A couple of weeks ago, Caitlin and I (Rachel) sat down with the incredible Dr. Christy Bauman to celebrate her new book that was just released, titled Her Rites: A Sacred Journey for the Mind, Body & Soul.
The six rites described in the book are: the Rite of Birth, the Rite of Initiation, the Rite of Exile, the Rite of Creating, the Rite of Intuition, and the Rite of Legacy.
Christy graciously took the time to share more about these six rites of passage and why it’s so deeply important for us to connect with each of them as women. There was so much goodness in our hour of conversation that we had to summarize and pull out the best parts.
Please enjoy this abridged version of our time together!
Rachel: Thank you so much Christy for joining us here and for sharing your amazing book with us. I greatly enjoyed reading your work and exploring an area I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about.
Caitlin: Exactly - I’ve never thought about the rites of passage in depth and never realized how important they are, especially to us as women. So powerful!
Rachel: You have a background in therapy and working with women and their sexuality. How did you go from that topic to this rite of passage world that you found yourself in?
Christy: It comes back to the body. In story work, which is what I was trained in in the therapeutic context, the goal is to tell your story and you’ll know which way to go. If you know where you come from, you’ll understand where you’re going, why you get triggered, etc.
But what I realized is that I also had this body and this body was storied. It wasn’t just about the psychological lens, it was about my body too.
Story work was limiting me in staying in the psychological. It wasn’t just the events that happened, but how the events showed up on and in my body. And in sexuality I was trying to figure out how to offer my own body to someone else, but if I didn’t know the stories in my body, that was going to limit me in my sexuality.
What I noticed is that I would guide people through their story, but they would stay up in their mind. They wouldn’t get any lower than their head. I wanted to talk to people not even from their hearts, but all the way down to their toes.
I want my clients to have such awareness that they can ask, “If my breasts had a voice, what would they say?” What can each of our body parts tell us about what it’s been like to be on our bodies?
I have worked with many brilliant storytellers who have been stuck in their head. They could explain what happened to them, but they didn’t know their story in their actual physical body parts. It was known, but not felt or experienced.
So it was about marrying story work with the body and how this body of ours moves through our story.
I am so excited about women getting this template because in my practice I was hearing woman after woman saying “Okay, now I’ve told my story, but how does that translate to when I’m actually with my partner? Because I’m still in this body”.
This book can be a guide to help women move through their story through their particular body, which will help them translate to those around them how they want to be seen more clearly in the world.
Caitlin: So how does taking the time to go through the rites of passage help a woman to get into her body, and what’s happening once she’s there?
Christy: It begins with story work, which you can read in the book, where I share my own stories as well as some client stories. But this is very particular story work. Each story sounds completely unique and particular to the body which held it.
A woman cannot tell me the story of her breasts and it sound like any other woman’s story. Sure, there can be general similarities, but the specifics are unique. My breasts, for example, are storied by the children who suckled, by the men who’ve engaged them, how I’ve engaged them in my own mind, how I’ve touched them, promoted them, bound them, held them… it’s all a story.
The amount of intimacy that’s at stake here is incredible. When I offer these breasts to someone and they're willing to be in my story and to study them, they get to experience an intimacy no one else gets access to.
Because the caveat is, if we don’t know ourselves, that sets up a power dynamic that can easily be abusive. Even if the intention of the partner is not to be abusive, this dynamic sets us up for failure and for sabotage. We must belong to ourselves first and discover what we want to offer the other person, not let them tell us who we are.
Rachel: One of the rites that spoke to me was the Rite of Initiation - the moment of learning something new. Can you explain more about this rite and what it can look like sexually, in our bodies?
Christy: The right of initiation is going from naïve to knowing. In sexuality, naivety is so vulnerable and the knowing we discover is often with another person or at the hand of another person. And it’s not always a place of comfort or kindness - initiation can be done through harm. So reclaiming our initiation story feels important.
The power of those first few times - whether there was trauma or whether it was beautiful - marks us. It takes our breath away. We didn’t know something and then we suddenly do. The first time we’re kissed. The first time a hand goes under our shirt.
In the book, I share a story of my young daughter, who was curious about the idea of initiation and anointing. She was in the bathtub, asking me questions. So I took the bath water and poured it over her head, saying “You matter. You’re chosen”.
Here’s the thing about initiation. As glorious and wondrous as it is, it’s only instantaneous. When we prepare to be initiated, we also prepare to grieve the moment it ends. It’s like orgasm - which is why we hold out as long as we can. It’s a moment. An exhilarating moment that we want to get back to again and again. Just as we feel it, it’s leaving us.
For the woman whose moment of sexual initiation was not safe, she often hates that sensation and will do everything she can to make sure it never happens again. This can look like extreme avoidance, or it can look like perpetually chasing a new story.
Caitlin: For those who have not had a positive experience of initiation, what could they do?
Christy: If someone has been harmed in the place of initiation, healing comes in being truly known. It is so brave to risk that knowing after being harmed, so choosing to trust is the biggest hurdle. If you want to find your way back, the repair is putting yourself in safe moments to practice. It will still be a risk, but if you can explore how you’ve been harmed or marked, there is great potential for repair.
In fact, what we know about the brain is that the high is just as intense as the first time. When we rewrite our initiation, it is possible to hit the oxytocin level that happened the first time.
When you move in and let someone touch your scar, sharing with them how you feel when they go there with you, it’s incredibly scary - it can even feel like a life-threatening moment - but it’s also fully possible for that oxytocin to spike and for us to get to a place of intimacy we were looking for all along.
Caitlin: Rachel and I both have preteen daughters with many initiations coming up ahead of them. What can we do to help them navigate them?
It’s so important to give our girls words and power to know what they want. Building a scaffolding of sexual development of a teen is so fun! Like, what do they want? What are they daydreaming about? Where do they want to have their first experiences? Do they fantasize about sensual experiences in public or in private? Do they feel sex needs to be hidden? Or do they want to be in proximity to others to feel more safe?
If we can think it, if we can dream it, then we have more access to creating it. For so long, girls have been told to shut down these thoughts, but that makes them more likely to be victims, rather than in control of how they want their sexual story to play out.
We need to give them permission to imagine, because then imagination gives them power to create the storyline they want. They will write the best stories if they’re safe enough. They want to write a story. They want to dream in a world that’s safe enough that there are no limits.
But if they’re constantly told that sex is dangerous, and here’s all the things you can’t do, then everything becomes a secret, and then they can’t dream… they just get by with what they can pull off.
When we don’t write our own sexual story, sex is done to us. But what if all we want for our daughters is to give them a story they can write for themselves? I want the sky to be the limit for our daughters. Let’s brainstorm it. Get the whiteboard out.
Have them think about what they want, and then if something unexpected happens, where they’d go from there. This gives them safety… this gives them power.
Rachel: I didn’t have permission to write my own story. When we leave it up to “we’ll see what happens” when we’re talking about sex and relationships, it becomes “we’ll see what happens when someone else does something to you”.
Are you saying we need to get back to, “what happens when you make this choice?”
Christy: Yes, our girls need to practice making choices in lower-stakes environments. Have your girls wear two pairs of earrings they like and then talk about how wearing each of them made them feel.
It’s so important for them to practice the act of choice, because our society goes from zero to ninety so fast, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The more our girls can dream, the more they will find joy in taking things slowly, one initiation at a time.
Rachel: Wow, this is so powerful! Let’s transition into another rite you discuss in the book - the Rite of Legacy. What would your ideal sexual legacy look like?
Christy: My answer is impacted because I am a mother. The legacy I want to leave is that my children would feel freedom in their bodies due to my own freedom in my body. I want them to feel permission to offer their bodies in glory. How I clothe and celebrate my body and love every stretch mark and saggy bit impacts them. Like, can they put their hands on my stomach without me feeling shame?
My hope in my ideal sexual legacy is that I would have offered my body every sensual and sexual freedom it desired. Maybe this sounds counteractive to my religious context, but I truly believe my body doesn’t want bad things.
I want to give my body freedom to engage with what it wants. I want to offer myself to my husband with honesty, hands shaking, and for him to know me and my desires.
Ultimately, it’s about freedom. Was I free to be in this body fully?
Rachel: What rites of passage do you see women stuck in when they’re stuck in their sexuality, and how can you tell?
Some women have a rite of passage that’s comfortable for them, and others they avoid. Some women feel safe in the Rite of Exile, because they know it so intimately. I, on the other hand, hate the Rite of Exile! Give me Initiation any day.
But we have to move through all of them. Getting stuck in any rite is like getting stuck in a season. But we need all of them - spring, summer, fall and winter. These are the cycles of our bodies and it’s really important to figure them all out.
Sexuality is our most creative space, and it’s in every rite of passage. It’s in the Rite of Birth, where we take our first breath. Breath is deeply connected to our sexuality. We must find our own breath to then know how to match it with the other.
I think you’re most in your sexuality when you know the Rite of Birth, the Rite of Legacy, and the Rite of Intuition. Intuition is when you’re connected to the knowing of your body. When you can trust that knowing and communicate it, the capacity for intimacy is limitless.
Where might a woman get stuck? Perhaps in Exile, but there’s even a case to make about the power of masturbation in that season. Exile doesn’t have to mean sexual stuckness.
If you aren’t super familiar with Birth, Intuition and Legacy, there’s capacity to get sexually stuck there, but this is new research - I honestly don’t know enough yet to give a definitive answer!
What I do believe is that the more familiar you are with how you experience each rite of passage, the more you will understand your own sexuality. How you are sexually mirrors how you are in every other part of your life.
The best intimacy you’re gonna get is how well you know yourself and how well your partner knows themselves and how well you share it with each other.
We MUST belong to ourselves first.
Rachel: Thank you so much for making this wisdom so available in your book! So what does someone do after they read this?
There is a whole section in the back filled with marking processes that I know I definitely want to experience. How would someone like me take this to someone and trust that they could walk through it with me?
Christy: My ideal idea is that everyone take this book to a therapist and say, “I want to explore this”. This allows you to have a safe place where your story won’t be exploited.
It’s so important who you give that power to, because the first time you walk through your story, you need to be with someone safe. A therapist is going to hold that role as best as I know.
The truth of it is, I think we know in the first minute we meet with a therapist if we’ve found someone good or not. Sometimes we need to go through five or six therapists before we’ve found the right one. But we don’t need to waste time. Our bodies know.
If you just can’t find a therapist that suits you, call up your sister or a friend and ask them to walk through it with you or do it together. Safety is the ultimate measure when finding someone.
You also don’t need to do all of them in a particular order or all at once. I wrote this in the way I would take a client through their story in a year, but you can go in any order you need. Perhaps you start with the rite you’re walking through today. Or maybe you go back to a season in the past you need to revisit. Take what you need.
When I do this with clients, I make sure we hit every single one over the course of a year, and we do body work around each of them. Some rites take longer, some are quicker. But I would take it to a therapist and have them read it with you.
Additionally, I’ve had clients who have decided they want to take these rites outward. Once they understand the Rite of Initiation, they want to take their daughter and her friends to the top of a mountain to celebrate her 13th birthday and talk about initiation as they look up at the stars. Or once they know the Rite of Legacy, they desire to help an elderly relative die well or help a friend process their grief with tenderness.
The more you know these rites, the more you can support others as they walk through them. Just do so with caution and mindfulness.
Rachel: Can you tell us about the musical album that accompanies the book?
Christy: Yes, I wrote song lyrics to accompany each rite of passage and my friend Sarah Siskind recorded them into a six-song album that can support your own processing of each rite. You can find Her Rites on Spotify, Amazon, wherever you listen. This is another way to embody the rites - through song and through listening.
Rachel: Thank you so much for sharing with us!
Caitlin: Yes, you are such a gifted storyteller! I was so engaged with all the stories you tell in the book as you walk through each rite of passage in your own life. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us!
Her Rites is available anywhere books are sold. Buy the book on Amazon here and listen to the accompanying album on Spotify here.
Check out more of Christy’s work at https://christybauman.com/
Rachel! I'm just now seeing this interview and your project! We have some cross over in the conversation of reclaiming sexuality!