THE STAGES OF INITIATION
locating your worldbuilding power
paradigmatic frameworks are part of how I stay grounded in my purpose during the ongoing waves of Revolution that punctuate the timeline of my life. without paradigmatic shifts within it’s very difficult to do anything other than reinforce the pre-existing paradigm without. I’ve been thinking a lot about How to Build your Dreamworld 2.0 as I often do at times like these. How to Build your Dreamworld 2.0 is the communal edition of my H2BYDW workshops and it contains the paradigmatic frameworks I feel to be most crucial for sustainable worldbuilding at a collective scale.
I’m so passionate about supporting worldbuilders in understanding how to build new worlds by not only navigating but contextualizing the tension that inevitably arises. in that spirit, I want to share with you a little about The Stages of Initiation because it is one of the quickest ways to locate yourself in relation to your worldbuilding power, especially when it’s activated by world events. The Stages of Initiation is one of the frameworks I teach about in How to Build your Dreamworld 2.0; it’s inspired by what I learned about the stages of movement involvement/grief when I took the Movement Trauma Healer Training in 2020.
THE STAGES OF INITIATION
I call these the stages of initiation because I’m positing that this cycle of awareness and activation doesn’t need to be a perpetual circle but can facilitate us into the action of beginning something, which is what initiation means. in this case, we’re talking about the action of beginning to build a new world or to continue building it at deeper and wider scales of integrity, impact, and reality.
the stages are a sequence of transformation that repeats at different speeds and frequencies throughout life depending on the individual. every single moment of every single stage is important, none is more valuable than the other—there is no hierarchy but there is order. there’s no final arrival, but rather a continued deepening of the commitment to the new world, whether personal or communal. (quick little secret: there is no separation between personal and communal worldbuilding.)
Awareness of the Pain/Tension: this is when the unconscious becomes the conscious or when the external impacts the internal. something happens to cause a realization that there is incongruence or dis-ease occurring. this is perhaps the most mentally destabilizing stage as a new awareness enters the field of your mind/body like lightning, demanding a destruction/reconstruction of reality. if you’re tarot fluent, you might recognize this as a Tower moment.
Rage/Grief: in the aftermath of lightning striking, there’s a heartbreak, a rupture, an opening. some of us collapse into grief, some of us boil into rage, some of us bounce between both like a seesaw until we numb out. recognizing that the anger and the grief both have their origins in love allows us to access the transformative functions of these energies. the fire of rage and the water of grief are both essential to an alchemy that naturally occurs if they’re held in a container of love. what’s important here is that all feelings are felt through as part of the alchemical process, not felt around. it’s easy to get stuck in this part of the cycle if there’s an attachment to an identity of grief or rage because we think that is what will keep us activated when the truth is that moving through it into our actual power source (love) is what will keep us active.
Hopelessness: this stage is particularly nuanced for everyone as some of us never arrive at total hopelessness and some of us already have a home in it. the way I’m using the word here is inspired by a conversation in the Midnight Gospel Episode 5: Annihilation of Joy where Duncan Trussell and Jason Louv talk about letting go of hope as letting go of the constant rejection of the current reality and perpetual reaching towards something else that isn’t the Now. it can be easy to get lost in the release of hope, but I see and have experienced it as a place of potentiality. in the liminality of this stage we have an opportunity to accept What Is in a way that doesn’t prohibit us from changing it but instead empowers us to change it from a place of radical acceptance. this means that our energy is efficiently conserved because it’s not being used to push against but to move towards. choice is a crucial component to moving from each stage to the next but none more so than here because we either abandon our power for hopelessness, or hopelessness becomes a transformative portal into more of our power.
Revival of Commitment: if you’ve chosen radical acceptance, you automatically begin to enter the fourth and final stage in this sequence. because you’ve been through the transformation, your awareness has now expanded beyond the problem and the limitation of solutions into a more accurate and grounded assessment of how you want to move forward. to revive your commitment to building a new world for yourself/others is to embrace your worldbuilding power. part of what happens during stage 1 is that we feel our worldbuilding power is deflated because tension has arisen. during stage 2 we might feel our worldbuilding power is inflated through the power of emotion, but hot-wired connections are not sustainable. once we enter stage 3, we might feel disillusioned about our worldbuilding power but in a way that helps us to right size it which provides us with more consistent access. in the revival of commitment, we are full of choice! we get to choose where, when, why, what, and how we direct our power to build worlds. we’re not avoiding disappointment and we’re not hiding in apathy. we’re present, better able to move through the sequence in future when our commitments are reinforced or refined through the ongoing tension of change. this is what it means to embrace our worldbuilding power with integrity and wisdom.
I’d love to know if this is helpful to you in this moment and why— let me know in the comments or tag me on socials with your thoughts. for a more comprehensive experience of being guided through the stages, full of personal shares from my experience, check out How to Build your Dreamworld 2.0.
p.s: for those ready to create deep, unshakeable congruence through connecting to their worldbuilding power as they are designed to, there are 2 spots left for my new 3 week 1:1 worldbuilding training.