The Gentle Unfolding: Initiation Midwife

From Patreon page: Initiation Midwifery

More and more I see the necessity for change now. And it is getting old writing those words. It is getting cold being caught in the swirling pool of what the heck have we done?

It is at the point now where the sun is setting, spreading bruised purple shades over a very darkening future. It is time to accept that, roll our sleeves up and get to work.

First I have a confession to make.

I have been working for 4 months for one of the dirtiest companies in New Zealand. It is called Fonterra, and it systematically funds the plundering of the rivers, conversion of soil to leachate and the money generated keeps off shore investors happy. While the riverbanks turn to sludge and the delicate eco systems are inundated with phosphorus and nitrogen, turning acre upon acre in to desolate dust and chemically charged grass.

I worked for them putting their cheese on the shelves of the supermarkets every morning to make sure the good customers bought them and the dairy prices stayed well. I did that job to fund my own Initiation into Adulthood.

There was a dance going on all those months. Within me and on the outside. Systemically, I can not fight the beast. I can not point and say “it is that person who is burning our world, who is turning the forest to bank accounts and normalising rape”. I can not fight the people, and I would not want to. There is huge capacity for love in every gesture a human being makes, whether it is smelling a flower or rushing out the door to school There is a "yes" to life in the contraction of their muscles, like dust loves the sun into a mot. There is the taste of love every where and in that I am free to choose.

Every bit of money I made went to keeping me able to live in a context out side of the mainstream. I used the money paid to me by Fonterra to donate towards the building of creation studio for Radically Alive Women. I used the funds to pay skilled space holders to navigate me through some of the most painful survival strategies and huge emotional blocks. I funnelled that money into building out and inhabiting a regenerative culture with other people. Most preciously I go to build my own capacity as a creative force of nature connected to my own resources and ultimately after stumbling in whispers silences, muddy water, something very precious emerged, something essential and deeply mine, a job title for my being here: An Initiation Midwife.

Of all the resources on this planet, the most abused is that of the human resources. This enables the abuse and misuse of everything else. To abuse the resources of a human being means doing things like forcing money to be the central question to young people’s lives. When you left school the way was always clear. You are either becoming better at making money. Which means you are making sure corporations thrive and the money loops continues. Or …. Actually I never got to the other options because my pleaser drive kicked in and I was like “ok yup, ill make money”. Show me how.

Unfortunately I must have missed so of the lessons. Unfortunately I was not still enough to fully swallow everything, not silent enough to agree. Unfortunately I spent too much time with the animals. Unfortunately my parents took me travelling for a bulk of my schooling and I saw a lot of the world outside of the town I grew up. Unfortunately I missed some crucial lessons and missed the final breaking in.

This meant I could still hear the whisper of there is something more. This meant I still had th vision to see through the pretence and into the wilderness within. This meant I was still in touch with my own rhythm regardless of the schedule of the day. However I still accumulated a lot of strategies within myself that distanced me from my authentic touch point with the world. I reached a point where it was time to start listening to thst whisper again, reconnecting back to myself or… leave it locked away forever. The time came after completing training in Nursing and one year working in the operating theatres, the pain of doing something I had not fully chosen and was not fully me was getting hard for me to ignore.

This rapid heartbeat, this inability to sleep, this isolation and sense of living a life that is not mine, could be handled one way – I could manage the symptoms as best I could, plastering a smile, cover the gaping wound of my heart, try harder, work more hours. Meanwhile my dreams when I did sleep were getting intense, images of past lives, of burnings, of women, of a snake slipping into my room. I could drink wine like other “young professionals” and make the stupor even more vague. Dizzying myself deeper into the silent terror of a disconnected world.

Deciding to turn towards myself and my own impulses is huge and terrifying work. It means having to face every micro agreement with the world I had made so that I could fit into it just so. It meant disappointing people I had sworn to keep happy. It meant upsetting the whole balance of the thing. As I scrapped away at layers and layers of fears, greifs, hidden agreements with myself. What emerged was not a profound clarity of direction it was more a capacity to truly see and be with what human beings are up to on the planet and how I had been conditioned to play my part as an obedient, citizen. A good daughter, even as a rebel. All those roles left me no room to grow up and start taking responsibility for my life. I was not able to truly stand in my authentic power with all my agency intact and resources available to me if I was still trying somewhere to be good, nice, fit in and be ok. This meant I could only go so far in creating and sourcing what I need in order to fully thrive on purpose in this world.

After that comes the question “Now What?”. In that question a whole new territiory opens up it is the a terriotory of yet to be discovered ctions, directions playing fields and conexts, situations and games, identities, traditions. Everything that makes up a human culture becomes optional which means most excitingly that it becomes a very real choice to decide to build a new culture. To go through the growing pains of that and learn together how initiation into radical responsibility really goes. What it actually means to be an adult with a purpose, a direction, clarity and projects that unfold consciousness, creativity, collaboration, reconnect people to earth and to each other and to their own being. One thing remains clear now is that women hold a huge key in doing this. There is a deep connection between community, earth and the innate knowing of gestating and birthing something from the yet to be known.

This morning this became clear. Over a cocoa something else bubbled up, held gentle witness by two elders, life moving full and alive, time having rubbed the glass clear, joy spilling easily from the corners of their lived in faces. 

There is a way of being with the world that is with out words. Before words. It is a place to be experienced before adding anything. This is the place that something else can emerge from. And it is here in that place the changes happen that are most profound to a human. Delicate and also emmense, alchemical changes that can tap and the fibre of a being.

It is clear to me that my job is to midwife my own emergence through training and initiation and through that to midwife the initiation and emergence for others. It is scary and sad work that requires a team and a lot of anger to make happen.

Today in the emerging space a space. My fear and my sadness was witnessed without trying to fit it into anything, that simple act is enough to let emerge through, to let what is not yet formed or in words to be given space to curiously rotate and emerge into it's next form.

I am scared because it is now that these things must happen. I lay in my bed and let the winds move through me. I let the winds whisper to me of the timing running out, of this generration, my people to be the ones that turn the great tide of the future, as the chances are wearing thinner. 

It is important that sourcing a different culture that will create more options for the planets, humans and all of life. For that we need people who will go into the formless, sense without words, holdspace for the gestation and delivery of the yet to be known.

For that we need midwives, not for human beings babies (although that matters too) midwives with skills of authentic adulthood initiation, who take a stand for calling the Being through ftrom child hood into the resources of an adult able to source and act from a place of Radical Responsibility. 

That is what my job is now. The task seems huge. First resource myself to reconnect to own inner resources and outer resources. Then learn to hold the space so that others can do so too. It does not happen in a linear movement it comes in waves and laminar scapes. In sourcing this work I must go into places and parts of me that have no words yet, that are ugly and hurt. The parts that are there to be gestated and unfolded, after all if anyone did know exactly what to do, it would already be done.

My sadness leads me to the gentle connection that is palpable when people simply are. Together, without trying to beat or prove or SURVIVE together, rather they are sensing into what it really means to be you and me just here just now, without needing to know. There are specific skills for me to learn of this journey. I must learn how to call on a team and hot to feel, how to keep feeling and healing, and navigating and thinking and writing and sharing. There are nudges that come from far off, unexpectedly so through the Archetypal forces of the universe and when starting to collaborate with them, things really stared to move along. There is a wisdom deep within that every person holds and is waiting to be unfolded, always. A deep commitment to that. I go along my path of unfolding that because that is where I meet you, together we can source something else.

It is for You, It is for Gaia and it is for the Generations to Come.

I am so Glad you are here.

Love

Millicent