crossing the threshold
preparing for women’s rites of passage
Seven sessions that provide foundation work and fortifiers for the liminal journeys and collective initiation.
You’re not broken. You’re uninitiated.
For over a century, therapy and wellness culture have individualised women’s distress, perpetuating the myth that wellbeing is a strictly personal issue requiring individual healing focus.
This course challenges that assumption while providing the balms, fortifiers, and practical skills women need to navigate life’s thresholds, both personally and collectively.
What does it mean to be a woman today?
Girls and women have lost the wisdom and cultural containers for guidance, teaching and witnessing throughout the life journey.
What can look like individual pathology, such as anxiety, disconnection, a sense that something’s perpetually missing, could be incomplete initiations.
Women may find themselves stuck in an earlier passage, or they’re moving through a new one and are yearning to be guided and witnessed through.
Another way to understand this is: You’re not going crazy, you’re going through a thing.
You’ve crossed a threshold into liminal space - the disorienting territory between what was and what will be.
This involves a symbolic death of old ways while discovering new ways of seeing and being. For some time, this requires back-and-forth revision and experimentation.
This is the path of initiation, it’s not pathology.
Some wounds can’t be separated from the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental contexts. They belong to the community and collective, not just you!
Knowing this is archetypal territory, that it happens to others, across time and place, transforms ‘going crazy’ into bone-deep trust in the process.
What this course isn’t…
This is not another self-empowerment program promising individual transformation.
This is not archetypal psychology as a self-improvement tool.
This is not a destination. It’s preparation for deeper collective work.
If you’re seeking personal healing, confidence-building, or spiritual empowerment, this course will frustrate you.
The root stock of this course is based on how we can begin to:
De-centre individual therapy as the primary healing modality
Relocate psychological work within the spiritual and socio-cultural context
Expand consciousness beyond self to incorporate the other
Prioritise community reconstruction over individual treatment
If these questions make you uncomfortable, you're not ready for this work.
What this course is…
This course is foundation work that prepares you to understand women’s cycles as cultural phenomena requiring community containers, not just individual healing.
It will prepare you with core skills and attitudes to revisit and navigate these journeys that cross your whole life. This includes both:
Practical skills for tending body-mind-spirit:
Somatic practices for nervous system regulation
Breathwork and embodied movement
Dream work and active imagination
Contemplative practices and ritual
Cognitive and re-storying methodologies to transform your well-rehearsed narratives
AND frameworks for collective understanding:
Distinguishing personal patterns from cultural programming
Locating individual experiences within archetypal cycles
Understanding when healing requires community vs therapy
Preparing for passage-specific immersions and collective work
The individual practices aren't self-improvement tools - they’re balms and fortifiers that build capacity to hold both personal material and collective patterns simultaneously.
You need these skills to engage in community initiation work without collapsing into individual empowerment.
This course introduces the Initiated Woman Archetype, not as something to become, but as a force that emerges through community and collective activation, not individual work.
It’s been developed as an adjunct to the large Passage Framework.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes called for the collective of women to “fill in” what’s been lost of women’s initiatory rites that occur multiple times, every 7 years!, across the lifespan.
This offering, and the larger work of Women’s Rites of Passage, is not the definitive answer, but one response to that directive. It requires a collaborative exploration of what's been lost.
This course acknowledges that resorucing, skill building and character building matter!
It’s vital to regulate your nervous system, understand your mind, learning to work with your body, dreams, and prayer …. to create and voice, and perform meaningful rituals.
You’re learning and developing these skills as preparation for the journeys that you will, in many ways, make alone. But also to anchor yourself through community engagement to be witnessed and guided, and to become a witness and guide yourself.
Skill and character building serve both as a self-improvement and for learning the greater context you live within.
This course operates from integration, and a Both/And approach, which means holding paradox and complexity, not either/or thinking:
Individual practices (somatic work, dream exploration, contemplative ritual) AND collective frameworks (archetypal patterns, social and cultural contexts, community preparation)
Personal tending (building nervous system capacity, developing skills) AND social-cultural-cosmological contexts (to recognise what individual work can’t address alone)
Practical tools (breathwork, movement, re-storying) AND perspectives that help you see the bigger picture (depth psychology, archetypal patterns, cultural and feminist analysis)
Individual practices without greater collective frameworks become the domain of self-centred and privileged wellness culture.
At the same time, collective frameworks without embodied practices remain abstract theory.
The initiated woman knows how to tend her body-mind-spirit AND understands that some healing requires more than what an individual can or should hold.
The Modern Problem
In Western societies especially, we live within cultures that are secular, hyper-individualistic, and competitive, where life transitions are ignored or medicalised.
Most societies are also overseen by a broad male dominance that devalues girls and women.
This has led to:
Generations of women feeling fundamentally stuck – uninitiated
An over-reliance on individual therapy to try and heal collective wounds – a resource primarily available for the privileged classes
A loss of intergenerational wisdom transmission due to the exclusion and minimisation of women's voices
The cultural devaluing of women's ways of knowing
We need to get away from the idea that the solution is more individual healing. The solution will develop from reconstructing the community containers that make actual collaboration, dialogue, and initiation possible.
But first, you need to be prepared to do the work and understand the frameworks.
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Who is this course is for?
This work operates from the principle: You are unique but not special.
Your experiences matter, but they’re not exceptional. They’re variations on archetypal patterns that women across millennia have navigated.
This course will be for you if you are ready to:
Question individual healing culture’s limitations
Examine personal experiences within collective patterns
Prepare for community-centred work
Challenge empowerment culture assumptions
Build toward collaborative initiation containers
Have an active spiritual practice that values bringing insights into being as personal and collective purpose
You should have:
Exhausted individual healing approaches (or recognise their limits)
A capacity for intellectual rigour alongside experiential practice
A willingness to examine cultural programming, not just personal wounds
An interest in collective transformation, not just individual growth
Who is this workshop is NOT for?
If you’re not ready to question therapy culture or examine your complicity in individualistic approaches, this isn’t for you yet.
This course isn’t for you if you’re seeking:
Personal healing as an end goal
Archetypal work as self-improvement or individual empowerment
Solo spiritual seeking or to stay in blissful mystical experiences
Quick fixes or simple answers
Working with Archetypal forces: The Initiated Woman Archetype - who is she?
Archetypes are impersonal energetic patterns in the collective unconscious, not personal achievements to unlocK
You cannot become an Archetype.
This is critical! Trying to ‘embody’ archetypes is ego-based spirituality. Archetypes can guide and influence you, but you cannot BE them. Individual empowerment culture sells the fantasy of ‘becoming your Higher Self’. This course explicitly challenges that.
The Initiation Cycle
The Call → Descent into Liminality → Rebirth & Return
This is the archetype of initiation and the pattern that spirals and repeats across lifespans.
Women can get stuck at any point in this cycle, making initiation incomplete. Like, refusing the call, or being trapped in endless processing in liminality, or being unable to integrate and be renewed to bring lessons learnt back into life.
Because initiation is a communal process, and because we’ve lost the cultural containers that support it, initiation remains incomplete for many girls and women.
A lack of initiation is not because you’re broken, but because you lack community frameworks.
The Initiated Woman’s Role
Liminality is the domain of the Initiated Woman Archetype. She stands on the other side of thresholds and accompanies women through descent. She nudges, prompts, and points where you need to go next, to learn, build resources, and release what's done and needs to be composted.
She’s NOT: Your Higher Self, personal achievement, or a self-empowerment figure. She is not accessible through exclusive solo practice, as attempting to embody her risks possession by archetypal forces your ego can’t contain.
She emerges safely through collective, not individual, work. Her multifaceted energy activates when women gather for mutual initiation.
The Rites of Passage: There’s always more initiation
Re-initiation means:
Returning to incomplete passages with new understanding
Restorying experiences with and within a collective context
Building skills to support others through similar thresholds
Becoming initiated elders who can guide younger women
This course won’t explore the Rites of Passage, and the 13 Passages in depth. That’s future work requiring community engagement.
Instead, this course introduces the Initiated Woman archetype as the pattern that guides women through ALL passages. Understanding her prepares you for the passage-specific work to come.
But as a minimum, it is helpful to understand this:
The Rites of Passage are the life chapters and developmental cycles that girls and women traverse throughout their lifespans. They are archetypal quests that have been happening for millennia, and all girls and women traverse them chronologically, but not all women will experience the vital gift of initiation.
Each passage requires specific lessons, tasks, and skills. But without cultural containers to hold these transitions, women remain uninitiated (not broken).
Women and girls collectively lack the community frameworks needed for actual transformation.
Its also important to note that these passages aren’t chronological or linear. They spiral and zig-zag. Trauma or ruptures mean some rites remain incomplete. You might find yourself circling back to earlier passages while navigating current ones.
Session 7 will briefly introduce the Passages framework to show how the archetype functions across the lifespan, and everyone who purchases the course will receive 2 free workshops on Women’s Rites of Passage.
Instead, the focus of this course is on developing foundational skills and understanding that make deeper passage work possible
Women’s Rites of Passage
Crossing the ThreShold
THE CALL OF INITIATION FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN
The preparations for our liminal journey through the passages.
$250 - Early Bird Pricing
Begins January 12, 2025
Unable to make it live? Register to gain access to the recordings.
Who is this course for?
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Who is this course NOT for?
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The Syllabus
Each session weaves together pre-recorded teachings, embodied practices, myth work, and psychological frameworks - drawing from depth psychology, somatic approaches, contemplative traditions, and symbolic exploration.
What’s Included?
Audio & Video Lessons (7+ hours) | Bite-sized teaching segments (1-10 minutes) weaving together psychological frameworks, somatic practices, and symbolic exploration. Each session includes 4-12 lessons you can move through at your own pace.
Recorded Practices (3+ Hours) | Supplementary resources of somatic work, breathwork, movement, and contemplative practices.
Myth work | Explore myths as both personal healing metaphors and reflections of broader cultural patterns
Body-based practices | Somatic work that bridges the personal nervous system with soul and archetypal information -the body can knows that mind doesn’t
PDF Worksheets | Downloadable worksheets and supplementary materials provide additional information to deepen the experience.
The both/and approach | You’ll develop practical skills for navigating your own passages WHILE learning why those passages require community containers, not just individual mastery.
Lifetime Access* | You’ll be able to revisit the material as this framework evolves and develops. I’ll be adding, tweaking and modifying course material as necessary
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We begin with ritual practice to establish ourselves as rooted and connected to lineage and community.
We explore the Initiated Woman archetype through image and imagination.
We meet the Persephone/Demeter/Hecate myth - understanding it both as a metaphore for the personal and cultural pattern for women’s journeys
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We learn embodied practices: breathwork, movement, connecting to your core and center.
We work with the Tree of Life as a personal mapping project and framework for tracking how the material of the course is being held.
We journey into the Myth - part 1
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We explore and reimagine the mind and its patterns; what conditioning and ‘spells’ you’re under, and distinguishing personal thoughts from received cultural programming.
We touch on the seeds of re-storying.
We work with the heart through contemplative practices and prayer as connection to a cosmological lineage.
We deepen into the Myth - part 2
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We learn to work with dreams as doorways to the unconscious.
We explore intuition as a bridge between logical and symbolic understanding.
We explore women’s “different voice” and your “original voice” - understanding both personal expression and cultural patterns of communication.
We explore ritual as acts that bring the symbolic into the world.
We deepen into the Myth - part 3
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We explore your “project” and learn about how to tend the creative cycle.
We work with the inner masculine and feminine as integrated forces and understand the intiated woman as an androgyne.
We explore how creative expression can serve both personal fulfillment and collective contribution
We deepen into the Myth - part 4
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We understanding that initiated women initiate others - the collaborative nature of this work.
We further explore re-storying practices for crafting new life myths.
We explore virtuous friendships and community building as essential to transformation
We learn that the Initiated Woman does not work alone - she is part of a triptych of the Wise-Wise-Initiated.
We begin planning for the closing ritual and ceremony.
We deepen into the Myth - part 5.
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Ritual closing and integration.
We review the 13 passages framework showing how the archetype of initiation looks across the lifespan.
We articulate what’s been alchemizing and how to bring this work into your life and community.
We prepare for what comes next after liminality.
Sneak Peek
When you sign up for this course you will gain FREE access to the Rites of Passage Masterclass Bundle ($21 Value).
FAQs
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Allow around 60–90 minutes per week to engage with the pre-recorded content (audio/video + practices).
They are offered as smaller ‘bite-sized’ mini-lessons and practices. You will have your own style but some people like to do a few minutes a day, others like to dedicate 1 or 2 blocks of time to complete them.
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You’ll have lifetime access* to the self-study content.
* this is for as long as the material remains relevant and hosted. -
Absolutely. The course is designed to be accessible for both newcomers and those familiar with symbolic or archetypal exploration.
All key themes are introduced with clarity, and you’re encouraged to engage at your own depth and pace. If you are interested in an ongoing exploration of Women’s Rites of Passage, this course is a prerequisite and good preparation.
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The course includes optional guided practices in breathwork, movement, or yoga-inspired somatic exploration.
Please listen to your body and energy levels, and make any necessary adaptations. If you are working with an injury, medical condition, or complex trauma, you’re encouraged to consult a healthcare provider before beginning these practices.
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Yes. This offering is open to participants worldwide.
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No, this course is not a therapeutic service.
While it invites personal reflection and may feel deeply meaningful, it is not a replacement for therapy. If you are currently under the care of a mental health professional, be guided by their advice as to whether this course is appropriate for you.
Please seek professional support if you are navigating significant emotional distress.
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Not at all. We’ll enter the myth together, in stages. It will be offered in a way that’s alive and resonant, even if it’s your first time encountering it.
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Yes, this course is curated for women and those who identify with feminine rites of passage and have had the encultured experience of girlhood and womanhood.
Women’s Rites of Passage
Initiated Woman Archetype
The Call of Initiation for Girls & Women | BEGINs SEPTEMBER 10, 2025
Join Dr. Mendy Neralic for seven pre-recorded sessions to welcome you into a clan of diverse women, all working towards the call to initiation.
This 7-session journey combines pre-recorded content—including audio teachings, video modules, and guided practices— where Dr Mendy shares from her apothecary of psychology - transpersonal, depth and archetypal, somatic and embodiment practices, yoga philosophy, energy medicine, spirituality and religion, and the mythic imagination.
This is where you reflect, explore, and delve into how the materia alchemises through you.
Both the Course and the Gatherings will be underpinned by the mythic ground of the Persephone–Demeter–Hecate story.
You are invited to choose between two pathways of engagement [see the Syllabus below]:
COURSE (Self-Study Only) – access to all pre-recorded content to explore in your own time.
(DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED) COURSE + GATHERINGS (Self-Study + Live Dialogue) – full access to the content plus participation in weekly live calls, offering a held, dialogical space to integrate and expand your experience in community.
An offering to demystify, reimagine, & restore connection to the cycles and rhythms across her lifespan.
I envision women and girls from different walks, places, and times coming together to investigate what‘s known of old rites of passage, bear witness as they re-story their lives, and share what they discover in that context.
We work to re-initiate each other and re-write what it is to be a girl, a young woman, and an aging woman in the modern age.
I invite you to join me in seeing this as a calling—as an initiation in itself—to create a culture of collaboration, meaning-making, and healing that goes beyond each of our individual needs and journeys so we can see ourselves as humans and souls embedded in greater cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”
DR CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES