Part 2: Initiation Meditation

I went into a meditation to ask myself: what is blocking me from being in alignment with my power? I placed my hands over my solar plexus. Turned on some soft music and told my body that I was open to listening.

I could feel the fire burning there behind my hands. I saw a vision of me walking up to a huge fire pit. I knew that I had to step into the middle and choose to burn away the old identities that are no longer serving me.

So, I stepped up into the fire. I fell to my knees as the flames, which felt like warm comforting touches, pulled from me the girl who lived as a victim. I allowed the shedding to happen. I chose to be here. I watched myself shed the skin of the girl who didn’t have a voice, who couldn’t stand up for herself. On my hands & knees, the shedding felt necessary and intense. I could not live one more day in this skin. And so, I didn’t. I wouldn’t. The layers were peeled away one by one. I wept into the fire for I didn’t know what would come after this. I cried as I let go of all that I knew how to be. I didn’t know what was to come, all I knew was that I couldn’t stay where I was at. Story after story was pulled from my bones of the abuse I experienced, I could not hold onto even one piece of this identity filled with blame. I watched them melt away. All the different faces of my grief, my sadness, my depression, my shame, I was letting them go. Pieces I had held onto for years. I cried them out of me. Letting them go as tenderly as I could, for at one time in my life, they were what kept me safe.

Once those layers had been washed in the fire, I felt a new rawness. The music was growing around me towards a crescendo & I felt my eyes begin to fill with fire. My body was filled with all the anger I had not been able to express or let out. I opened my mouth to scream & the fire of generations of pain was behind it. The hot rage spilling out of my mouth, out of my eyes, out of my heart.. I let it. I not only let it, I embraced it and reveled in it! I let it all in. I allowed myself to feel angrier than I had ever felt in my entire life! I saw antlers beginning to grow out of me & took the ash from what I had just shed & spread it across my face like warpaint. The warpaint of entering into the realm of my own wildness. I screamed gutturally from my chest. I know I sounded like a wild animal & I reveled in the feeling of it all. I embraced this part of me that had been scared to show its face. I felt a doorway of new power opening up inside of me.

This part of me that is willing to open up to my own wild nature, to step into the fire, to honor the return of my anger. This is who I am stepping into. I was still on my hands & knees in the fire. Howling out all the pain that had welled up inside me through the years. I bared my teeth and let the fire pour into me and out of me. I was shaking with the raw power that I possessed. I allowed myself to be completely consumed by it. I screamed as loudly as possible, over and over and over again, the fire in my throat was unlocking me. I tore my clothes off & continued to paint myself with the ashes of what I had just burned.

My skin was on fire, my heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest with the overflow of raw energy that was pouring out of me. It wasn’t enough to be consumed by the fire. I wanted to be the fire. I loved the feeling of fire pouring out of me. The feeling of changing into something untamable! Of turning into a creature that could not be caught, manipulated or forced to do anything. Returning to my own wild nature was the soothing I needed. It was the calming balm that my soul had been asking for.

The messages began to pour through loud and clear: I was never without my power. It has always been inside me. Giving my own anger up to the fire was the beginning of my initiation. To have my power is to have the power to control and direct my own anger.

I have a right to be here. I have a right to feel. I have a right to take up space.

As I listened to the messages coming from the wild place inside me, everything began to calm down. The fire was not holding me the way it had in my rage. Like a dear friend who knew exactly how to direct the fire so that it did not burn anyone. The fire was teaching me, it was showing me how to master this part of myself. The flames died down to low licking sparks. I was feeling a return to myself that was new. I now knew the power that lived inside me. The rawness. The wild woman that is always right under the surface, waiting for her time to be set free.

Because I knew what I was capable of now, I didn’t need to express my anger to anyone. I had transformed it into something else. A ritual that had initiated me into the sacred within myself. My sacred wildness. My sacred anger. I got to hold these pieces in my hands. There was a knowing in my bones that no person could ever take that away from me. As I stepped out of the center of the fire, I knew I had experienced a great change here. I belonged to myself again. I knew my own power.

I had stepped into the fire not knowing who I would be on the other side.

I let the initiation take me. I didn’t know where we were going. All I knew is that I was along for the ride & it would take me where I was meant to go. And it did.

Into the fires of embracing my own wild nature.