meant to be descriptions of who you are, or who is in front of them. Um, they're meant to be roadmaps.

They don't describe who you are, they describe where you're going. And, and I would say, you know, if you get an accurate name of elder gives you an accurate name, you'll know it because it will not feel comfortable. And the reason it won't feel comfortable is because you haven't lived into it yet. It may take your entire life to get comfortable with it.

So the idea is and so from that, all of that understanding, teaching from working with this young man, and that young lady, wrote this poem to share with you as a way to end this time together. Okay, so you can see it here. I'll read it.

Pay attention… pay attention

Be careful not to distract yourself from yourself

By focusing on the obstacles in your life.

Focus on the delivery of your medicine,

Not on the stories in your head

Where you recount your limitations and loss.

Do not indulge in such self-importance

As a way to avoid taking responsibility for your medicine

And the gift of healing you came here to offer.

You are the hero’s and heroines of your own story.

If you are not initiated into the

Bone memory… into the mythology… of your own life,

You will likely be living an existence that is not entirely your own

And the life you know you must live

Is the one standing just a few paces in front of you

Looking back over its shoulder with eyes wide

Waiting for you to remember.

Apprentice yourself to yourself

Walk to the horizon of your own dreams.

The place where you live in the absence of story;

The place where the sharp edges of this unfolding moment

Demands your full attention.

Where are you? .... I am Here!

Who are you? .... I am this Moment!

Pay attention… pay attention…

Do not walk in the world in such a way

That another gives you a name

You have no belonging to.

(~Kedar S. Brown, Jan. 2013)

Final Comments

I want to thank you all for for hanging in there with us. I have gone a little bit over the hour. If you want to talk more personally about the training. If you go to the website www.ritesofpassagecouncil.org, you can also set up a 20 minute free consult call with me if you want to talk in more detail about it. I do have a few spots left for the upcoming start date in August. And I'm happy to speak speak to you a little further about any individual specific concerns or questions.

All right, well thank you all again for joining in in this circle gathering this evening and I wish you all well.

Guest participant 1:06:40

Thank you Kedar.

Kedar Brown 1:06:44

Anything else before we close? All right. Well, I hope hope to see you around those sacred fires one day down the road. Thank you. Go well.