Tree of Life
How do we show up for each stage of life?
How do we honor the complexity of life while standing upright inside of it?
We are all on a journey. We can either do it alone, or in a beautifully held container that fosters deep and unmatched connection with the natural world and fellow initiates. I am so grateful for the subtle and potent energies that are now alive and refreshed in my spiritual and emotional systems.
Elena Pinsky, 2017-19 Tree of Life Initiate, Singer, Artist, Graduate Student
Are you feeling The Call into a Deeper Level of Relationship to Life?
Tree of Life is a Rites of Passage Collective, weaving deep nature connection, liberatory social practice, and elemental ceremony in service to a humanity that fosters a thriving and interconnected world.
Intact cultures throughout time have and currently hold humans through rites of passages that support the transition from adolescence into adulthood and adulthood into elderhood. These initiatory processes are specific to the culture within which they are enacted. They often involve deep nature connection, ceremony and some sort of trial alongside sound mentorship from those who are in the next stages of life.
Here in this place, in these times, with the incredible mixture of lineages that most people walk with, on lands that we are not native to, yet we need to show up in responsibility for, we are co-creating a culture that has not yet been. Our elders teach us that we must go to the edges to learn what we need to weave back into a culture that informs the center. The tapestry that we are here to weave is multi-colored, informed by many lineages, is in current time relationship with Spirit and serves the land, the species, and people that we walk with and create home upon.
The mentors and elders of the Tree of Life journey are here to help prepare the way, to bring guidance and support, to create and hold the container needed for this initiatory process and transformation.
Currently, our offerings tend the childhood into adolescent portal, the adolescent into adulthood portal and ceremonial groups for those who are walking in the mature stage of life beyond these thresholds.
We also have active relationships with elders and line ourselves up behind those elders who sit or wish to sit in their own initiation rites and wish to sit in support of the younger ones in our midsts. If this is you or someone you know, please reach out and let us create connection.
Consider these questions to help you understand if a journey with one of our programs meets what is calling you or someone you know at this time:
Do you long to feel deeply connected to and resilient within
the web of life that sustains you?
Do you want to gain an understanding of how to walk upright in this world and with all of your relations; to live in sacred reciprocity with life?
Do you long to know who you are and why you are here beneath the social conditioning and external messages you have received?
Do you feel the quiver of what it is to be made useful by Spirit; to empty out your grief and become a vessel for your unique service to the world?
Do you feel the call to ceremony? Do you feel the call into initiation?
The Tree of Life journey is an invitation through a portal; a proposal dropping at your feet.
The proposal involves a commitment to a Life; a willingness to line yourself up with a life that supports All of Life and to let go of ways that do not serve.
For those who are holding girls or long to reclaim their 1st Moontime rite, we both offer a 1st Moontime Ceremonial Rite and Training. For those who yearn to come into their adult version of self, the preparation is to go through our FOUNDATIONS process followed by the INITIATION journey. For those who have, in their own way, crossed the adulthood threshold, join us for the Mari Altar Yearlong commitment into ceremony.
For each Offering that we hold, we ask for reciprocity to the land, spirits, and people who are aiding you, relationship with your ancestors and the land you are sitting on, and a willingness to be in deep inner reflection and work.
What informs the Tree of Life Initiation Journey?
The Tree of Life's women's rites of passage work is the most powerful transformative experience I've ever witnessed. In the course of two years, a group of young women - unsure, a bit insecure, a bit frightened, still in many ways "adolescents" - flourish into gorgeous adults: confident, clear sighted, fully in their power, clear in their goals, moving fearlessly through the world from their hearts. Learning how to truly pray and authentically make offerings to Spirit is a touchstone that the women can - and do - return to throughout life; the ceremonies are an enormously powerful tool for remembering who they truly are, how to humbly serve the Holy, and how to care for one another and this earth. Any woman who has the enormous good fortune to take part in the Tree of Life initiation process will be forever transformed and blessed with the power to center and re-center herself/themselves throughout life.
~Rachael Knight, Land Rights Attorney, Consultant and Ceremonialist