Walking Into the Soul Fire Together

This week is the first direct pass of my Uranus Opposition. Uranus Opposition happens once a lifetime, it’s a transit that occurs around age 40–43 and marks a profound energetic turning point. It is often described as a "midlife awakening."

Gail Burkett, my dear friend and elder mentor has been preparing me for this. She held space for me while I designed a ceremony and I thought through how I would undertake this initiation into mid life.

The day before the first direct pass, I spent the morning thinking deeply and writing about all the things I want to let go of, past experiences, places and relationships I want to call my energy and power back from in order to ready myself for this life transition.

My son and husband created a labyrinth for me, both the kids decorated it with items from my altar, stones we’ve collected, statues I’ve made from wild clay. They drummed for me while I walked the labyrinth and stated my intent for my ritual. I called in the directions and I greeted and thanked my helping spirits and ancestors. We moved outside and started clearing a space for an outdoor altar. I planted a rose. The rose has long been my ally, often holding my heart and helping me integrate. I wanted to honour her spirit on this day.

Then, as I stood barefoot in the rain, with my husband by my side, I set fire to my pages of writing. I spoke out loud the patterns and beliefs that I wanted to let go of and I burned them. As I burned them I breathed in the heat, and I expelled it from my body, imagining myself letting go of all of these threads and connections still draining me after being long in the past. I spoke to my grandmothers, I honoured them and thanked them and spoke of my intention to do that by being free and sovereign in ways they were not able to be. I stated my intention to step into my soul’s calling, to be held by the Earth and the Cosmos, ready to live my sacred life with clarity, courage, care and grace. Then I scattered the ashes.

I know that this Uranus Opposition will be a stormy rocky time, where I may lose myself and find myself many times over. I will spiral and swirl. But I think through ceremony, I will be able to hold my centre. I have many ceremonies planned this year, to encompass the whole transition. This is a soul initiation and I am grateful to my friends and family for being my loving witnesses.

When it comes to ceremony, as a white English mother in a culture built on colonialism, I walk a path of remembering what my ancestors once knew, not to appropriate, but to repair, to listen, and to walk toward wholeness alongside my children and community. I hold deep respect for the Indigenous and land-connected cultures who have kept soul-rooted ways alive, often against all odds. In England, we do have some deeply ancestral rooted traditions, yet often they are not readily accessible, so we have to create our ceremonies from what feels right and true. It’s often about a deep listening to my inner self, while being rooted in the Earth. I need to do this because somewhere along the line, it became dangerous or unsafe for my ancestors to hold these threads. Whatever it was that meant we dropped this thread of the weave of life, we didn’t just lose ceremonies, we lost a way of knowing ourselves. We lost the sacred mirror that helped us grow. And in that silence, something else crept in: fear, confusion, and a disconnection from our soul paths. That’s not accidental, it’s deliberate cultural and spiritual destruction to make our powerful soul truths unspeakable and unknowable. I hold a rage for this loss that says, “This matters. This important and beautiful thing has been stolen and destroyed and no one seems to know what they are missing.”

So as I watch as our culture unravels and collapses what becomes clear to me is that Bill Plotkin is right. Humans are in arrested development. Our Industrial consumerist materialist culture is stuck in adolescence and most people do not ever go beyond that developmental stage. And because it has been this way for generations, there are no true elders to show them how. Gail’s guidance and love through my soul initiations and rites of passages has given me new pathways to walk in my own way, and I will forever be grateful, the presence of someone in my life who is consciously helping me to become an elder is activating something ancient in me.

We now live in a world where there is a huge split between those who have matured into a soul centric adulthood, with a strong understanding of who they are and their ecological soul purpose, and those who haven’t. Those divides are visible in the cracks and tears of our social fabric and often we come across people with unintegrated nervous systems, stuck in a developmental stage of adolescence and swimming in past traumas, struggling to find meaning in their lives.

When I look around at the western materialist culture that surrounds me, I can see that our ways of being have been built on layers of trauma. Gabor Mate says that trauma is a separation from ourselves. We have been raised to separate our bodies from our minds, our children from their families, our people in our communities, ourselves from the Earth. Compartmentalised, pathologised, ticking boxes, a list of labels and identities, avoidance normalised and encouraged. We aren’t just separate from the wild world, we are also separate from parts of ourselves. Parts we’ve left behind in the past. Parts we’ve severed so we don’t have to face them so we can just keep on keeping on.

Our belief in our separateness simultaneously cuts us off from our responsibility and accountability as members of the Earth Community as well as putting walls of loneliness up between us and the rest of the Living World. We do not feel like we belong. We hold beliefs about Food, Sex, Water, Insects, Bacteria, Plants, even our own bodies and minds which hold separateness and immaturity at their heart. It’s like we live on autopilot, just moving through each of these relationships and not being fully present with it. Each of us will hold our own map of separation and maturity, our own tangles of trauma that lead us to live our lives as if we are totally alone in the universe; rather than beings made from living water and bacteria, surrounded by leaves and roots, sending signals through the soles of our feet into the living, listening web of mycelium.

One of the things I let go of in my ceremony was my programming around hyperindependence. I asked to release myself from it and embrace reciprocity and the abundance that would bring. I recognise now that I can’t only be open to giving, in order for reciprocity to work I have to be open to recieve. This false humility I have instilled in me to never ask for any help or to hide from people’s gratitude, needs to go because it puts me in a situation where I don’t get to fully experience reciprocity. And reciprocity is the basis of all relationship.

I’m grinning because this is probably a good place to put a subscribe button…

While modern industrial culture remains stuck in adolescence, many cultures around the world have maintained soul-centric ways of being, rites of passage, and deep ecological belonging, even in the face of colonisation and displacement. But in the dominant culture, it is clear that the cultivated separation and immaturity is not serving us or the Earth. What we are called to do right now, is examine where we feel separate and seek to break down those internal walls. They only exist outside of us because they exist within us, and for our children they may not even exist at all yet. We are being asked to mature beyond what our culture is set up to allow, we need to provide the pathways for our children to do that too.

As a home educating parent, my main work is to create cultural containers for our children to dance in. This is sacred work, and it often requires me to look at my shadows. In this community building work, many times, I have had to repattern how I hold responsibility, safety and power. A strong container is not boundaryless and I have been initiated into holding boundaries in new ways. This is what makes a strong container courageous and coherent, and this is what is needed in an incoherent world. In the wider collective, people are often able to live in and contribute to chaos without self-reflection or accountability. In these coherent containers, people are invited to step into coherence or to vibrate out. Rites of passage and initiations are similar to this but for your own soul, it's like a point to pause and bring yourself together, to come into coherence, to look at your soul's vibration, to identify what no longer fits and shed it. To listen to what your soul needs, not to the trauma, not to the conditioning… but to what lies underneath all those layers.

Following my last post “A soul is not a thing you have”, this question has been deeply on my mind. What does it mean to not just raise a child, but to nurture a soul into it’s unfolding?

What if the goal of parenting in this time of great change is not to raise well adjusted consumers who follow the life path laid out by modernity… birth > school > uni > work > retirement > death… but to create the conditions and story that support our children to step into true deep exploration of their souls and the great mystery?

How do we guide them not into usefulness, but into wholeness, how do we raise them not for achievement, but for soul?

And that leads me to ask a few questions…

What are the actions that prevent soul centred living? I have written in more depth about many of these in past articles…

• Schools and institutions that reward compliance, performance, and disconnection from land and body.

• Consumerist conditioning that tells children their worth is external and upholds billionaires as aspirational.

• Suppression of grief, rage and shadow, leaving children with no template for how to feel or fall apart.

• Over-scheduling, productivity obsession and comparison, which crowd out wildness, slowness, and mystery.

• Linear life path narratives that erase the natural spirals of descent, death, and rebirth.

• Elderhood and death positioned as something to fear or be disgusted with rather than embraced as an inevitable part of life.

• Absence of true elders and rites of passage, leaving children uninitiated and unmirrored.

• Fear of nature and difficulty assessing risks, children being removed from nature because it’s dangerous. They aren’t trusted to assess risk themselves or understand natural hazards

And, what are the steps we can take as parents to ensure we are creating the conditions for soul-rooted, Earth-embedded, and developmentally whole humans?

• Hold consent and co-regulation, deep listening as important values, advocate for them in the face of these things being undermined.

• Let them live wild and free. Give them as much free play in nature as possible, allow wildness and wonder. Let them touch the plants and get to know their spirits. Let their senses develop to sense when a plant is poisonous.

• Surround them with elders, mentors and adults who reflect and see their essence.

• Talk of feelings, dreams, spirit, metaphor, the mythic, the earth, the mycellium, the birds, tell them stories that honour the animals, the rivers, the ancestors and the stars.

• Deconstruct myths of adolescence, success, life paths of modernity and create a culture around them that supports their inner life, not just their performance.

• Talk openly about the unwell culture, invite them to imagine what else is possible and create cultures of coherence and wellness for them to experience.

• Invite deep engagement in art, music, story, poetry, myth.

• Prepare them to be in the wild on their own one day.

And, perhaps the main thing to do was on my mind when I invited them to witness my Uranus Opposition Ceremony. Maybe the greatest gift I can offer them as their mother, is not certainty, protection, or answers, but a living example of someone walking their soul path, falling apart with grace, and choosing again and again to belong to life.

What if I let them witness my own rites of passage and initiations? What if I undertake all of these initiations that I missed? Maybe if they see me unravel and initiate myself, when the time comes, they will know how to walk their soul path and the Earth differently. They will have had it modelled to them, they will learn how to navigate this messy human experience because they saw me do it and get it wrong sometimes. What if I am visible walking my own soul path in the hope that my children can trust theirs? What would they see when I step through a new threshold, and they witness me transformed by dreams, land, ritual and art? What if I let them witness me be initiated by grief, love and the land? What if I normalise grief and breakdown as signs of soul emergence and soul deep learning? What would change for them if I speak my ceremonies and prayers aloud in front of them? What if I make visible my self discovery and not-knowing, and ask them to witness me shed my beliefs and fears to return them to the Earth, what then? What if they see me walk into the mysteries of life arms and heart wide open?

One of the first things that I recognised as a parent was that children are mythical souls, with their own path to walk, their own grief to carry, their own service to offer, their own mysteries to live into. We do not shape or control our children, they come as whole beings with a light of their own. Yet, often, we are called on as parents to make sure that our culture and society does not extinguish that light. And perhaps even more often we are called on to shine our light so they can see the way.

I offer this as a mother, walking barefoot in the rain, holding both grief and beauty, letting my children witness my becoming. If you are a parent, a seeker, a soul on the threshold, I hope this reminds you that ceremony is alive, eldering is possible, and it’s never too late to return to the spiral.