Healing from Healing
building culture is the best medicine
There’s a page deep in the bowels of the internet - Healing from Healing - that I often turn to when the narcissistic BS my own sub-culture makes me want to puke.
Through memes and videos, they hold up a crooked mirror to the modern new-age pilgrim.. you know the one forever circling their own reflection, polishing their wounds like heirlooms, selling their latest spiritual breakthrough instead of actually integrating.
And of course, there’s truth in the humor.
I’ve walked that road myself - years of anxiously asking what in me is so broken - and how the F do I heal it.. because, like Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, I kept accidentally blowing myself up.
Luckily, by around 26, I knew somehow that healing itself wasn’t really the path.
Around that time, I had discovered that nearly every culture on Earth carried some form of initiation rite - ways of helping late-adolescent humans cross the threshold into true psycho-cultural adulthood, to find vision, purpose, and place within the larger fabric of life. And if that were true (which it is1) … then what the heck was I doing, if not seeking out initiation?
Back then, there weren’t Instagram Bros selling initiation weekends on my yet-to-exist social media feed (thank the Gods) and I knew of no one doing the work.
The culture I was born into didn’t know how to do initiation.
So I went looking.
And in the looking, I began to learn that initiation is not another self-help seminar or ayahuasca vision.
Nor is it something you complete and place neatly on a shelf.
What it is, with all its mess and beauty, is a way of binding yourself back into the great fabric of things.
It is, at its essence, the making of culture.
Which means healing, if it goes all the way through, cannot end with the self.
There are workshops, and there is therapy, and these can be good fires to warm your hurt little hands by… but most of us are still returning to lives that do not know how to hold what we are becoming.
Healing, without building a different culture to step into afterward, is like pulling yourself out of a flooded river and then jumping right back in.
Families are fractured. Communities are scattered. Intact lineages are battered.
There is no village waiting to welcome most of us back.
So we are left trying to heal from the absence of the very thing that would make us whole.
And so, in that difficult realization, the work of healing changes… it becomes less about tending your own wound, and more about helping build the place where wounds can actually be held.
For me, this has meant seeking out elders, mentoring boys and men, sitting with my ancestors (and helping others do that through my ancestral divination work), and learning slowly how culture is actually rebuilt - relationally, spiritually, over time.
I’m co-guiding one of these containers right now - a year-long men’s initiation here in Colorado - and recently the men began fundraising for their upcoming vision fast.
And the goal of the fundraiser isn’t actually economic. The fundraiser is really about remembering that initiation has always belonged to the wider village. These men are not going out there just for themselves - they are going out in prayer, and in service, for all life.
When I sat, for four years, in a Lakota Hanblecha (Vision Quest), there was a whole community of supporters tending camp, tending the sacred fire, and eating and drinking for us while we fasted… precisely because they felt such gratitude and reverence for what we were offering ourselves up to.
And it is the same with these men.
With deep courage and humility, they are going to offer themselves on the altar of life and death, praying they come back with some medicine for the people, for the Earth.
And so this fundraiser itself becomes part of the “supporter camp,” helping build the web of support, accountability, prayer, and relationship that makes transformation more likely to endure.
Are you willing to support these men?
→ Check out their fundraiser here.
And now, with some fear in even naming this, I’m offering this work to Jewish men through Brit Adam: A Jewish Men’s Initiation and Ceremonial Training
And it’s vulnerable… like really vulnerable to name this publicly.
I’m not liking the experience of being a Jew in public right now. That’s not a simple identity or ancestry to claim. And for a lot of my life, my own internalized anti-semitism ran deep enough that I simply lied about being Jewish.
A huge part of my own initiation has been reclaiming this beautiful and complex lineage through pilgrimage, grief, prayer, and study. And still, there are parts of me that hesitate to name it publicly.
Last summer, a firebomb was thrown into a peaceful Jewish vigil here in Boulder. Two young Jews were gunned down in DC blocks from where my sister lives and works. The stories are countless.
And I fucking hate - and I don’t say that lightly - what is happening at the hands of still-adolescent, power-mongering, terrified-as-fuck, profoundly uninitiated Jewish leadership in Israel. Leadership deeply disconnected from its own ancestral trauma.
And honestly, all of that is even more reason this work needs to happen in the Jewish world, and with Jewish men.
Jewish men need real rites of adulthood. Spaces capable of holding grief, power, lineage, responsibility, and repair. Spaces that can actually metabolize what we are carrying instead of endlessly passing it forward unconsciously.
This is the work I’m offering alongside Rabbi Zelig Golden and other elders through Brit Adam.
And we want the conversation itself to carry - like a good ferment, alive, moving, shaping what it touches.
So on May 19th, we’re hosting a free public talk with Rabbi Zelig, Rachel Rauch, Sarai Shapiro, and myself on Restoring Rites of Passage and Embodied Ritual in Jewish culture.
It’s going to be a groovy, honest, and hopefully very useful conversation space — especially for anyone exploring how ancestral culture, ritual, and initiation might help repair some of the deep isolations of modern life.
And on June 3rd, we’re an info session for Brit Adam.
Register for the info session here
If this speaks to something in you - or to a man you love - we’d be honored to have you join us.
Spring has been super busy with work and travel, and so I apologize for being a bit a spacious with these publications.
We will resume our speaker series and office-hours in June, and I have a slew of articles half-written right now. With some blessing (and warding off the demons that invade my calendar), a couple will be posted in the next month.
As always, I’d love to hear what this missive awoke in you. Make a comment or DM me.
With care,
John Wolfstone
P.S.
I’m opening a couple spots for Threshold Coaching with me.
If your life is in a real WTF moment - falling apart, cracking open, calling you deeper - and you’re ready to stop trying to “fix” it and instead learn how to tend it as a threshold, reach out and we can discuss what working together might look like.
Email me at john@thresholds.earth
Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, University of Chicago Press, 1960.
The original French edition, titled Les Rites de Passage, was first published in 1909.