08 Jan The Practice Of Living And Dying – VISION FAST in Slovakia 29 July to 9 August.
29 July to 9 August
Jozef Mihalisin and Carine Roth
In english
When at the cliff edge, take a big step forward.
« We don’t know what happens when we leap. It might be a long free-fall. It might be the end. Or it might be a threshold. An initiation. A leap of life. Regardless, it requires some falling. There’s reason to be afraid. What happens when we stay with the fear? Even befriend Fear?
Knowing that something in us needs to die to cross this edge into the forever-becoming-into-who-we-are »
©rebecca freeth & carine roth
This ceremony is an ancient and essential rite of passage; fasting 4 days and 4 nights, without company, without shelter, in deep listening with the land, with the nature within and around, on the body of the Earth.
Unlearning separation, relearning indigeneity; in a world in massive transformation, in an era of mass extinction, hospicing modernity comes with a sense of what needs to die in our ways of relating to each other and to life.
This rite of passage is an invitation to belong to a group of courageous people, peace gardeners, going out in their solo time in Nature to learn to die and rebirth in a new paradigm, a new story, a new narrative of what it means to be human in those times, to remember our genuine desire to care for all living beings and to find what it takes to move towards one’s vision and gifts.
With the support of the earth, the elements, the other beings, more than humans, ancestors, spirits of the land, the Vision Fast is a calling to face one’s disparition with an open heart and a renewed trust in mystery.
As Meredith Little, founder with her husband Steven Foster of The School of Lost Borders in California, often says, for indigenous people there was no death in nature, the only death existing is the ego death. Therefore the physical death could be approached as a simple transformation, a natural process where it all belongs to the earth.
Lets gather in ceremony to relearn this truth in our bones and find deep peace in our essential belonging to the flow of life.
Let’s get hungry on the land to let her feed our souls, dreams and visions for who we are becoming when we give up our fears and grow into our callings, manifesting our truth in service to our beloved.
Do you hear your soul calling?
Something needs to die so that something new can be born within us.
We perceive that something has metaphorically died,
but we do not know yet what has been born.
Vision and Liberation
“Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.”
Robin D. G. Kelley
“There is a difference between the visions that come out of our most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people. I’ve often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit, are their yearnings for connection and their longings to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world. I’ve never encountered anyone’s most vulnerable visions to be about isolation or money.
The truth is that the visions we inherit, the visions from others that we live inside of, can only re-create the world as it is. Within the constraints of the visions of others, my capacity for love was stunted and tethered to the past.
We need visions within us that make our stomach quiver and cause us to come alive. Then we can show up more authen-tically, reshape the contours of our community, rework the structures of our world.
VISIONS ARE A CALL, a conjuring, a glimpse into what can be, but as my grandmother would often say, quoting scripture, faith without works is dead. We name our visions; we say them out loud to bring them into being, and we move them toward fruition by staying the course.
Commitment is the path between your vision and this moment. It is the day-to-day building, practice, and intention that transports you forward to that changed place, whether it’s internal or external to you.
When we set out with a vision, it crashes into backlash, bar-riers, fear. Commitment is what gets us through the middle of change, when the outcome seems bleak, when it seems we’re lost or can’t go any further. Commitment expects our despair but doesn’t waver. It comes from inside of us, keeping steady when we lose hope, or give up, or decide to step away.
What lives inside us does not go anywhere, but waits, so we can return to it. Commitment to the North Star, our vision, brings us through. To what and to whom are you committed?
What do you long for? And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?
Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized. It’s the way we bring about change for ourselves, and for the world. When we are besieged by visions that do not match our longing, some of which are sinister, it’s unlikely that we’ll stumble into freedom. Freedom is in the gaps, in the nascent and emergent, in the unexamined space between things but it is there. We can call it down. We call it down when we listen to our dreams. When we let the unconscious and the imaginal show us the way around what it is we see right now. We call it down when our present can be in conversation with what could be. In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them. There are already visions around you that have shaped most everything about our world. If they do not serve us, perhaps it is time to revisit our imaginations, perhaps it is time to dream new dreams.
Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be.”
©Prentis Hemphill, in What it takes to Heal.
A Vision Fast
A Vision Fast is an ancient rite of passage, marking a transition, a change in your life, a calling – sometimes unformed and uncertain.
It is a ritual that allows us to look and listen deeply into who we are and what our purpose is. What are we here to do and what is the legacy we are leaving behind?
The vision fast is a modern rite of passage that helps us to come to terms with the complexity of our times and to mark and celebrate the transitions and various stages of life.
It’s a time to pause alone in nature, without shelter or food, to honour the seasons and the cyclical nature of life.
A space, in ceremony, to ask essential questions and nurture a rich and full vision for your own life and what you want to do with it.
Vision fasting is intimately linked to the cycle of living and dying, to the constant movement of being, from birth to death.
Fasting and exposing yourself to the elements and to solitude brings the humility and calm you need to hear your own heartbeat and let your fears dissolve.
Saying yes to life, in its entirety and without believing you can control it, but taking full responsibility for yourself and for what you have to offer others.
We have chosen to call this ceremony a Vision Fast and not a Vision Quest for reasons of cultural appropriation.
The Vision Fast is nonetheless largely inspired by indiginous spiritual practices and wisdom from all over the world, and we are forever grateful to the peoples who preserved and practised this rite of passage long before us and allowed us to remember to listen to the earth in ceremony – and to pray and dance and cry for a vision that inspires us to care for the beauty of nature and the world.
We come from the tradition of The School of Lost Borders founded by Steven Foster and Meredith Little.
We honour the way in which they both brought this ceremony back into our modern culture and we honour the importance of practising it to remind us of ourselves as Human Beings.
The vision fast ceremony has three archetypal phases that have been identified by anthropologists in rites of passage around the world:
SEVERANCE
Severance begins when you decide to commit to this ceremony. It is preparation for the vision fast, and the time to ask: „Who am I now? And what do I need to leave behind to move forward?“ This process of „letting go“ can be difficult, but it is the first step in marking the truth of who you are and the gifts you bring to the world.
THRESHOLD
During the threshold, you will cross alone into the natural world for 4 days and nights. Throughout your solo you will find yourself in a liminal time, a realm between your old life, and the life that has yet to come. You will create your own ceremony that reflects your background, intention, value, and what you are honoring in your life.
INCORPORATION
Incorporation begins when you return from your solo and are reunited with your group and guides. They will listen deeply to your story and mirror it back to you. You will be supported to bring back the learning and gifts from your ceremony to your people. Incorporation is a year long process and an opportunity to show up in your life in new ways.
The Practice of Living and Dying
This is a special curriculum within the School Of Lost Borders that offers programs accentuating this dying-in between-rebirth process. It was started in 2003 by two guides: Meredith Little and Scott Eberle. Meredith, as one of the School’s co-founders, has been practicing “symbolic death midwifery” for over 40 years. Scott, working as a hospice physician, has offered “physical death midwifery” for over 30 years. Together they have created a program series that explores how a participant can move through their own “dying” process. Well after its inception, this curriculum was further expanded by other School guides drawing upon their own living and dying experiences.
The aim of a Practice of Living and Dying program is both educational and therapeutic. Educationally, this work draws upon the School’s years of symbolic death work in the desert, intertwining wisdom coming out of the modern hospice movement, the personal experiences of the guides, and the wisdom of the land. Therapeutically, time spent alone in nature exploring this living-and-dying material invites each participant to experience the wisdom of their own nature, especially their personal truths about living and dying.
These programs invite the asking of an inseparable pair of questions:
How do we live, so we may fully embrace our dying?
How do we accept our dying that we may fully embrace our living?
© The School of Lost Borders
We offer this program in the lineage of the school as Carine Roth has had the privilege to work and assist with Meredith Little for several years before Meredith recently stopped teaching. We honor Meredith and Scott’s work and generous legacy as well as our humility and gratitude for this work and ancient ceremony.
Logistics: The twelve day ceremony involves four days of preparation, four days and nights of fasting alone, and four days of incorporation.
The program will be held on the ancestral, and present day homelands of the meadows and forests in the middle of Slovak Republic, between towns Zvolen and Krupina at 887 m above see level. The name of the location is PODSEKIER near the villages Pliešovce and Zaježová.
GPS 48.46682646794576, 19.20781279756949
Accomodation: in your own tent
Health issues: All participants must be over 18 years old and submit the required health questionnaire and liability form and will receive a welcome package with a list of equipement.
Program Fee: 950€ – 2980€ sliding scale price + 250€ (vegeterian food/accomodation)
To honor the vast difference of financial resources among us, this program fee is based on a sliding scale. We set forth no criteria and ask that you pay what is appropriate for your circumstances and access to financial resources. If the low end of the sliding scale is still too much, please let us know.
You can apply by filling in the application form
Please contact me if our price makes it impossible for you to join
Your place is reserved upon payment of the deposit, registration and administration fee of 300 EUR
Balance of the program must be paid at least 30 days before the beginning of the Vision Fast.
Our account detail to make your deposit :
Association Rite de Passage, Chemin de Renens 12, 1004 Lausanne, Switzerland
IBAN CH16 0839 0039 1577 1000 1
Mention Vision Fast PLD
Banque Alternative Suisse
Clearing bancaire/IID : 8390
QR-IID : 30123
BIC (SWIFT-Code) : ABSOCH22
Cancellations
Cancellations are hard on the participant and the guides.
We respect the unpredictability of life, and we are diligent about running an organization sustainably.
- If you cancel 60 or more days prior to the start date of your program, you will receive a full refund of any fee paid, minus registration and administration fee of 300 EUR.
- If you cancel 59 days or less prior to the start date of your program, and we can fill your spot, then you will receive a full refund of any fee paid, minus registration and administration fee of 300 EUR.
- If we cannot fill your spot, and you cancel within 59 days of the start of your program, then we hold you accountable for paying the program fee at the lowest end of the sliding scale.
« Vision fasting is an embodied experience of feeling into the cycles and seasons of life from an ecological sense of self – sensing with our whole being and in intimate relationship with the alive world around us. » carine roth
To prepare for the Ceremony
Once you have registered and paid the registration fee, we will send you then our detailed Vision Fast Handbook and ask you to go through it. We will invite you to start feeling into our ceremony by going out in Nature for a day to listen and let the land inform your intention for your fast. And to then write us a Letter of Intent.
We will have 3 group calls on line before the Vision Fast and 1 integration call after the Fast:
Tuesday 6 MAY – 20h00 CET
Tuesday 3 JUNE – 20h00 CET
Tuesday 8 JULY – 20h00 CET
Tuesday 7 OCTOBER – 20h00 CET
During our 12 days together, we have 4 days of preparation before the Fast, and 4 days of integration after the solo, to tell stories and gather the wisdom of our group, and understand the teachings and visions offered by the land.
The guides will hold space from basecamp during the entire time of the solo.
Safety is guaranteed by our staff members trained as wilderness first responders.
For more information or to join the course,
please contact Carine Roth
Care Ethics
Environmental ethics that incorporate paradigms of caring conceive of environmental harms and the exploitation of nonhuman animals as failures to extend caring to worthy others and see those failures in relation to similar failures to care for other people. all species of animals and plants have an inherent right to exist and that wilderness should be protected irrespective of its usefulness to humans.
“We all have our own ground to work, you know. You have yours, too. You just have to find out what it is. But you know what? It is right on the edge of yourself. At the cliff edge of life. That’s the edge you go to. Put yourself in conversation with that edge no matter how frightening it seems. Look down over that edge.”
« Genius in Latin originality means, the spirit of a place. The genius of an individual lies in the inhabitation of their peculiar and particular spirit in conversation with the world…You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life and it will transform everything…We journey from one unknown sea to another, the wind on our face, meeting the elements. Out of this conversation we create a directional movement that ensures our survival and creates exhilaration–an immersion in the present whilst we simultaneously experience the joy of speeding toward our destination.”
David Whyte, in Crossing An Unknown Sea
© carine roth – ceux d’ici.ch