Why We Need Creative Rites of Passage
We need Creative Rites of Passage because those of us who have grown up in Western culture have been purposefully conditioned to view our essence and our role on Earth through the lens of the Capitalist Industrial Complex, rather than through the lens of nature and honoring who we are at the soul level.
We’ve been shaped to produce, to perform, to extract, and to conform. Not to get low and listen. Not to attune to subtle information. Not to live into the deeper questions of who we are and why we’re here.
Traditionally, rites of passage are collective rituals designed to honor the maturation of a person into a new stage of life—often adulthood—and to celebrate the soul’s unique expression and contribution as it takes shape within the community. Historically, though these rites were ceremonial acts of courage. They were initiatory. They included tests, physiological and psychological thresholdcrossings like receiving your first bleed or going on the kinds of vision fasts where you don’t eat for days. They included prayer, creativity, and communal witnessing. People were given new names, new responsibilities, and new relational roles. The rite itself signified: you are no longer who you were. And this community sees it.
But in our modern lives, especially in creative and entrepreneurial spaces, there is little to no structure for holding our emergence.
There are metrics. There are launch goals. There are timelines and templates. But there is rarely a framework that supports us through the real emotional, developmental, and energetic changes that come with growing a body of work.
We need Creative Rites of Passage to mark the maturation of our voice and the growth of our capacity to express and build what lives inside of us. It takes incredible self-awareness, embodiment, and wisdom to steward vision and stay with it.
The truth is, many visions, businesses, and initiatives don’t fail because the idea wasn’t good. They unravel because the founder couldn’t stay with it. Because the structure, support, or inner scaffolding wasn’t in place. Because the pressure to deliver outpaced the soul’s timing. Because the person carrying the vision didn’t have the right of passage to meet the next version of themselves.
The Creative Rites help us remember our natural ways of creating, so we can build stronger cultural infrastructure for supporting and stewarding meaningful change.
They name what is often unnamed: that transformation is happening. That something is dying and something is beginning. That a new part of you is arriving and needs to be witnessed, held, and honored. They offer a way to metabolize the initiations we move through, so we don’t collapse into urgency or confusion at the first sign of discomfort.
They’re not designed to make the process clean. They’re designed to make it holy.
They affirm that you are not wrong for needing time. You are not behind for feeling lost. You are not broken for grieving what you’ve outgrown.
Creative Rites are a structure for your becoming.
They root us in a slower, wilder timeline—one that mirrors the Earth, not the market. They help us move with integrity, not performance. With capacity, not burnout. With devotion, not desperation.
If we want to build new earth businesses—if we want to walk our creative paths in a way that is regenerative, soulful, and deeply rooted in who we are—we need rites. Not just rituals, but containers of meaning. Not just checkpoints, but thresholds of transformation.
The Creative Rites support us as we cross into who we are becoming. They hold us steady when we are tempted to abandon ourselves. They remind us that the wilds of the creative process are not something to rush through or bypass, they are the path itself.
