Event Type: Awakening to the Cycles of Life

I’ve struggled with knowing myself and my place in the world since my late teens. I never felt I was taught how to decide which direction to take my life. Somehow, as a 16 year old, I was expected to know what to do with the rest of my life, without anything to base that decision on. As a college student I changed my major several times, unable to decide on anything that really moved me. As an adult, I find myself in the same place as my 18 year old self – like a teenager who’s never really been able to decide what I want to be when I grow up.

The Life Cycle Living workshop showed me that I had missed an essential phase in my life that would’ve allowed me to understand myself better, to move forward in my life with direction and clarity. It gave me context to that which I knew to be true, but couldn’t formulate into words. It’s not that this program gave any answers on how to change this, but I was able to feel like the stuckness in my life isn’t related to something I have failed to do, or to a personal failure. I now understand it’s because the society that we live in expects our children to jump from puberty to adulthood without any support to understand what that even means. This realization made me very angry and also very upset, because so many of us are missing pieces of ourselves that are necessary to be who we really are. And we all have so much to offer as our true, authentic selves.

Life Cycle Living has left me wanting to pursue how I can move through this missing stage. My local fire community seems hungry for more of this medicine as well. We were passionate about brainstorming how to bring a supportive way of aging to our community. We are excited to become involved in the next steps of what Life Cycle Living has to offer each of us. We want this not just so we can heal ourselves individually, but to be able to extend the gifts of Life Cycle Living to all of us, to grow stronger together. Like a community. Like a village.