Ceremonies of Womanhood
Ceremonies of Womanhood are powerful ceremonies to mark transitions: becoming a mother, moving into menopause and shifting into elderhood. They can be simple ceremonies, just for you (or you and I), or more elaborate ceremonies involving your community.
I can hold your ceremonies in person, here in the Highlands of Scotland (or possibly travel to you), or we can co-create ceremonies together to be hosted by others wherever you are on the earth.
A Mother Blessing Ceremony
Unlike a baby shower, where the focus in on your baby, you are the focal point of a Mother Blessing Ceremony. A mother blessing recognises the portal of birth as a powerful initiation. When you give birth to your first child, you are also birthed, as mother.
An empowering and nurturing Mother Blessing Ceremony is meaningful way to prepare for birth, honouring your miraculous body and marking the transition from maiden to mother. This ceremony is an opportunity for your community of sisters to gather around and hold you, lavish you with love, acknowledge and affirm you and offer support for the weeks and months ahead, building your resilience and confidence for birth.
This type of ceremony is sometimes referred to as a Blessingway. A Blessingway, or Hózhójí, is a sacred ceremony performed by the Navajo nation or Dine people and includes prayer, song, ritual and storytelling; and celebrating rites of passage throughout life. A Blessingway supports the Dine people to live in accordance with the principles of Hózhǫ́ – walking in beauty, balance and harmony, in all aspects of life and recognising the interconnectedness of all things. A mother blessing is just one type of Blessingway ceremony for the Dine people. The Dine people ask we call the ceremonies we create of this kind mother blessings.
A Wild Wise Woman Ceremony (for Menopause)
Despite being one of the biggest transitions of our lives, we often don’t mark menopause in any way, in our society. Perhaps due to patriarchy diminishing the importance of women’s experience, we don’t acknowledge the size of our experience of menopause. Maybe our own internalised patriarchy, has caused us to link our value to youth and so we don’t want to face our own aging and certainly don’t think it’s something to be honoured. Maybe for some women, there’s still stigma of talking of blood and wombs.
Based on the triple Goddess - maiden, mother, crone – menopause is a shift to crone-dom. But if we divide a women’s life into four phases - which map onto the seasons, the elements and directions – menopause is a shift to the Autumn years, the west, the element of water, of emotion; to late adulthood/early elderhood; to what Clarissa Pinkola Estes terms the Wild Wise Woman.
This is a ceremony to welcome the Wild Wise Woman in you, honouring the service you’ve given to family; supporting you to turn outward towards community; but perhaps more importantly, to turn towards your self, stripping away the societal conditioning to serve everyone and everything else except you! What do you desire at this point in your life? What are you being called to now? How would your life be if you surrendered to your wild nature and your own inner wisdom?
You might choose to have a menopause ceremony, at the point you’re considered menopausal in society (for example in the UK that’s 12 consecutive months after your last bleed), and you might intuitively choose another marker which feels right for you.
A Crone-ing Ceremony
This is a ceremony to acknowledge the transition you make into elderhood. A ceremony of reclamation and reflection, of story-gathering and story-telling, of pacing and peace-making, of celebration, perhaps even coming to terms with death.
In Bill Plotkin’s Eco/Soul-Centric Model, the transition of Crowning (Crone-ing) shifts our task from caring for our community to caring for the soul of the more-than-human community. In this phase we recognise wholeness, the web of life and interbeing, a concept from the work of Thich Nhat Hanh.
The crone in our society is often personified in the images of ‘witch’ with her warty nose and jutting chin, her straggly hair and stooped and bent body. She’s ridiculed, not valued, if she’s seen at all – mostly she’s invisible. How wrong society has it! The elders I know, the crones in their power and truth, having done their healing work and shed much of society’s conditioning – are radiant! They shine with inner beauty. The older they get the more translucent their skin and the more the light of their being shines through. They stand in the place of their souls – are wise healers, magical beings, connected to Spirit and earth! And maybe invisibility is a blessing – cloaked in invisibility, underestimated by society, you can be even more yourself and have the freedom to serve in all the ways you’re called, as opposed to all the ways the patriarchy wishes you to!
Who decides when you become a crone? When you’ll have a crone-ing ceremony? You of course!
Usually 2-3 zoom meetings and emails over a period of 3 months resulting in co-created ceremony
May be involved in holding the ceremony on the day
£250 - £450
When I started my ministry training, I knew the ceremony element would challenge me... I had an aversion to anything remotely ceremonial! I told myself ceremony 'just didn't do it for me'... oh how wrong I was! I discovered the reason I avoided ceremony wasn't because it didn't move me, but that it moved me so deeply I struggled to be with the intensity! I also realised that ceremony was an innate part of me and this awareness brought forth a deep sense of grief... and rage... that at some point ceremony had been 'ripped from my line'. Wow that was some knowing!
My reconnection with ceremony has been an incredible journey. In my work with women I see the power of ceremony in honouring life's phases and transitions.