In April, I ran the first Sacred Edge, our monthly embodied and relational ritual for meeting yourself, again and again, in a room full of other people.
For a while, every gathering initiated me. Waves of fear and grief moved through me before each one. My body shook. Holding the work meant meeting parts of myself I’d never had the capacity to meet and feel before. If I had, I’d have been teaching earlier.
The morning after last week’s Sacred Edge, I noticed how different it is now. It doesn’t initiate me every time anymore. It used to be so crunchy. I’ve met the main parts it was there for me to meet, at least for now.
August was full. Kiki and I taught a four-week True Contact cohort, then a weekend intensive for parents with their little ones in our home, alongside our monthly Sacred Edge, with our team supporting us through all of it. Both sold out. Eight days of teaching in three and a half weeks, and the deepest work Kiki and I have ever shared.
At the end of it, this summer felt like the completion of a five-year initiation. What I can feel now is that the initiation didn’t complete. What I’m being initiated into changed.
Now it’s trusting what is true, in me and as a steward of Co-Awaken, and surrendering my attachment to outcome. This month, that looked like following the desire to create deeper contact with our teachings while honoring the team’s capacity. The more I step in, the more I trust my resilience to move through it, even when it feels like death.
And it isn’t only me. This summer, Erica and Jessyca, the two other members of our team, went from assisting to facilitating at Sacred Edge. In our team meetings, we routinely set the content aside to meet the tension underneath, at the attachment layer, because there’s no other way we want to create together.
A new way of being together as a team is taking shape: a shared devotion to meeting what is true.
I Am in No Way Initiating You
The word I keep coming back to is self-initiation. Traditionally, initiation happens within a community: elders hold the rite, guide you through an ordeal, and welcome you back changed, with a new place among your people. By self-initiation, I mean choosing that crossing ourselves, making contact with places deep inside us that we once needed to avoid to survive.
The day before Jessyca co-led her first Sacred Edge with me, we sat in the backyard to prepare. I shared my desire for her to step into it as an initiation. When I said it again, I heard myself clarify: I am in no way initiating you. It’s a self-initiation.
I’ve come to think it’s the only way this work can be taught. We can create a beautifully held container, and we do, but each person has to choose to step in and make contact with what they’ve long resisted and avoided.
It’s a fundamental tenet of the school: the only way we can awaken participants is by being at the edge of our own awakening. The only way we can transmit initiation is if we ourselves are being initiated.
We don’t teach from what we’ve mastered. We teach from inside what’s unfolding in us. Unless we meet the initiation in ourselves, whatever initiation we create in the field won’t feel true. It becomes a forced and constructed experience.
In retrospect, that’s why those early gatherings shook me. I had to meet those places in myself to transmit to those places in others.
Borrowing Nervous Systems
This month, on a medicine retreat, I got to practice that in an even deeper way.
A familiar panic and dissociation came, the one I’ve met on this retreat before. But this time it took me somewhere I’d never quite reached: something that felt like baby consciousness, like I was back at my own birth, where the dissociation seemed to begin. A layer of fuzziness that has shaped my experience for as long as I can remember.
I knew what I needed. I reached for the practice we teach. I kept borrowing the nervous systems of other participants, and their arms for the dyad practice. I let myself dissociate, came back into contact, and let go again. Each time, a little more of the fog lifted and I felt more here, until I pulled myself back into the present moment.
What stays with me is the agency and self-initiation in it. The panic was the same panic I’ve met before. This time I chose to enter it, with another nervous system helping me hold the thread, instead of waiting for it to pass.
At Co-Awaken, we’ve often described secure attachment with Life as trusting that Life is unconditionally holding us. After the retreat, it also feels like this. It isn’t “I trust that Life will give me what I want.” It’s “I trust my capacity to remain in relationship with whatever Life brings me.”
Self-initiation is one of the ways that capacity grows.
We can spend years organizing our lives around what we’re not willing to feel, sometimes without knowing it’s there. The resistance becomes perception, then story, then what we believe about other people, ourselves, and reality. Each time we initiate ourselves, less of the past is projected onto the present, and that changes what becomes possible between us.
Since the retreat, life feels less foggy. More clear.
The initiation hasn’t stopped.
If you’d like to follow the school as it grows, Letters from Co-Awaken is where we share what we’re learning and what’s coming. Something new for True Contact is on its way this fall.