Community-based Rites of Passage pt. 1

Before my career as an executive coach and consultant, I worked as a high school teacher and dorm parent at a boarding school in Connecticut.

Smartly dressed with a windsor-knotted tie, cotton khaki pants and boat shoes, I was the picture of the New England prep school professor, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

I taught physics, mentored boys in the dorm room, and coached track. (How expert I was in any of these pursuits can be presumed from the fact that I was assigned my subject and sport only after being hired).

The school pioneered a unique model based on a relatively niche concept. “Troubled” kids were sent “away” to the school - like many schools of similar intention - with a twist: Parents were required to come to the school once a year for what amounted to a weekend of constellation-style group therapy.

The idea - still revolutionary to some - was that the “problem” child is not the cause but rather a symptom, one member of a dysfunctional family unit. Common were the moments of insight when the parents realized their own lack of spiritual hygiene - expressed as things like work and screen addiction - were causing or significantly contributing to the crisis in their child.

While this model was revolutionary in that it asked parents to take some responsibility for their child’s behavior, it still belongs to an outdated model of teen intervention. “Experts” charge high fees to overhaul teen behavior, whether involving the parents or not.

Programs like Outward Bound and NOLS, far and away the leaders in nature-based teen leadership education - for which their environs are well-suited - have been copied by “wilderness therapy” programs. These predatory outfits trade on the desperation of parents looking for an easy fix that won’t ask them to change (apart from paying fees of up to $1,000 per day.)

All of this - well-intentioned as it is - points us in the wrong direction. And, it reveals a deeper disconnect in our culture.

Old-time and indigenous communities with intact initiatory* frameworks never “sent” their kids anywhere. Indeed their embeddedness in place was intertwined with a required knowledge of how to raise their young humans into capable members of their societies. There was no place to send them, even if they wanted to.

The more our culture has disconnected itself from the roots of its vitality - the waters, animals and plants of the place we daily tread, and the lost stories elucidating the ways we are bound to and by these co-inhabitants - the more we lose a sense of kinship and agency, aka true health. The loss of this health, felt by all, expresses itself as depression, anxiety and the rest of society’s mental and physical health problems.

In other words, troubled kids are so troubled because the culture is disconnected.

The notion we uphold at Firestarters Initiative is radical: the return to earth connection our society lacks will be aided by - not the cause of - communities who can initiate their youth through processes forcing the best they have from them: creatively, spiritually, biologically, soulfully.

In other words, while, yes, the kids will have to save themselves, it is actually up to the adults around them to help prepare them, mature them, and empower them to do that.

The radical part of this isn’t that the adults have to initiate the youth. It’s that the adults nearby have to initiate the youth.

There is no program to send them to.

The idea is that it’s up to us, the neighbors, teachers, parents, uncles and aunties. We have to organize the catastrophe.

Right here, in our valley. In every valley. We have to hold on to our kids, cooperate with each other, listen to the land, and support our youth to arrive at adulthood with an open heart, a settled soul, and a full toolbelt.

But initiation alone starts years ahead of the actual “rite,” with processes that prepare the youth. These would be programs to arm would-be initiates with the social confidence, emotional well-being and many-pronged ingenuity they will need to call upon to navigate the choppy waters awaiting them.

These choppy waters are not something we place in front of them as their initiators, but something life will automatically throw at them.

All we can do is help them outfit their raft - and them - ahead of time.

Part 2 will focus on what this preparation might look like and how we at Firestarters Initiative are helping do that with our programs.

* What is initiation? Referred to as an “organized catastrophe,” an initiation might be a process that takes days, months or years during which an individual or group of individuals undergoes a series of encounters with meaning that devastate their sense of being, forcing them to wrestle with the parts of themselves that can cobble together a sense of identity that can function - indeed thrive - in the world, informed by the cellular knowledge (not in spite of it) of the stakes of what it means to be human.

Said differently, an initiated person would be one who cannot help but know what their life is for. They also intuit that the revelation of that role is and was necessary for them to soulfully thrive. Initiates must encounter the “butt-kicking bigness” of the world, as Martín Prechtel calls it, while artistically crafting a place in their culture upon which their adulthood might scaffold.

If youth do not learn to “stop crying for milk and become a breast,” (Prechtel) their community risks them “burning the village just to feel the heat” (excerpted from African proverb of unknown tribal origin).

In other words, initiation deeply matters.