VISION QUEST
THE WILDERNESS VIGIL
THE NEED FOR PASSAGE RITES IN OUR MODERN ERA
The Vision Quest, also known as a Vision Fast, or Wilderness Vigil, is one of the most potent rites of passage and initiatory experiences available to us in the modern era.
Peoples and cultures the world over have long curated initiatory rituals; a way of tuning their ears to the pulse of the earth; the song of the stars; an ancient way of marking, celebrating and honouring life transitions; a way of deepening into the mysteries of life, death and rebirth.
While the transitions from childhood to adolescence to adulthood can be some of the most notable life shifts, the rhythms and cycles of nature are forever initiating us into the ever-changing seasons of our lives, with passage rites serving to mark and anchor in these important life stages.
Traditional rites of passage, which typically involve reasonable degrees of psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual intensity and challenge, have almost been forgotten in our modern socio-cultural reality, fundamentally due to the growing separation between humans and the natural world.
The need for initiation is a bone-deep longing, however without the skillful guidance from adults and elders in our communities, we find unhealthy and unconscious attempts of initiation becoming rampant, manifesting through addictive, destructive, violent, disconnected behaviours.
The African proverb speaks directly to what we see in our modern world: “If the young are not embraced by and initiated into the tribe, they will burn down the village just to feel the heat.”
Mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade suggests that “The initiation of youths always implies an opportunity for the cleansing and restoration of the life force of community. Initiating youths into full life also represents a critical opportunity for a society to sustain meaning and teach life-affirming values.”
It is essential that we reorient ourselves towards the curation of these initiatory passage rites.
Perhaps there’s a shred of truth in the words of Japanese poet Matsuo Basho: “Seek not the paths of the ancients; seek that which the ancients sought.”
This work is not only about the empowerment of the individual, but of equal importance is attending to the wider field in which an individual is situated, both socio-culturally, and ecologically; in essence, for the good of a healthy and wholesome community.
THE ANCIENT INITIATORY CALL AWAITS…
ARE YOU READY TO ANSWER?
“There was once a time when the ritual of seeking a vision was as important and as much a part of a man’s life as his birth and death.”
- Gabriel Horn (White Deer of Autumn) | The Book of Ceremonies
Most familiarity with Vision Quests might come from the native traditions of North America, however similar initiation rites of extended time and solitude in nature can be found cross-culturally across our world.
Sacrificing many comforts and familiarities for multiple days and nights on end, the wilderness vigil involves a surrendering to the wild cocoon of nature; an opportunity to see anew; to heal and reveal; to tend to the challenges of life; to call in the greater vision for ourselves and our life; to return regenerated; to expand our awareness into the great mysteries.
Wilderness guide, storyteller and mythologist, Dr 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.”
If you're conceptually -or experientially- familiar with the wilderness vigil, you'll know that it often involves:
Fasting alone in the wilderness, often in a small circle, with no food, sometimes no water, no tent, diminished sleep, no technology, no entertainment, and no contact or communication with others in the outside world, for several consecutive days and nights.
It's no small feat to undertake a Vision Quest.
There’s libation required. Sacrifice. Payment. “Giving things up to attend to the unfolding”, Shaw would say. “You are the offering. Your time is the offering. Your rapture and discomfort is the offering.”
Such is the nature of sacred reciprocity. Many people hear the call, few take heed and follow through.
"“The last few days have been such a beautiful unfolding of realizations and crystal clear clarity about where to from here…
…In the way of inner work, what I’m calling in, and what I need to continue to release in order to create space for this.
Infinite gratitude for this special part of my journey.”
There are many reasons why someone might answer the call to sit in solitude; the call to quest…
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
Reset and shake up the stagnancy of daily life
Purification from the busyness and distractions of modern living
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
“It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
IT’S TIME TO RECLAIM YOUR OWN BLOSSOMING
Vision Quest presents a clear invitation to thoughtfully address some of life’s big questions.
“Who am I?”
“How are my wounds and gifts related?”
“What medicines do I have to offer the world?”
“Who are my people and how am I serving them?”
“Where am I within the ever-changing seasons and cycles of my life?”
“Where am I refusing to acknowledge and claim my own unique flowering?
Sincerely reflecting on these questions can open opportunities to get in touch with your souls journey; your visionary path; your original blueprint; your true nature, a deeper sense of belonging; within your human-centric communities, and the wider community of nature of which we’re all a part.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that life becomes easier after a Vision Fast.
On the contrary, as we deepen into the wholeness, richness and multi-dimensionality of life, our lives as a consequence can become paradoxically both more difficult, and more profound.
Vision Quest is not a cure-all; a fixative; a panacea.
An initiatory passage rite of this nature will potentially reveal the complexities of life and our unique constellation within it. Courting these challenges and re-inhabiting the aspects of self that have been suppressed; numbed out; cast out, can be dark work. Earth work. Wild Twin work. Tending the compost and the mass of decaying leaf litter.
“Waking the Bone Pile” Dr Martin Shaw calls it. “Likely it’s going to burden you with that arrangement… It’s a holy thing, that burden. We are culturally drowning in ignorance of it. Your legs should totter a little underneath it…”
So it is, to step up and show up to life in all it’s fullness; the challenges, the blessings, the pain, the beauty… rather than live a half-life of drab colours and dreary textures, void of a greater depth of meaning and purpose.
As the great poet David Whyte said, “We are the only species that can refuse our own flowering”. Participating in a Vision Fast presents an appeal to something larger, something more intimate, so that we may indeed have an opportunity to claim our own blossoming.
In essence, this ancient yet modern-day rite of passage can help us navigate the challenges and complexities of life; by offering us a profound invitation to become more intimate with nature, heart, soul and spirit; encouraging us to realize that our wounds and our gifts are one, and that we each have a unique song, story and medicine to offer the world.
THE THREE STAGES OF A VISION FAST
While there are various ways to language and bring structure to what a Vision Fast entails, the three classic stages of this passage rite includes:
Preparation / Severance
Threshold / Experience
Incorporation / Integration / Return
PREPARATION / SEVERANCE
The initial preparation stage of a Vision Fast begins to take place the day one makes a commitment to participating in this passage rite. Ideally, one would have many months to prepare for such a significant experience in one’s life.
One’s intention, and the exploration thereof, continues to take root during the preparation stage, with a deepening clarification coming to fruition as one enters the formal community container of the Vision Fast.
Often this community of participants will gather in council to listen to each other’s stories of what brings them to Quest, with the Guide serving to assist in the solidification and clarification of their intent.
Inherent within this commitment to Quest, amongst the myriad reasons as to why someone might tend to this calling, is Severance. “Who am I? Who have I been? What am I being asked to let go and leave behind in order to emerge renewed?”
The psychological deaths that passage rites can bring forth are a necessary stage of birthing the new; whether it be through ego dissolution, a shattering of one’s identities and roles, the dismantling of one’s beliefs and dogmas, or letting go of old stories to allow for new potentials and opportunities to arise.
Severance can be difficult, and what one is severing from may not be all that clear upon the initial formation of one’s intentions, however the illumination of the cyclical rhythms of death and rebirth; letting go and liberation; releasing and renewal, are an integral process to experiencing and actualizing a life of greater depth; of meaning; of vision; of purpose.
THRESHOLD CROSSING / THE EXPERIENCE
Crossing the threshold from the ordinary into the liminal; from clock time into ceremonial time, is akin to opening a portal into the great mysteries of life; the mysteries of nature and spirit. This crossing formally marks the several consecutive days and nights (often 4 days / 4 nights) of solo fasting in the wilderness, removed from many things comfortable and familiar.
It’s through the threshold phase of a Vision Fast that many opportunities and invitations arise:
reflecting and finding medicine in the unique challenges and complexities of one’s life
becoming deeply intimate and receptive to the subtleties and intricacies of nature
letting wildflower, red rivered fox, and croaking raven be one’s guide through the mysteries
bathing in the fertile grounds of one’s old life and the life that has yet to come
taking drink from the wellsprings of grief that flows through one’s life
simmering in the rich reservoirs of stillness and solitude
calling for support and guidance from ones ancestor spirits
claiming a life of regenerated vigour
engaging in self-guided ceremony that reflects one’s intentions and calling to Quest
witnessing and experiencing everything in nature as a mirror into one’s self and one’s life; through imagery, symbology, metaphor and myth
The threshold phase is truly multi-faceted, with the full spectrum emotional landscape of consciousness on offer. One could experience extreme bliss and euphoria, to intense pain and grief, to absolute boredom and loneliness, and everything in between.
The liminal landscape can potentiate different depths of ceremonial time. The light of day can bring upon the expansive qualities and transcendent characteristics of spirit’s illumination.
Darkness can bring upon another variety. A thinning of the veil; a blurring of the edges; a portal that brings out a different kind of mystery; a different kind of spirit. The trickster kind. The strange and inescapable kind. The porous blanket over the eyes kind. The Baba Yaga kind.
It’s not uncommon for guides to encourage an all-night vigil for the final night. After being tempered for those four days without food and comfort, that final evening of fighting off sleep to converse with the cauldron of mystery can simmer us in a special kind of way.
So it is when we ceremoniously step forth into the great uncertainties of the liminal time and space of a Vision Fast. This is not merely a moment in time that we step in and out of, rather, an opportunity for an ongoing conversation that we can continue to marinate in.
INCORPORATION / INTEGRATION / THE RETURN
Upon returning from the threshold, the final days of being in the formal community container of Quest are devoted to the stage of incorporation, also known as integration, or the return. This is a time for reuniting in council to share stories of one’s threshold time; exploring the themes, messages, gifts, and the greater implications of our Quest for our ever-unfolding lives.
Often, the Guides and the community at large will mirror these stories back to each participant, offering opportunities to see one’s threshold time from a wider context and expanded awareness, and to have the arc of one’s story and life honoured, witnessed, affirmed and supported in a rich, meaningful and heartful way.
Just as one’s preparation phase begins when one makes the commitment to Quest, one’s incorporation phase continues well after the initial return. Some might suggest that the incorporation of the gifts and medicines that a Vision Fast might offer (incorporation meaning to embody; take into the body) could continue to be assimilated and actualized for the rest of one’s life.
Jiddhu Krishnamurti, the Indian spiritual philosopher and mystic, once said, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” and so the beautiful challenge of integration resides not only in integrating the Quest into the arc of our lives, but integrating ourselves in a wholesome way; a regenerative way, back into our communities.
“There are no guarantees whatsoever that the vigil will grow fruit on the return. An enormous amount of that is down to the character and sheer devotion of the participant” writes Shaw in his wilderness vigil extraordinaire, Wolf Milk.
“It is easier to put the thing on the shelf with other esoteric holidays we’ve taken. I stress again that most of what happened out there happened underneath. You may not have received a roadmap but an atmosphere. An atmosphere to work out of…”
At the risk of overlabouring Martin Shaw’s quotes in this here detailing of Vision Fasts, his experience and wisdom on the matter is indeed relevant, including his succinct summation of the integration journey that lays ahead:
“Don’t come looking for honey if you’re not prepared to work like a bee.”
WHAT IS THE JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION?
Embarking on a passage rite such as a Vision Quest can certainly intertwine with one’s journey of Soul Initiation.
As the depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution Bill Plotkin suggests, “The journey of soul initiation can be a multi-year long process that enables us to remember who we were born to be, and what we were born to do in this lifetime.”
As opposed to Western psychological models of soul, Plotkin proposes that soul is an ecological concept, rather than solely a spiritual, psychological, or religious one. It’s suggested that Western psychology and religious ideology clouds the idea of soul because of our longstanding severance from nature; hence, these models are representative of this separation.
Not only does the idea of soul allude to an intimacy with something deep; the deepest meaning in our lives, but that the nature of soul resides with the larger framework of the web of life and our unique place within this ecology.
Thus, the idea of soul could be languaged as our original blueprint of who we were meant to be, what we were born to do, and how this unique blueprint belongs within the greater ecological niche of nature.
When the Grand Totality of All that there is; Great Spirit; God; The Absolute; Consciousness, moves through each of us, what manifests is the individualized life force essence that resides within; the unique instructions of who we are at a bone-deep level.
“Pathmaker, there is no path. You make the path by walking.”
- Antonio Machado | Poet
THE DARK ROAD ON THE DESCENT TO SOUL
“If our first birth is a fall into life, this “second birth” falls toward death and the underworld. It requires a return to the roots of knowledge, the roots of consciousness, and the seeds of meaning hidden in each person. Only by a descent and a series of adventures along the dark roads of the unconscious can the inner life fully awaken…”
- Michael Meade | Mythologist, Storyteller
There’s truth to what Meade suggests; that this initiation and descent to soul isn’t necessarily safe, nor easy. There can be dangers abound both psycho-emotionally and spiritually, with disruptive forces piercing social relationships, career path, self identity, and life in a broader sense.
If the foundations on which we stand are shaky enough to be completely and dangerously dismantled by a descent to soul, it’s certainly suggestive that we need a restructuring and reorientation of the socio-cultural reality in which we situate ourselves and in which we find support to integrate these initiatory journeys.
The dangerous reality of a descent into soul initiation during these times is perhaps why the majority of people never reach a stage of maturation, where they find their unique individual way of enhancing life and co-operating with the dynamics of health, wellness, wholeness and evolution.
Due to the Western models surrounding mental health and the notion of soul, it’s not uncommon for conventional psychotherapists to want to rescue people and pull them out of this descent for fear of the dangers present.
“What’s more dangerous?” one might ask. Taking the arduous yet essential spiritual journey of soul initiation, or losing and forgetting these ways entirely?
Bill Plotkin’s work of channeling the Eco-Soulcentric Wheel of Development offers a model that transitions through eight significant life stages, and what those stages of human life look like “when we mature in full resonance with both nature (“eco”) and soul; when we are in a continuous process of becoming fully human throughout the lifespan.”
The journey of soul initiation takes root within this wheel of development, and in contrast to the three stages of a passage rite, Plotkin illuminates five stages of a Soul Initiation: Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment.
The central phase of the journey of soul initiation is the descent, which is what Plotkin calls the Soul Encounter; receiving a vision or revelation of one’s unique place in the greater earth community.
The entire journey of soul initiation can be a long process that takes a person from the end of psychological adolescence, through a liminal initiation stage that can last several years, and culminates in the major life passage Plotkin calls Soul Initiation, which marks the beginning of true adulthood.
Healthy cultures are shaped by the work of true adults; soul initiated adults, and with very few initiated adults, who ultimately give rise to the elders that tend the relationships between humans and all of life, it’s nigh impossible to settle into the tapestry of a mature and healthy culture.
Plotkin notes that the soul itself is not capable of manifesting anything in this world; rather, it’s a mature and initiated ego coupled with the souls guidance that is the driving force for manifesting innovative delivery systems for the embodiment of soul in culture; for becoming “visionary artisans of cultural renaissance.”
Western culture is largely in tatters, and rather than passage rites and soul journeys offering a cementation and maturation into the healthy values of an already existing culture, those who find themselves initiated along this path are left with the burden of responsibility to pick up the pieces and tend what threads are left in rebirthing something new.
Let us find light in the words of the great poet Rumi: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
The Vision Quest is a portal to metamorphose; a cocoon that can aid in the dissolution of our caterpillar bodies so that we may be transformed and reborn into a winged creation of beauty; enacting and actualizing our visions and prayers for a new earth to come.
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes | Woman Who Run With The Wolves
Send a message if you’re hearing the call to Quest...
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
- The Little Fox, Unique in All The World | The Little Prince