Families who follow a faith tradition are likely to mark the passage into adulthood with some form of ritual — a confirmation ceremony or a bar mitzvah maybe. But often these are really just an excuse for a party or an extra deluxe birthday celebration. They do not incorporate anything beyond the most symbolic forms of initiation.
This, says psychotherapist Dave Waugh, is why we’re seeing an explosion of young adults experiencing a “quarter-life crisis.”
“The pain is quite grave when these existential questions come up — things like who am I really? What am I meant to be doing in life? What’s my purpose? Who’s going with me?” he says. “I think religion helps to answer those big questions because… you could find your own crisis or life passages mirrored in some of the stories of the tradition.
But so many people are leaving [organized religion] now and are spiritual but not religious… and they say they have an innate spirituality, but often it comes up in crisis.”
I met Waugh earlier this summer, intending to speak with him about his new book Evolving Soulfully. But his family history instead made an irresistible story for Canada Day. I promised readers I would get to his book later in the summer.
Evolving Soulfully is not only about quarter-life crises. It is for anyone in a major life transition who feels stuck, says Waugh. It could be a health issue, work or romance, but his practice is especially centred on helping people transition through stages of life.
“The rite of passage between childhood and adolescence or adolescence and young adulthood or into midlife or into retirement — these are all profound transformational moments, but our culture tries to make it just a simple transition,” says Waugh. The failure to provide meaningful initiations, he says, can result in misguided actions with tragic consequences.
“We’ve all heard of, for instance, youth in Lynn Valley jumping off the cliffs there and into the river below,” he says. “That’s an ancient ritual that happens in some cultures, where the elders facilitate the jumping off of cliffs, and indeed some youths don’t make it, but it’s a meaningful rite of passage.”
Another, perhaps more frequent example in our culture, he says, is high speed car chases.
“If you see the car as horse-powered, these youths are trying to power up and mythologically burst through into a bigger life, a meaningful life,” says Waugh. But with no elders supervising a structured initiation, the need for some proof of adulthood can emerge dysfunctionally.
In some First Nations cultures, boys or young men go on a “spirit quest” or “vision quest,” a practice Waugh has facilitated among some men locally, who go off alone with a restricted diet — maybe just water — for a few days until they experience something meaningful.
“Traditionally, what would happen is the boy goes up the mountain and has a vision they don’t understand themselves,” Waugh explains. “Then they come back down to the village and… the boy sits with a circle of men and then he tells the story of what happened, maybe a serpent came or he dreamed of an acorn or some kind of symbol comes to him, like a mountain lion. The men in the circle are listening very attentively and the men that resonate with the symbol that came to him, he goes into apprenticeship with and he gets like a new father who is a mentor to his soul.”
An example of a ritualized coming-of-age transition for young women Waugh has heard of is older women bringing a newly menstruating girl to a hollow tree that has a notch where her head pokes through.
“Then the women feed her as the moon is coming out, the sun is going down and she’s getting a resonance with the tree and nature saying that her body is going through great changes just like the changes of the season related to nature,” he says.
While some of these rituals may seem far out to contemporary urban dwellers, Waugh worries the absence of alternative means of initiation may be leading to physical side effects — “mysterious ailments that doctors seem to not be able to address, like chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue or fibromyalgia.”
“There are so many of them that have a psycho-spiritual dimension to them,” he says. “There is such a thing as spiritual depression, when somebody doesn’t know why they’re here or what their gifts are.”
Ritually and intentionally asking and seeking answers to these existential questions is key to what Waugh’s work — and book — try to do, helping people cultivate a “soulful life of natural vitality, deep presence, intimacy, meaning and purpose.”
Evolving Soulfully will have its official launch at Banyen Books, Oct. 8, 6:30 p.m.
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@Pat604Johnson
