When Love Meets the Fear of Initiation

Your steps fall softly upon the dense forest floor. One foot in front of the other, steady and deliberate, ensuring your forward momentum. Light trickles through the canopy in golden ribbons while the air hums with memory. The ground is damp beneath your feet, and though you don’t know exactly where you are going, something in you keeps moving.

Finally, you reach a river. The sound of the current grows louder with each step closer. There is a tightness in your chest that feels hauntingly familiar. A voice in your head tells you to keep going.

When you arrive at the riverbank, the water is wild and unruly, a living force thrashing and roaring as if it, too, carries memory. The whispers inside you encourage you to cross anyway.

Fear begins to overtake you. Your breathing grows shallow. The danger of what you are about to do feels almost holy in its weight. You sense that turning back would mean losing something precious, yet stepping forward might cost you everything.

As you stand at the riverbank, flashes move through your mind. Lifetimes of initiations… Swimming through crocodile-filled waters. Sitting in darkened caves. Walking until your feet bled and your spirit broke. You were always told to push past the fear, to prove your devotion, to keep going no matter what trembled inside.

The sound of the river grows louder, echoing your heartbeat. It feels impossible to cross. You want to run, to hide, to disappear back into the forest.

Then, the exact moment you need it, a warm presence arrives beside you.

It doesn’t ask you to move.

It doesn’t ask you to be brave.

It simply stands with you - breathing, feeling, witnessing, face wet with tears.

You realize it is you, but in another form. The you of this lifetime.

You, the one who has returned to meet all those who came before.

And you? You are a representative of lifetimes of being an acolyte, a student, a receiver of initiations.

The being beside you quiets the voices telling you to keep moving. Together, you begin to breathe. Your own tears begin to fall, releasing layers of unfelt pain and fear. Letting go of needing to experience growth through suffering. Ending the cycle of bypassing and forcing connection to the Divine through these unloving portals.

The current begins to soften. The chaos slows. Your own body begins to soften with the love this being is emanating. You notice that the river itself was never trying to harm you, nor were the voices in your head. They simply reflected the fear that hadn’t been met yet.

The water turns clear, even mirror-like. You see your reflection ripple back at you, luminous and alive. The crossing feels natural, almost effortless now. Each step forward is a homecoming, not into something new but into the deepest truth of yourself.

The fog in your mind lifts and your third eye clears. What once felt tangled and heavy now feels simple. You keep returning to the same answer: love.

And as you reach the other side, you understand. The true initiation was never to conquer fear, but to let love hold it until it no longer needed to be afraid.

A wave of golden and rose light washes over you and through you.

The peace that begins in your heart spreads to every cell of your being.

You breathe, and you know.

The Divine has always been here.

——— ——— ———

I wrote this piece from the perspective of one aspect of the soul who represents a lineage of enduring painful and undigested initiations spanning over many lifetimes. This was almost the exact process I experienced in my last session and illustrates the feeling of meeting a part of your soul, feeling them deeply, and recoding these experiences.

I met this aspect of me in deep overwhelm at the thought of growth and needing to suffer through fear just to be able to arrive at the next steps of my ongoing healing journey. From the perspective of these aspects, this can only happen through force and bypassing of the tender and understandable fears that arise when faced with these mirrors of growth.

My soul has tended towards avoidance and hiding, while others lean into pushing forwards and putting the fear aside. Either way, there’s no reverence or love for the pain and no space to stop and be with it. While avoiding and pushing are ways to stay protected, sitting with the fear creates cracks in that protection. The fear is that makes you vulnerable to more pain, when really it creates space for the Divine to pour her love through those cracks.

I wanted to share this as a visceral transmission as it can be so hard to put into words trying to explain what it feels like.

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Raianna Shai is a Divine Self Embodiment Facilitator in 1:1 sessions with women. Visit https://www.divineselfembodiment.com for more information about space-holding sessions and free 45-min intro calls, group calls, videos, community, etc.