Ten Years of Annual Ceremonies: What Changes and What Stays

I started the annual ceremony practice the year I turned thirty-five, after reading about indigenous ceremonial contexts and wanting to create something intentional and consistent rather than occasional and opportunistic. I chose a place in the mountains I'd backpacked to before and found meaningful. I've returned every year since.

What a decade has revealed: the relationship with the substance deepens with familiarity in ways I didn't anticipate. Early years were more experientially intense — novel, often overwhelming. Later years are less intense in that register and more specific: each ceremony seems to know what I'm carrying and goes directly there.

The recurring themes across ten years: every few years, the ceremony seems to circle back to the same material that apparently hasn't been fully resolved. Family dynamics, ambivalence about my choices, the relationship between what I do and what I am. These themes return at different depths depending on where I am in my life when I arrive.

What has changed: I'm less afraid of the substance than I was in year one. I'm also less expectant of particular outcomes. I show up with an intention and stay open to the experience working with what's actually present, not with what I brought in my plan. This took several years to learn.

The place itself has become part of the practice. I know where the light falls in the afternoon, where the water sounds different, where I always find myself at the peak. The familiarity of the physical space is a container that I've built over ten years. It makes the internal space safer.