Rites of Passage for modern women—Sacred ceremonies for life's transitions
Living in New York gave birth to the woman I am today and to the ceremonies and initiations I share. Returning to Australia was a big step in my life, not only because I loved the comfort of the Big Apple and the community I had built there, but because I knew I had a responsibility to share the medicine I carry.
Read on to learn about the history and why these ceremonies are so important to be reclaimed in a western society.
What we have lost
During your life as a woman you experience many changes, within your biology, your physical body, and your emotional and mental landscape. In the time of your ancestors, women lived differently. They lived in community. Women gathered in circles to learn from the elders and educate the younger. Women celebrated each and every milestone in a woman's life — because women held the wisdom of the earth itself. Women were the oracles, the herbalists, the medicine of the community.
Women honoured the arrival of menses for a young girl. Becoming a wife. Becoming a mother. Giving birth. The closing of the hips through a Cerrada de Cadera ceremony. If there was loss, women would hold space for the one moving through grief. And women celebrated a woman becoming a crone: a synonym of pure wisdom.
In a spiritual sense, the crone is the time in a woman's life when intuition takes a new level, when the body has completed its cycle of menstruation and gives birth to a new version of us. Someone not only older and knowledgable, but carrying the wisdom of a fully lived life.
The price of a westernised society
We live in a patriarchal world—deeply westernised and colonised. Under a spiritual and shamanic lens, we live in a distorted and unbalanced society where masculine energy is far too dominant compared to feminine energy.
Feminine energy is related to nature, earth-based practices, indigenous traditions, the expression of emotions, community, and harmony with all creation including the plant realm, the animal kingdom, and the Earth itself.
Over the centuries, as the world was being colonised and indigenous practices were persecuted, and in many countries destroyed or forgotten, some practices survived. The price we paid was not only the creation of separation and individualisation within our society—making distorted masculine energy like competition, greed, and selfishness more valued—but also the suppression of the feminine energy that was reflected in indigenous cultures around the world.
The domesticated woman—What we lost to colonisation
Something very interesting happened to the modern human. As humans evolved, the anthropocentric way of thinking led us to compare our ways of being to other societies and even other creatures—thinking that the coloniser was "more important" than other humans.
But within indigenous traditions like shamanism, we don't see it that way. We understand that we are one with nature—no one creature is the same as another or more important—it is their consciousness that is reflected in different ways. Because for those who study shamanism and consciousness, everything is alive and conscious, manifested in different ways.
History has taught us that when colonisers found something different, they did one of three things: ignored it, suppressed it, or feared it. And what they feared and didn't understand, they destroyed thinking it was not "evolved." This includes the suppression and silencing of women in westernised societies. Not only of their voices, behaviours, and bodies…but that is a conversation for another time.
What my indigenous teachers call this is the domesticated woman: A woman who has severed her connection with herself, with the unseen, with her intuition, with nature, and with the rites of passage that once marked the welcoming and completion of each cycle and stage of life.
As a student of shamanism, I don't see earth-based practices as indigenous only, I see them as earth technologies. Profound, life-changing, and eye-opening.
How this work found me
When I studied with Cecilia, an Argentinian medicine woman, I had no idea I would one day offer rite of passage ceremonies, closing of the bones, or womb massage to clients here in Australia.
When I studied with her I was seeking my own healing—after many years of trying to become a mother, I was grieving. I was closing my own chapter to become who I am today, though I didn't know that back then. I was learning about the womb, about energy imbalances, and learning how to hold space for myself first—so that I could later do it for others.
It was only about a year later, when I had healed myself and already had a healing arts practice, that someone asked me to hold a sacred women's ceremony to honour her ancestry and her pregnancy—after a long path of miscarriages. She not only wanted to honour herself and her baby coming, but also her ancestors, her story, and the women who came before her.
That was the sign I received that gave birth to the work I do today. I wasn't planning it. It simply unfolded, as everything does in the realm of shamanism and earth-based practice. We don't push to make things happen. We wait, we listen, and we follow inner guidance.
We don't choose this path. The path chooses us. And sometimes we experience deep initiations like mine because we cannot do the work if we have not first experienced it ourselves.
What is a Rite of Passage?
A Rite of Passage is not just a ritual or a ceremony. It is a return to the sacredness of your becoming. It is the celebration of a transition in your life—from maiden to mother, from single woman to married woman, from an exhausting relationship to the courage of choosing yourself, or to let go of a part of your life that is coming to an end.
A Rite of Passage is a moment in life where you honour who you are right now with intention and an open heart you welcome the new energy, the new you, into being.
Because a woman who is transforming sometimes needs the completion. Needs to be seen and heard. That is the sacredness of this practice.
Women across Sydney and Australia are beginning to reclaim these ancient ceremonies: Mother blessing ceremonies, first moon celebrations, womb grief ceremonies, and closing of the bones rituals. These are not trends. They are rememberings.
What a ceremony can include
Every ceremony is tailored to what the woman is seeking. No two are the same.
A Rite of Passage can include a fire ceremony, a limpia (energy cleansing), a closing of the bones, a womb massage, sound healing, a shamanic journey, or an energy healing session. Some women choose to work one on one with me in a deeply intimate and private space. Others choose to invite family members or close friends to witness because sometimes a woman in transformation needs her community around her.
Whether you are in Sydney's inner suburbs or travelling from elsewhere in Australia, these ceremonies are held in person only and shaped around your specific needs.
Closing of the Bones—Cerrada de Cadera
The Closing of the Bones—or Cerrada de Cadera, is an ancient practice rooted in Mesoamerican and South American indigenous traditions. Variations of this ceremony exist across indigenous cultures around the world, but my lineage carries Central and South American roots through my teachers and guides.
Originally created to close the bones of a woman's body after giving birth, wrapping her physically to support her postpartum recovery, over time this practice evolved into something far wider. It became a space for transformation, an immersive experience where a woman is invited back into the womb, into the cocoon, to return to life and be reborn energetically.
Today, in a modern world where women are beginning to reclaim their voices and their emotions, this practice holds space for exactly that—closing a chapter and welcoming the woman who is being born. Because like nature, we are always transforming. We evolve, reinvent ourselves, change, and mature not only in our minds but in the emotional body we carry.
This ceremony is woven into Rites of Passage for women moving through any significant transition—motherhood, a breakup, menopause, a significant milestone, a first menstruation, or simply the shedding of an old identity. These life moments deserve to be witnessed, held, and honoured.
For women in Sydney seeking a closing of the bones ceremony or a postpartum ritual rooted in ancestral tradition—this is a rare and deeply nourishing offering.
Planting seeds in Sydney
Living and offering this work in Sydney, Australia, I believe it is my guides who have brought me here to keep planting the seeds of transformation, to keep supporting women from all backgrounds to remember who they are behind the masks and roles we carry in a society that, for so long, minimised indigenous traditions.
Australia is a land of ancient wisdom and deep earth energy—an island-continent where the original custodians have held sacred ceremony and rites of passage for tens of thousands of years. And yet ceremonial practices for modern women—the kind that honour the cycles of life, the transitions, the grief, and the becoming—are still rare here.
Sydney is a city of women awakening. I see it in the growing curiosity around sacred healing, in the women who reach out quietly and say: I don't know what I need, but I know I need something.
I am here to change that, I am here to plant seeds, one ceremony at a time.
If you are in Sydney and feel called to mark a transition in your life with intention and sacredness, this work is for you.
