6 Benefits to Realize When Wrapping Up an Initiation Cycle

Initiation is a cycle in which you are faced with a meaningful challenge in your life that disrupts the daily flow of your life to open you up to something greater. The point of initiation is to have insight, or to illuminate a part of yourself and your life, and to integrate what you learn about yourself into how you show up in the world going forward. This helps you to become a bigger person – to let go of what’s not working anymore or to realize your uniqueness and to bring your unique gifts more fully into the world.

That final phase of initiation – after you’ve successfully navigated your ordeals -- is referred to as Return & Reintegration. As a practical matter, the more important of these concepts is probably Reintegration. That is, most if not all of us do emerge or “return” from a challenging initiation. But for many people, they either don’t make changes -- maybe because they didn’t learn anything from their challenges, they ignore what they learned without changing, or they didn’t acknowledge, appreciate, and share with others what they learned from their challenge or ordeals with others.

So that’s the key to this third and final phase of the initiation cycle: to have participated in the ordeals consciously, so you successfully emerge or return from them and recognize and share your insights with others (reintegration) – by being different than you were before and/or sharing your experiences & insights.

A critical aspect of your return & reintegration is to be welcomed back by others, like friends, family, business associate, and even your community – that they recognize that your life has changed in a meaningful way. They welcome you back from your “ordeals” by appreciating and recognizing your new-found wisdom or gifts as valuable to others.

This final phase is the time to acknowledge and share the benefits you gained from your experience. Here are 6 of those benefits:

1. New Learning and Newly Found Gifts

During the challenging ordeals of your initiation cycle you acquired special knowledge, new skills, or valuable insights. As you come to the end of your ordeals and settle into a new way of being or acting, you can now share these benefits to enrich and benefit others. This is how you become the change to make a difference in the world. It’s said that if you don’t share your wisdom and gifts during your life, no one else will be and do things in quite the same way, EVER.

2. Closure

Sometimes, during the ordeal, you confront personal demons, face past mistakes, or seek redemption. Thus, the Return and Reintegration phase can represent a healing process, allowing you to make amends, find forgiveness, and bring closure to unresolved issues. For example, most of us, after working through issues during an initiation cycle, have forgiven our parents, friends, spouses or partners, employers or work colleagues for things they did that we had been holding on to. Forgiveness and letting go of needing to immerse yourself in the pain of such experiences is a type of closure.

3. Assume Status with Greater Responsibility

You may feel a sense of responsibility to your community after coming through a challenging initiation cycle. With your new way of being, you may be called upon to lead, protect, or guide others based on your newfound wisdom, gifts, and experiences.

4. Become a Symbol of Hope

When you get to the return phase, you may become a symbol of hope for others. Your courage and triumph over adversity during your ordeals will give others hope that they too can overcome their challenges. You see this mostly after someone has come through a serious illness or horrible experience where they almost didn’t survive, but made it back or recovered.

5. Deeper Sense of Meaning and Purpose

The Return and Reintegration phase serves as a bridge between the out-of-the-ordinary challenge you came through and the daily routine of life you return to. In other words, this is about weaving your experiences from the initiation into who you now are as person and how you live going forward, giving you a deeper sense of purpose and meaning to your life.

6. An Inspiration to Others

Your return and reintegration after your ordeals can trigger positive change within your circle of friends and family, your community, or the larger culture. The influence of your experiences and transformation may lead to transformations in family, work, or community, helping to resolve conflicts or address long-standing issues.

To sum up, the Return and Reintegration phase is a crucial part of the initiation cycle in which you return to a more settled circumstance and wrap up your challenging experience. In this phase, you share newly gained wisdom, bringing positive change to your friends, family, and community. Your return emphasizes the transformative power of your experiences and your newfound capabilities to make a difference in the lives of others.

Upon return and reintegration, you have completed what is known as a “little death” that allows you to “bury” aspects of the “old” you, so the “new” you and the community can live life with a renewed perspective. You and your community are now changed because of the benefit of your fresh insights. Your return signals you have completed one cycle of many during your lifetime, during which you will experience more transformations – large & small – allowing you to let go of old ways of being and to gain new abilities, knowledge, or a new understanding of yourself and your place in the world. And you are better person for it.