The Lost Art of Initiation

The Absence of True Initiation

There was a time when no one crossed into adulthood without fire. Some walked into the wilderness alone. Some endured pain. Some faced the unknown and came back changed. It was never about proving strength. It was about burning away what was untested, about stepping over the threshold from childhood into something deeper.

The world has changed. In many places the rites are gone. And the elders have fallen silent. The maps are missing. A mapless people in a mapless world, mistaking comfort for meaning, mistaking survival for passage.

Yet life still initiates. The fire still comes. It just arrives unmarked and often uncontained—through loss, heartbreak, failure, and death. We wander through these moments, unaware that they were always meant to be a passage. Without guidance, without ritual and ceremony, they can break us instead of shape us.

I remember when I first felt it—how uninitiated I was. My life folding in on itself. My career crumbling. A relationship slipping away. My parents standing at the far edge of their lives. I am in my forties, yet it feels like I am only now being called into manhood. There was no ceremony, no elder, no sign to say: This is the threshold. This is what you must walk through. Just the raw experience itself, pressing in, relentlessly.

It wasn’t just my story. It was a mirror of something larger. A culture untethered from its rites of passage, adrift in its own adolescence. We prize comfort, success, and ease, but we forget that fire is the forge. And we do not speak of the truth—that transformation, real transformation, is raw and brutal and necessary.

The trials are here. The question is—will we face them as initiations or flee from them as burdens?

The Sacred Rite of Transformation

Men and women seek initiation without knowing what they’re looking for. They chase suffering in marathons, in fights, in drugs, in self-destruction. They throw themselves into chaos, hoping something in them will finally be burned clean. But without the guide, without the wisdom to contain it, they’re left with nothing but the wreckage. No meaning. No threshold truly crossed.

Initiation is not a metaphor. It is a death. It is a breaking. It is the crossing from one world into another, knowing you cannot go back.

Once, these rites were woven into the bones of a culture. A boy walked into the wild and returned a man. A woman’s first blood was marked by ritual, honoring her place in the lineage of life. A father-to-be buried the unparented man within him so the father could be born.

Today, these crossings still happen, but they go unnoticed. The death of a relationship. The loss of a loved one. The end of an identity. Each one is an invitation to step through, but few recognize it. Without the ceremony, without the guide, we move through these passages half-conscious, unmarked, and unclaimed.

What must die for you to move forward? 

What is asking to be left behind?

If you cannot name it, you will carry its ghost with you.

The Archetypal Journey of Initiation

Every true initiation follows the same path: the Separation, the Ordeal, and then the Return.

The Separation—The moment you leave behind what is known. Sometimes by choice. Often by force. A loss, a failure, a death, a moment when the ground beneath you vanishes. The old self cannot continue, but the new one has not yet emerged.

The Ordeal—This is the place where the fire burns hottest. The breaking. Where we are emptied, stripped, shattered. This is the confrontation. Here, the young one dies. Here, the untested heart is split open. It strips away all that is not real, the wounds you have carried, the lies you have told yourself and the illusions you have clung to.

Here, we are forced to meet what we would rather never see. The pain. The wound. The truth.

And if we endure, if we do not turn away, we emerge changed. Not whole, not yet, but raw and new, with something in our hands we did not have before.

A gift. A knowing. A name.

The Return and the Weight of What We Carry

This is the Emergence. Not as who you were, but as who you are becoming. But return is not enough. You must embody what the trial gave you. Wisdom means nothing if you do not live it.

A man is not made in the suffering. He is made in what he does with it.

Too many return and do not know how to carry what they have seen. They make a home in the wound, let it define them. They tell the story over and over, but they do not live it. They hold onto pain like a relic and call it wisdom.

But true initiation does not leave us in the past. It calls us forward. It does not ask us to wear our wounds like badges. It asks us to embody what we have learned. To move through the world as something changed, not in word, but in presence.

And yet, this is the piece that is most often lost. The world does not welcome the returned initiate. There is no ceremony, no witness, no elder waiting with open arms. And so, many drift. Marked by what they have endured but unsure of how to live it.

But this is the task. To live it. To take what was given and turn it into something that matters. To carry the weight with grace. To hold both sorrow and gratitude in the same hands. To walk forward, not as the man who survived, but as the man who was remade.

Three archetypes stand at the edges of this path. The Elder, The Threshold Guardian and The Trickster.

The Elder—the one who has walked this before and bears witness. Without them, the journey is disoriented, the trial endless.

The Threshold Guardian—the one who challenges you, who ensures you are ready. They do not block the way. Rather, they ask if you are willing. They call you into deeper dialogue with the part of you that has been protecting you from the breaking open. (read more about Threshold Guardian here)

The Trickster—the one who disrupts, who laughs in the face of your certainty. They remind you that the path is never straight, that wisdom comes not through control but surrender. (read more about surrender here)

Miss any of these, and the journey falters.

The Consequences of Avoiding Initiation

Life initiates whether you choose it or not.

Avoid the fire, and you do not avoid the trial—you only remain untested. The world is filled with men and women who never stepped fully into themselves, who live half-lives because they never walked through their own deaths.

A wound that is not honored festers. The loss that was meant to change you instead weighs you down. The transformation that was meant to be embodied remains a ghost you carry.

Without initiation, we do not grow up. We grow old. We move forward in years but not in depth. We live lives that are comfortable but not whole.

How to Reclaim Initiation

The rites of old may be lost, but the work remains. The initiatory fire still burns. If we are to reclaim it, we must meet it with intention.

1. Recognize Life’s Challenges as Invitations - Stop seeing hardship as something to endure. Rather see it as something to pass through. Every trial is a doorway. The only question is whether you step through or turn away.

2. Create Your Own Rituals - Mark the moment. Burn the old letters. Speak aloud the name of what you are leaving behind. Enter the wild alone. Make it sacred by making it conscious.

3. Seek the Elders - Find those who have walked the path before you. Sit with them, Listen. Share. Let them bear witness to your journey.

4. Embrace the Wound Without Wearing It - Your trials will shape you, but they are not your identity. Let them forge you, but do not let them define you.

5. Move from Incorporation to Embodiment - Do not just understand the lesson. Live it. Speak from the place that you have walked. Stand in what you now know.

   (read more about moving from incorporation to Embodiment)

6. Find Your Tribe - Initiation was never meant to be done alone. Witness each other. Hold space for the crossings. Be the elders you never had.

Standing at the Threshold

You are standing at a threshold right now. Some small, some vast.

The question is not whether initiation will come. It will. The question is whether you will meet it. Whether you will allow yourself to be changed by it. Whether you will step into the unknown or cling to what is dying.

We speak of initiation as if it is gone, but it is not. It is there in every loss, every heartbreak, every death, every moment we are called to step beyond what we know. Life itself is the rite of passage. It always has been.

The fire is still burning. The question is, will we step into it?

And when we do—when the breaking comes, when the old self falls away—will we recognize it for what it is? Will we have the courage to stay, to stand in it and to be truly cooked?

Or will we turn away, clinging to the comfort of a life half-lived?

Because the truth is this: We are initiated by life whether we acknowledge it or not. The only choice we have is whether we will meet it with open hands, ready to burn, ready to be made new.

Fire does not ask permission. The question is only this:

Will you flinch? Will you turn away?

Or will you surrender yourself to be wholly changed in the process?