The Solution
Initiation: A ceremony, ritual, test, or period of instruction with which a new member is admitted to an organization or office or to knowledge. -American Heritage Dictionary
Indigenous cultures worldwide used to recognize “acting out” as the early warning signs that a teen’s time had come. It was the moment for the elders to gather and, if need be, rip the boys away from their mothers’ arms to take them into the bush, the woods, the desert, the prairie, or the jungle, to teach them how to be men.
Girls, usually after their first menstruation, would be sequestered sometimes for days alone with the “crones” and taught how to be women.
The rights and responsibilities of adulthood were revealed to the young people through culturally appropriate trials and mentorship, ushering them across the threshold of childhood to the promised land of maturity. The stakes were high. The elders knew the young people would remain as suspended adolescents indefinitely if they weren’t initiated.
Across the planet, most of these links in the generational chain are now broken. But not all. Some of the old ways have survived. And new forms of mentoring and initiation are springing up every day that are culturally appropriate to our modern age.