Women’s Rites of Passage
An offering dedicated to demystifying, reimagining, and restoring women's wisdom and bringing the old practices into modern times.
Upcoming Offering
Initiated Woman Gatherings - June/July 2025 - dates TBD
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Access two workshops, the Rites of Passage Ebook, and resources and learn more about upcoming offerings related to the Rites of Passage.
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Women’s Rites of Passage Workshop
Rediscovering the Cycles of Life for Healing, Transformation, and Meaning - 45 minutes
This introductory workshop is on revisiting the passages of initiation to re-know, re-story, and reclaim your place as an individual within a collective of women. You'll experience the material through the alchemy of psychology, story, symbolism, imagination, movement, energetics, and contemplation.
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Women’s Rites of Passage E-Book
This job is not for just one elder, healer, or therapist.
Collaboration, communal care, and broad, diverse networks are key to investigating the old rites of passage. The e-book includes more information around the history of the Rites of Passage, the 13 passages, and my invitation for you.
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The 13 Passages Workshop
The Cycles of Initiation for Girls & Women - 40 minutes
Even though women ‘know’ how to heal, for all their efforts, they still feel separate from themselves - due to personal, generational & ancestral trauma and broader cultural, political, societal and ecological circumstances. Creating a dissociation from self, others in the community, and their womanhood.
In this workshop, I outline each of the 13 passages of the archetypal journey that happens across the life span of girls and women - from birth to death.
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Join the newsletter to gain access to my free workshops, Rites of Passage Ebook, resources and learn more about upcoming offerings related to the Rites of Passage.
What are the Rites of Passage?
The Rites of Passage are the different stages, thresholds, life chapters, or lessons that girls and women traverse throughout their lives. They symbolise the particular tasks, lessons, and skills important to learn for each phase of a woman’s life development - and help facilitate changes through shifts in values, attitude, perspective, focus and how to act and relate.
Moving consciously through these Passages helps each girl or woman prepare for the challenges of that age, know her place and value, and inform direction and purpose. They also provide the foundation for the life she will re-enter into and the later passages.
In this context, each Passage provides a container to help you move from one phase of life to the next. They can last moments or days, but usually much longer—like months or years. Each is marked by a combination of development, physiological and biological growth, and change, with a spiritual longing or soul calling to enter a new age.
“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
For over a century, psychotherapy (in all it’s evolving guises - talk, somatic, art, depth...) has primarily guided and supported people through difficult times, picking up the banner where religion and society have failed many of us.
But there's still a considerable gap, and you can feel it - yes? A feeling of still being separate from... something ... a deeper self? Soul...? connection to something Greater?
Every day in my practice, I witness women feeling separate from themselves and other women. Many women have admitted that they have lost touch with their womanhood-- due to generational & ancestral trauma, cultural changes, politics, and societal and ecological shifts.
We dissociate from our bodies, cut off our voices, and bury the soul. We have original thoughts and ideas, but still, we pull back and hold back.
We strive to heal the disconnect through individual healing modalities -- but the lingering sense of separateness can make us feel like we still haven’t “healed enough”. Defaulting to a self-blame that amplifies feeling frustrated, lost, isolated and burnt out.
The Modern Problem
We are all daughters and sons of the patriarchy. Under the umbrella of patriarchy, we’ve lost the diverse wisdom about who girls and women are and what their vital roles are within the community.
For an age, both women and men have been indoctrinated into this system, overtly and covertly devaluing women and confining men. This has led to a skewed and limited idea of the Feminine, with an internalised belief that femininity and womanhood are inferior subset to the Masculine and manhood.
Women’s ways are denigrated and dismissed as hysterical, mean, flaky, moody, weak, or indecisive. Witch, bitch, bad, mad, and sad. Simultaneously, girls and women are expected to be passive, friendly, self-sacrificing, pretty, sexy, and silent. To fit the male gaze, women have had to bend, twist, stretch, and squish themselves into specific ways and roles.
Attempting to reclaim their voices and power, women have tried to prove their worth by emulating men and striving to match the ‘superior’ masculine ideal of perfection, recognition, force, logic, and constant action. Whether women appease or imitate, they shut off from their uniqueness and connection to womanhood.
So, what can we do about it?
In an ideal life situation, we would be guided, initiated, and supported through each new stage of life, Rites of Passage or threshold by wiser others and elders in the community. But due to the context that most of us live in - modern society has created a culture of disconnect, hyper-individualism, and secularity (simply put). Meaning that many of us have remained unguided and so uninitiated through important life stages.
I see this surface within my clients (and myself) through recurring themes, cycles and struggles - of feeling lost, uncertain, self-blaming and self-reliant.
Re-initiation is a process of going back and working through the passages we have missed or been stuck in, and relearning the lessons and rites of that age. We also rewrite - restory - our hurts, so they can be woven into the greater context of our lives - rather than carried as unprocessed burdens. When we do this for ourselves, this allows us to ensure that other girls and women in our communities have better guidance. We become the new initiated elders.
As a culture, we need time to rebuild and lay down the wisdom for this modern age.
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.
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Access my free workshops, Rites of Passage Ebook, and resources and learn more about upcoming offerings related to the Rites of Passage.
Rites of Passage Articles
About the host
Dr. Mendy Neralic
Dr. Mendy Neralic is a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, grandmother, and emerging crone. Her work is about supporting and guiding people through metamorphic change, and she wants this personal transformation to have a greater effect of rippling out into community and eco-cosmology.
Dr. Mendy consciously lives by the mantra and quote by Angeles Arrien, “I walk the mystical path with practical feet” - as she blends and mixes her foundations in traditional psychology and neuroscience with depth, archetypal and cross-cultural psychology and somatic therapies. She infuses these with embodiment and the wisdom and practices from various spiritual and religious traditions, yoga philosophy and esotericism, including energy medicine, mysticism, Tarot, dream work, folk stories and mythology.
Dr. Mendy is an initiate of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes-Reyes and is dedicated to carrying forward the work of helping women embody their wild and true natures through each of her offerings.