Week 1 – Entering the Spiral Together

In our first week together we will land and find our ground through bringing in our voices, clarifying why we are here and beginning to map where we are in this rite of passage.

We will become intimate with the internalized ideas and beliefs that we hold around the midlife, begin to explore what is true for ourselves, and what lives in our blood and bones. Together we will compost what no longer feels valid or supportive through ritual practice.

This is a threshold of descent, and ascent, where we emerge more ourselves. Through this journey together, we will acknowledge our lived experience, all that we have learned and what we may want to unlearn, hold all of our iterations of self, offering thanks and blessings to all of our parts, all that we’ve been, who we are now, and who we are deepening into.

Together— we will step into a space of shedding and reclamation within the alchemical container of community. This is a rite of passage that asks us to step into our power.

Week 2 – The Rites of Fire

In week two we will explore the rites of fire and how the heat of this transformational time will often bring forth and reveal buried anger, passion and desire through the body. In the apprenticeship to this alchemical fire, we have the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of our anger and the protection and deep trust that it can provide. Anger is often the energy of change, and it can also contain the unexpressed energies that we hold.

If we cultivate courage and curiosity, the element of fire will also help to reconnect us to what truly ignites, inspires, and awakens us in midlife. The heat of this time can help to thaw our nervous system out of a state of freeze, so we can access new dimensions and sensations in the body. Desire can become a compass, as it points to what has meaning and value for us.

“A Woman who is in contact with her heat, her fire, is in a state of intense sensory awareness.” – Maria Souza

Week 3 – The Rituals of Water

In week 3 we will be exploring the rites of water through actively tending our relationship to grief.

When we work with the waters of our grief knowing that this transitional time is an opening, we can move towards much needed gentleness and compassion towards ourselves; for the countless times in our lives when we did not have access to this. Our intentional grief tending allows us to unravel from the burdens of the past and reconnects us to the clarity of our hearts.

By allowing the waters of our sorrows to flow, letting the unexpressed or unacknowledged grief move, and sharing our sorrows with one another, we can make space for what wants or needs to come in. There will be rituals for this grief as we shed our skins and make offerings to the earth.

“A woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself.”

- Maya Angelou

Week 4 – The Erotic: The Meeting of Water & Fire

In week four, we will be invoking and getting curious about our unique relationship to the erotic. The erotic can include sex, but it exists largely outside of our sexuality as well. Our erotic energy is deeply connected and woven into what we love and desire. The energy of our eroticism is often revealed through leaning into and embodying what brings us alive and the courage to stop engaging with what drains us.

When we find and follow what makes us feel more erotically alive in midlife, we open up deep channels of self-expression and remembrance. Tending our intimate relationship to eroticism is a practice like anything else, and we will be exploring the possibilities of how we may court the erotic in our lives during this rite of passage.

Erotic energy is our vital, instinctive, life-force and it is deeply connected to how much we are living true to who we really are. We remember, together.

Week 5 – Sex, Weaving Fire & Water

Week 5 we’ll delve deeper into eroticism and its relationship to sex and sexuality. We will get curious around the fire and waters of our wombs and the creation power that lives there as we reclaim parts of our sexual selves during this rite of passage. When we work with the elemental energies of rising and building, and slowing and quieting, we grow in our midlife sexuality and in our expression in the world.

We will also get curious about what kind of touch we like, our pathways to arousal, what is supportive, and how this knowing ultimately feeds our aliveness. As we become more present to our aliveness, to our power, we can live more fully into the myriad of ways that we can express and experience our sexuality and eroticism.

During this week we will dive into female pleasure anatomy and learn some Sex Ed that most of us didn’t get during our first rite of passage!

Week 6 - The Medicine of Laughter in Midlife

In week six we will be bringing forth one of the most erotically healing energies: a woman’s wildly unconstrained laughter. The fun-loving, crude, playful, irreverent, and joyfully expressive woman who laughs out loud at the absurdity of it all – is a revolutionary force.

We will invoke and work with an old Goddess who is known for her wild energy, her sexuality, and her healing power of laughter and explore the importance of accessing and embodying this energy during our midlife passage. We will use the power of story, myth, and laughter as a way to remember how to embody these generative energies.

A vital element in some of the old myths is the use of a woman’s laughter to “bring the world back into balance” (Winifred Milius Lubell).

“In laughter, a woman breathes fully, and when she does, she may begin to feel unsanctioned feelings. And what could these feelings be? Well, they turn out not to be feelings so much as relief and remedies for feelings, often causing the release of stopped up tears or the reclamation of forgotten memories, or the bursting of chains on the sensual personality.”

– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Week 7 - Celebration, Integration & Closing Ritual

Week 7 is a celebration of our communal journey into the portal of perimenopause and menopause and into our collective pathways towards radically wise and wild eldering. It is a return from our communal descent and an acknowledgment of our deep knowing of the vast power that we all carry.