veleda vesta

A guided journey of empowerment and healing through life’s difficult passages, with practical tools, including embodied rituals, writing prompts, seasonal self-care practices, and community creation.

The journey of the Dark Goddess is a natural part of any difficult rite of passage. These transitions are often thought of as negative--death of a loved one, job loss, home loss, chronic illness, divorce--but even so-called ＂happy＂ transitions, such as marriage, the birth of a child, or retirement, can come with unexpected instability, grief, and a need for integration. In our culture, we may often feel like we should ＂move on＂ or ＂get back to normal.＂ In studying myth, however, we come to understand that the purpose of challenging life transformations is not positive or negative.

Year of the Dark Goddess provides an anchor and a roadmap for navigating the disorientation of life transformations and offers resources for embracing changes as initiations that strengthen us and make clear our purpose and power. The book is modeled on ancient rite-of-passage ceremonies and journeys to the underworld and is structured as a four-phase rite-of-passage process: Preparation, Separation from the Known, Transition-Initiation, and Return-Integration. The book provides readers with practical tools--embodied rituals, writing practice, seasonal self-care and community creation--to ground and empower positive transformations in times of challenging change.

Readers may use the book as both a linear guide through the initiation year, or a nonlinear tool for structuring their own unique rite-of-passage journey. Readers are invited to create personal challenges, reframe their rite-of-passage through myth work and sacred art, and create a potent and effective rite of passage ceremony to integrate their change.

The self-initiation process in Year of the Dark Goddess follows a ceremonial year, each quarter section is structured with the following:

• An interactive brief of themes and objectives for the quarter, such as making an altar, writing with the ancestors, creating herbal infusions, and storytelling.
• A seasonal ceremony template appropriate to the rite-of-passage phase.
• A unique retelling of an ancient myth or fairy tale and instructions for deep myth work. These tales contain the formula for how to successfully navigate rites of passage, consciously and unconsciously.
• Journaling prompts for reflection and projection, making visible the initiation journey.

Lara Veleda Vesta, MFA, is an artist, storyteller, and educator. She is the author of Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine, The Moon Divas Guidebook, and The Moon Divas Oracle Book. A certified Celebrant with the Celebrant Institute and Foundation, and a former PhD student in philosophy and religion, she has spent over a decade studying ritual in diverse communities and facilitating rituals for individuals and groups in hundreds of different environments. She also has been through multiple challenging rite-of-passage transitions due to disabling chronic illness, which framed her understanding of the Dark Goddess work.

She is currently guiding students both online and live through a year-long rite-of-passage process as she crafts the Dark Goddess book. She was a professor of English and Writing at Pacific University and in 2015 created the Wild Soul School, an online educational community offering classes in personal empowerment, ancestral connection, self-initiation, and ritual practice.