02 Nov THE YOUTH QUEST - Switzerland July 7 to 12, 2024

Vision Quest for 15- to 24-year-olds

(24-hour solo fast)

Jura, Switzerland.

July 7 to July 12, 2024.

Carine Roth and Guido Albertelli

 

The Vision Quest is a single fast in nature, a specific form of Rite of Passage.

to mark and celebrate the passage from one state to another,

from one age or life stage to another.

 

Youth Quest.

 

For the 6th year running, we're offering this space to 15 to 24 year-olds to listen to their talents and aspirations. Every time, it's an honor and a great joy to be able to share these moments together.

The transition from childhood to young adulthood is an important stage that can naturally be accompanied by questioning. Affirming my values and finding my place in the modern world can be a challenge that Vision Quest supports and encourages.

It takes courage to sit alone in nature, facing yourself. In return, it brings clarity and strength.

To be seen for who I am and to find "my medicine", what I want to bring to the community.

Finding the place of my strength, of my heart, choosing to let my unique flame shine, essential to the smooth running of the world.

Society has a duty to offer young people a space in which to discover how to take their place and have the capacity to become our collective future.

 

 

"If the fires that burn innately inside young people

are not intentionally added to the community home,

they will burn the structures of culture, just to feel the heat."

(African proverb)

 

Throughout their lives, human beings pass through various stages. In traditional societies, rites accompanied these passages, including that from adolescence to adulthood. Vision quests (fasting alone in the wild) are a specific form of rite of passage.

The Vision Fast - a Ceremony with no religious connotations.

• This practice has proven its essential character over the generations.
  
• This ceremony involves a challenge, a challenge, a danger, to be overcome in order to express one's own value and truth.
  
• It offers the opportunity to revisit and express one's own history, one's identity, in a positive way, to nourish one's self-esteem, to perform an initiation, an act of bravery, of courage, and to feel proud, ennobled and grown up.
• It allows you to build a personal story rich in meaning, based on concrete experience in Nature, and provides an invaluable foundation for entering life with a better understanding of yourself and the desire to assert yourself and take your place in the world and in society.

 

The Vision Fast (a 24-hour solo in the wild) is an initiation that celebrates a change of status, of role, of place. It is essential that this change be recognized and validated on return. This implies not only the voluntary decision of the future initiate, but also the participation of his or her entourage, community and loved ones, on departure and return.

 

Discover who I am.
Live an initiatory adventure in nature.
Find my path, my voice, my personal
my personal legend.

 

The 3 phases of a rite of passage:

-Separation; preparing to leave the known to dare to enter the unknown.

-the passage; the vision quest, the ceremony.

-integration; a crucial stage that welcomes and incorporates the changes and discoveries of experience.

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Mark a passage.

From birth to death, the human being goes through the various stages and initiations of life. The normal cycle is for the baby to become a child, the child an adolescent, the adolescent an adult, the adult an elderly person.

Even if this evolution takes place naturally, it's not always easy to overcome these transformations, to know how to understand and welcome them. Marking life's stages with rites of passage is a way of giving them meaning, of accessing these existential stages in a fluid, conscious way, and of extracting the substance of lived experience to enjoy and share.

In traditional societies, rites accompanied the transition from adolescent to adult. These were not only physical but also psychological tests that led to the surpassing of oneself in order to establish a notion of pride and personal esteem, to find one's place within the community and to discover the essence of one's personal legend.

The Vision Quest (Vision Fast) is an ancestral and essential rite of passage that recognizes, values and validates the first steps into adult life.

In the human psyche, celebrating life's milestones is central to building identity and understanding the world. Very often, teenagers will seek to mark this passage in one way or another: taking risks, defying the established order, testing their own limits, sometimes in dangerous or even destructive ways. Pain and risk to health are then, as they were in primitive initiation rites, included in the process of transformation and the need to signify this transformation in a concrete and perceptible way. This responds to the essential need to be seen and recognized, to have one's place and personal value in a social system of relationships. Unconsciously, young people engage in a rite of passage. But this ritual is not validated by the community, nor does it provide a framework for young people to try it out. These self-initiations are not only sometimes dangerous, but also often unsuccessful, as the notion of returning to and being welcomed by the community is essential to the initiation rite.

So the fact that rites of passage - such as vision fasts - are slowly making a comeback in our modern societies, especially for young people, is excellent news.

Why is this important?

©youthpassageways

• If you're a young person trying to make your way into adulthood in an often confusing, demanding and stressful world, rites of passage are important to you.
• If you're someone who cares about children and worries about the difficulties they face on their journey to adulthood, rites of passage are important to you.
• If you're concerned about the state of the world and fear that we humans have created quite a mess and made the world increasingly inhospitable for all life, rites of passage matter to you.
• If you care about the strength and resilience of our communities, if we are socially equipped to face an unknown and seemingly difficult future with grace, courage and integrity, rites of passage are for you.
• If you're hoping we'll find ways to better support each other in bringing out our gifts and talents and using them in the service of our communities, our world and our future, rites of passage are for you.
• If you hope that we can create a peaceful, just and sustainable future, becoming all of us the kind of adults the world needs to meet its current and future challenges, rites of passage are for you.

 

Rites of passage are important because of what they can do: in the lives of young people, in our own lives and in our communities. They have the power to penetrate deep into the hearts of human beings and help them thrive, rather than simply survive. In short: rites of passage are important because young people matter, our communities matter and the future matters. 

 

The Rite of Passage
Rites of passage for young people can provide an alternative to antisocial or negative identity construction. Avoiding the increasingly harmful consequences of differentiation through narcissism, drug addiction, thrill-seeking and loss of empathy. (Friese et al. 1995; Moore and Russell 2002; Ewert et al. 2011)

Contact with the natural world and a period of isolation (fasting alone in nature) offer teenagers a chance to hear their own voice and get to know themselves more clearly, to confront limits and discover their own values in a sacred, collective context (Knapp & Smith, 2005).

Find out more about your guides:

 

Carine's page

Guido's

 

 

 

 

 

 

Practical info:

 

Information by email, pre-registration meeting, contact:

Price: 480,-chf for supervision and 80,- for expenses and food. That's 560,-chf for the 6 days.

Material list, schedule, interview and individual preparation before the quest.

Registration registered after payment of a deposit of 240,- chf to the Rite de passage association account.

Association Rite de Passage, IBAN CH16 0839 0039 1577 1000 1Chemin de Renens 12, 1004 Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

Rites of passage are based on the age-old practice of marking life transitions with a meaningful and memorable ceremony - self-generated, voluntary and culturally recognized (Larry Hobbs, School of Lost Borders).

 

Tying the Threads of the Past to the Future: A Ted Talk by my friend DARCY OTTEY, who gives her vision of rites of passage and their importance for our young people.

Being young...

The moment, no doubt, when that age-old injunction, which has spanned the centuries without ever running out of steam, speaks to us in anguish and enthusiasm: "Become who you are!".

It's a time, then, for gradually learning to take charge of oneself, discovering autonomy, building self-confidence and experiencing the importance of caring relationships with others, with those who recognize me in all my strength and vulnerability.

And that's what this story, which has also come a long way, is all about:

"Once upon a time, a lion cub lost his mother at a very young age and found himself alone. Sad and abandoned, he wandered in search of help or affection... until he found a flock of sheep. He joined them and, as the sheep accepted him, he grew up with them. And so the cub was raised by the sheep to the point where he was grazing grass and bleating like a sheep.

The cub grew into a superb lion with a flamboyant mane, feeding on grass and water, living in harmony with his sheep brothers.

One day, while the lion was grazing among the sheep, an old lion came down from the mountain. He was amazed to see that a lion was quietly eating grass in the middle of a flock of sheep. So he decided to go and talk to him, and asked:

Why do you live like a sheep?

- But I'm a sheep," he replied.

-No, son, you're a lion like me, not a sheep!

As the young lion didn't believe him, the old lion asked him to follow him and took him to a lake. He said to him:

- Look at you! You're not a sheep, you're family, you're a lion!

Looking at his reflection on the water, the young lion replied in awe that he was indeed a lion, not a sheep. The old lion said:

- Rugis, you'll have confirmation!

It was then that he held his breath before letting out a huge roar... He then became aware of who he really was!"

(Guido Albertelli)

"Exile, isolation, alone in the wild world

to taste freedom, fears and doubts,

responsibility and become who you are..."