Tag: severance

The three parts of the ceremony

A medicine walk, just like a full-length vision quest, has three parts to the ceremony: severance, threshold, and The ever-popular bear poo is often seen in BC wilderness visionsreincorporation.

The time spent mirroring my intention was part of the severance phase, during which I was preparing to leave my people and go out into the wild. This time also included packing and preparing for the day walk.

The time on the walk is called the threshold phase, during which I was in the sacred space of the ceremony, and a ghost to my people. The threshold place is the place of spirit, of magic, and of the unknown. Some call it the liminal space. This is the place where trees, animals, and rocks can talk to us, if we will listen. This is the place where a vision might come, though it can come to us anywhere and anytime if we are open to seeing.


The final phase, reincorporation, is when we return to our people with the gifts we have gained from our time of trial. The hardest task is to embody the vision in our lives, through service to our people. But before I describe this phase of my journey, I’d like to summarize what I’ve said so far.

First, there were the entries from the severance phase, about mirroring for intention.

Then there were the entries from the threshold time, while I was out on my medicine walk:

Next time, I will tell you about the reincorporation phase.

Vision quest—background

A rite of passage

Peoples of many cultures have created traditions and ceremonies involving solo time in wild Faster in Wyoming's red desertnature. In North America, the plains peoples are the most well-known groups to use the ancient practice of the vision quest. John Murray recounts, in editors Michael Tobias and Georgianne Cowan’s The Soul of Nature, a story of discovering a vision quest site in Rocky Mountain National Park. Archaeologists from Colorado State University and the National Park Service studied the site and determined it had been used for vision quests and fasts from 10,000 years ago until about 500 years ago. This is remarkable! Long before the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the first peoples of North America had been using spiritual ceremony to help their people live and thrive.

The vision quest was used as a rite of passage to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. The quester would fast from food, people, and shelter. In some groups the faster would go forth naked, with only a bear-skin robe for warmth and protection. Severing from her people (I don’t know for sure if young women participated in this ceremony, or if it was only males in traditional societies who used this rite of passage, but today they definitely do!), the quester would enter a threshold space—a space between worlds, a place of spirit. The faster would be invisible to her people—a spirit form—until returning back across the threshold, sometimes after four days and four nights of fasting, sometimes for different periods of time. Upon returning, the quester would tell her story of the fast. The story would be received by her elders, and the entire community would know that the quester had successfully crossed over into adulthood. She might have received a vision, or a gift to bring back to her people. Incorporation, the final stage of the vision fast process, would involve living her gift or vision—bringing it back to her people, and making it real.

There are historical accounts of Native Americans who saw the coming of Christopher Columbus’s ship in a vision, but didn’t know what it was because they had never seen a ship before. There are many accounts of first peoples visionaries seeing the coming of the “white man” and the ensuing drastic effects on their way of life.

Today, First Nation peoples in some parts of North America still use the vision quest ceremony. Contemporary groups such as the School of Lost Borders and Monkey Valley Retreat Centre also put people out on the land to undergo the rite of passage of the vision fast. See the Links page for other contemporary organizations who offer vision fasts.