Initiation and the Markings of Adulthood: A Conversation with John Wolfstone

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Nov 9, 2022

John Wolfstone, a wilderness rites-of-passage guide and ritualist with Hebraic, Norse, and Celtic roots, delves into the significance of initiation in adulthood. He discusses the loss felt in modern cultures without traditional rites of passage and emphasizes the power of community support during this transition. The conversation explores how mentorship and ritual can foster personal growth and reconnect individuals with their inner selves. Additionally, John highlights the role of elders in nurturing generative service and collective well-being.

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INSIGHT

Initiation Moves Ego To Soul

Initiation into adulthood is a cultural psycho-spiritual process that moves a person from ego-centered adolescence to soul-centered service.
Traditional rites used trials, mentors, and temporary separation to produce death-and-rebirth maturity and community membership.

INSIGHT

Missing Integration Turns Initiation Into Trauma

Lack of cultural integration turns liminal initiations into prolonged trauma without community reintegration.
Modern culture often performs severance and wandering but lacks the village to bless, name, and assign new roles back into society.

INSIGHT

Facing Death Sharpens Adult Capacity

Healthy adulthood initiation requires encountering death so the ego loosens and life becomes more precious and service-oriented.
Facing endings sharpens perception and opens the heart to live with grief-and-beauty awareness.

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In this conversation, Carl speaks with John Wolfstone.

John is third-generation settler, working on the Traditional and Unceded territory of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok Peoples. His blood and bones hold Hebraic, Norse and Celtic ancestry, and his spirit is from the Stars. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, ritualist, community consultant, relationship coach, and transmedia story-teller, John is on a mission to reclamate adulthood initiation rites-of-passage.

Holding space for the great grief of our times, John designs and facilitates rituals of transformation, in service to regulating the personal and collective nervous systems back to belonging with the Earth. John apprenticed in numerous indigenous and ancestral ritual healing lineages during his decade long adulthood initiation quest, and bows in reverence to his many teachers, mentors, guides and elders.

John tends thresholds of all kinds, and can often be found praying by a fire, whistling bird song, invoking his ancestors, and training his craft as a sacred huntsman.

John is also one of the cofounders of the School of Mythopoetics.

In our conversation, we explore initiation, and why it has been so central to the human experience. We also talk about what is lost, in terms of the presence of adults and elders in the world, when practices of initiation are absent in a culture.

We talk about the markings of adulthood, exploring some of the indicators that someone has grown into an adult, or not.

And we look at how to grow a literacy with initiatory process, and for the many of us who have not grown up in cultures with intact rituals and rites of passage, how to bring these practices and principles into our lives and our communities.

John is facilitating a year-long adulthood initiation ritual apprenticeship through the School of Mythopoetics beginning November, 2022, and you can find more about that here. https://www.schoolofmythopoetics.com/ritual-apprenticeship

You can find more about John and his work here:

johnwolfstone.com