The past three years has indeed been a pressure cooker, each life challenge adding weight onto my shoulders until I learned the lesson that I cannot carry it all.

October is my birth month. I don’t celebrate my birthday officially, but the month started a threshold. My ferry ride to Seattle and the journey to the first of two major retreats opened with a foggy sailing.

It has been one year since I completed a year long men’s rites of passion and ritual facilitation training by John Wolfstone and Daren Silver. I was cooked over the year through five intensives in Boulder Colorado, including a four day Vision fast in the wilderness.

Over the course of the year, I learned wilderness survival skills, tracking, 5Rhythms dancing, Four Shields, Dagara grief ritual, divinations, storytelling, and quest.

It wasn’t just the tools, it was doing it in brotherhood - pushing myself harder than if it were a passive experience.

The final event was a death ritual, where I was buried in the earth at night while my brother read my eulogy.

The weight of the earth, probably 150 to 200 lbs of hard clay soil covered me. It was an existential kink, a losing of control, and a forcing to be still. Every time I wiggled, the earth would settle and hold me deeper into the ground.

When it was time to emerge, an aliveness came sparking out of me that I have never felt before. While the official container has ended, and we cross the threshold to another one, the experience will forever mark the transformation I needed, in a time where pressure was all I knew.

Just as I was coming back home to catching up with family and work, another portal opened up with a week long Psychodrama and Grief ritual in Duvall Washington.

I spent the week, among my village that supported me in the past three years, mostly in the psychodrama space, and crossed into the grief world with Ahlay Blakely.

After participating as a protagonist in psychodrama structures five times, I realized that not once have I ever enrolled ideal parents.

The mere thought of that brought up deep grief, that I was not ready to receive love from ideal parents.

Needless to say, I was selected to be first in doing my work, and after facing the violence and the aftermath of the Vietnam war, I received an ideal father.

I’ll write more about my personal work later once this arc was found time to simmer a bit more, but for now, it was profound.

We then transitioned from the therapy work to doing the grief ritual. It has always been a hard one for me. I often complain about the noise, the dancing, and all the drumming that distracts me.

On the fourth time, I again felt a freezing up, and frustrated, I stayed with the feeling. Why wasn’t my grief coming up.

It wasn’t until the second day that it dawned on me that the cries, screams, and rage sounds of the village, was a reflection of the village I never received, and lost.

When I accepted that, it opened up the portal to the grief, the unnamable losses. Sitting there on the shrine, held and crying, I looked around, and saw the faces of the village that currently holds me.

In that moment, I could hold both the grief of the lost and what could have been, and what actual is in this moment.

I’m taking a break from the deep healing work, and just being present to the moment, something that has not always been accessible to me.

I learned to stop and smell the roses.

It was hard.

I had to die, over and over again.

Until I was reborn, again.