Waking the Bone Pile: Wilderness Passage Rites & Healing through Nature
“There is almost always a bone pile waiting out there in the bush for us. The more attention you give it, the bigger it tends to get. Bone piles are all the little deaths that have occurred along the way. The descansos of your lives, the crossroads moments where something or someone got chucked under the truck.”
- Martin Shaw | Wolf Milk
The Bone Pile. We’ve all got one.
The first time I took a good hard look at mine was during what I call a spark of divine intervention.
No questing, no journeying, no fasting, no medicine journey. For whatever reason, life decided it was time that my lens of awareness would invert; from the externalities that I was so heavily fixated on, to the interiorities of self.
An unplanned and unstructured initiatory experience.
A sobering string of moments really, realizing that I was the common denominator in life’s unsavoury happenings.
While it had worked countless times in the past, shrugging off the potential opportunities for introspection, growth, and responsibility (in the name of more unconscious debauchery and reckless behaviour) wasn’t working anymore. The glance from those empty skulls and ivory crossbones pierced some kind of cloudy veil that would continue to gnaw at my conscience as seasons passed.
The Bone Pile.
Some of us awaken to it; some of us never do.
Mythologist, author, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide, Martin Shaw, suggests that the Bone Pile is a crucial part of our psyches and cultures; a metaphorical image that represents the accumulated detritus of our personal and cultural histories.
In his book "Wolf Milk," Shaw suggests that the Bone Pile is a repository of potential, creativity, healing, and an opening into more depth and richness in life, rather than just a dumping ground for our past.
You might consider the Bone Pile to be a place where we store the forgotten, lost, or neglected aspects of ourselves and our societies; the discarded parts of ourselves that so many of us reject and forget.
I love the mythic insight and rich metaphorical imagery in the phrase “Bone Pile”, and the ways in which this concept can be explored through a bunch of different lenses.
Modern psychology, particularly depth psychology, has its own version of the Bone Pile.
As Jung languages it, the Shadow represents the rejected, forgotten, repressed, suppressed, denied, disowned aspects of an individual's psyche, often equated with the Bone Pile.
And since each individual psyche can be expanded upon to consider the multi-dimensional interconnectedness of lineage, ancestry, culture, deep time and history, we can see that any and all qualities, characteristics, traumas or unprocessed energies that have been repressed or denied can add their own flavour -whether subtle or overwhelming- to the Bone Pile.
Just as engaging with the Shadow (not just psycho-emotionally, but as a multi-faceted journey inclusive of psycho-somatic processes and spiritual connection) is a necessary step in the process of “individuation”, or, becoming a more integrated self, confronting the Bone Pile is an unavoidable journey in becoming more whole and claiming a greater sense of self-awareness and personal power.
Waking the Bone Pile isn’t glamorous though, nor is it an easy journey to undertake.
As Carl Jung suggested, "A trees branches can only grow to heaven so far as its roots reach down to hell."
Modern psychology aside, traditional practices and the many facets of soul exploration and deep-healing are ways in which we can start to have a good old gander at the Bone Pile and all it represents.
Vision quests, wilderness vigils, sacred medicine journeys, consciousness exploration in it’s myriad forms, somatic healing, trauma release, processing dense energies stored in the body, subconscious processing practices, family constellation and the stack of therapies available, nature connection and shamanic awareness skills…
All of these processes and many more can open up a vast window in and provide opportunities to explore and transform the depths of the individual and collective psyche.
Something I’ve spouted for many-a-season now is that there is no difference between self and nature; we are country. It’s a fact of life that many of us forget, or only recognize on the mental conceptual plane, rather than it being a felt, embodied, lived and breathed experience of being an active participant in our bioregional ecologies.
I’m still working on that remembrance. Many of us are.
A necessary expansion for the world of psychology has been the move into “eco-psychology”, the knowing that human psychology and soul are not separate (and really can’t be separated) from nature, from ecology, from the wild. They’re intertwined on a fundamental level.
So while a lot of individuation, integration, and exploration processes can help to illuminate the many faces of self and psyche, they’re incomplete without the larger consideration, the overarching narrative arc and deep-time story, of where and how we fit into the natural world around us.
One of the most potent passage rites and iniatory experiences for transforming the Bone Pile is the Wilderness Vigil, also known as the Vision Fast, or Vision Quest.
It’s a multi-day ceremonial process that involves spending time alone in the wilderness, void of food, connection with others, and both the physical distractions and comforts of modern living, in order to confront the multi-dimensionality of life that might arise when we sit still for days and nights on end in solitude in a wild place.
Martin Shaw says it like this:
“We are out there to hear more than the whirring cogs of our own drama. The emphasis in rites of passage is you need to be porous to the mysteries awhile. And most of us need quite a shakedown to get to that point… It’s only then you may breathe deep enough to behold what the gods are trying to really disclose to you. And traditionally that’s best encountered in a wild and lonely place.”
There are many reasons as to why someone might feel called to participate in such an offering:
Seeking answers to life’s profound questions
Personal transformation and reconnection
Claiming one’s personal power and life purpose
Seeking clarity, meaning and purpose
Finding one’s authentic soul path
Purification from the busyness and distractions of modern living
Receiving guidance to better navigate the challenges and complexities of life
Experiencing one’s heart and soul in a deep and meaningful way
Life transitions; including severance from the old, and birthing the new
Divine communion with spirit
Exploring the mysteries of life and the wonderment of nature
To dream and be dreamt by the wild and mythic stories of the land
Marking, honouring, or celebrating the story of your life and the unique place you find yourself to be in this time
Whatever the case, the significance of nature-based passage rites, practices, and processes for reorienting ourselves to the challenges and complexities of life, remembering our place in the natural world, and ultimately starting to reclaim and transform our own Bone Piles, can’t be understated.
By engaging with our personal, cultural, mythic, and ancestral histories in this way, we can continue moving towards a culture actually worth its salt; a culture that has reclaimed some sense of depth, richness, connection and wholeness in the greater scheme of things.
As Shaw writes, "The bones in the pile are not simply the detritus of our past, they are also the seeds of our future."
If you’re interested in participating in passage rites such as the Wilderness Vigil, aka Vision Quest, you can read more info HERE and get in touch with us and we’ll respond in good time…
