Woman-Becoming Rites of passage

One of the many stories i share with my daughters and with girls in circles, is the Sealskin Soulskin story by Clarrissa Pinkolas Estes….

I have weaved it together with a ceremony and activity, to create a powerful teaching tool : see gathering your wisdom bundle download for more details.

It is such i wonderful story about a man who steals a Seal woman’s pelt , so she will marry him, which she does… but there are consequences……she begins to fade away and become ill as she loses her self, her true nature, as that what her sealskin represents , her true nature, which is a wild Seal woman who belongs in the wild ocean. The Sealskin also represents our Soulskin as women,our true nature , who we truly are. 

I had just shared this teaching and ceremony with the girls in our lodge along with the teachings of Seal medicine, when i left to go wandering with my family and my sister Hannah and her family in our travelling homes.

We travelled on a cold winter day in January, the new year actually, to a windswept beach on the mid wales coast…. as the tide ebbs in this place it reveals a magical secret, the remains of an ancient forest….. As i stand on the beach surrounded by the stumps of ancient trees embedded in the sand, i close my eyes and can see back to when this land was deep dark forest with wolves and bears, when it was wilderness. My heart yearns for it once more.

Over the next few days we all discover the remains of a female seal thrown onto the beach by the winter storms. Embedded into the sand, she is almost just bare bones, obviously been dead a while…..we feel the power of this discovery , after just a few days ago sharing seal stories and seal medicine in ceremony with girls… she still has some of her precious sealskin as the rooks are finding it too tough to break through, they caw at our dog to come eat it and share the remains with them!

Then another discovery, just by her, camouflaged by its spotted fur in the pebbly beach , a seal cub, her baby… still whole with fresh blood on its fur. It is very thin and we realise it must of starved after its mother had died.

This felt like a powerful message from spirit…

The next day my sister and i drummed and connected to this message as we sat by this mama and her babe.

We felt the teaching of the wild, the deep and the feminine. 

Then the message was clear, as women we need to recover our Soulskin, nuture it , find the truth of it, know it and keep it, we will then know our own deep self, live from her, speak from her and live our true wild nature.

And we must do this work of the recovery of ourselves, our Soulskin , not only for ourselves, but for our daughters.

If we do not recover our true natures and embody our natural deep self, then our children , our daughters will starve, they will be only be fed half truth by us, and drip fed the lies and distortion of this separated teenage culture, that seeks to make them sick with loss of connection to themselves and mother earth. Their souls will wither and lie hidden as they are starved of the truth of connection to their own unique essence.

For theirs and our souls to blossom and unfold into the glory of their true nature, we need to heal and recover ourselves and become truthful.