Welcome to the Sacred Way
A Journey of Reconnecting, Reweaving and Reimagining
Through Art making, Story telling, Dancing, and the Wisdom of Plants
Hello and welcome to this space of wondering. I am Dimitra and The Sacred Way is an exploration of my own ancestral current. It is an invocation and reclamation of ancient practices and teachings, forgotten, but not lost. The Sacred Way is an opening, an invitation to connect with rituals of life and death, of death and rebirth; Of going into our shadows and emerging into our light. The Sacred Way is a call into the river of life, which moves in many directions. It is a prayer, a meditation, a process of connecting what is new and what is ancient.
I believe that we can access and bring light into these places long neglected. That we can do so through creative expression, through storytelling, through walking and through plant medicines.
The Sacred Way (Ιερά Οδός) is a reference to the road between Athens and Elefsina. In ancient Greece the Cult of Demeter would perform her Sacred Rites which involved a yearly reenactment of the journey Demeter took to rescue her daughter Persephone from the underworld. Initiates performing these rites would be led along this ancient road (Ιερά Οδός) in a cycle with three phases: the descent (the loss), the search, and the ascent. This procession lasted nine days; On the seventh and eighth days the initiates and their teachers would enter into Demeter's temple in Eleusis for a ritual of what was known as things said (logomena), things enacted (dromena) and things seen (deiknymena), which were all part of the mystery. It was at this point when initiates received the epopteia, a sacred vision that was the highest stage of the initiation. On the final day initiates would head home, bringing with them the learnings of their journey and begin integrating them into their lives.
The purpose of these rites was to ensure the health and evolution of all of life. Believing it necessary for everyone to face and be with their shadow, and by doing so allow for a processing of the unwanted, and hidden aspects of life; By being with that which we are most unwilling to face we become able to grow, to evolve and to ascend, remerging as an initiated human and collectively enabling the continual initiation of culture.
A Space of Imagining
Within our ancient past initiation was the essential turning point which brought us out of adolescence and into adulthood, which brought us into parenthood, into elderhood, and then into death. Initiation provided us with the necessary stimulus to step into a new level of being. To be accountable and aware, awake to our web of consequence. The Sacred Way is an invitation and offering to explore how we might access these teachings which are woven into our physiology. Reimagining and creating our own rituals of initiation to bring us into right relationship with all of life.
Creative Practice
Initiation involves connecting with that which is Divine. And what greater way to acknowledge the Divine than to step into our own creativity; Creativity is an innate principle, found within all of life and extends out into the cosmos. When we participate in an act of creation we bring ourselves more fully into the great spiral dance of the universe.
Walks of Wonder
Everything is dancing, from the cells in our bodies to the molecules making up the chair you might be sitting on. Life is swirling, teeming, weaving continuously. Even in great stillness, there is a hum, a buzzing which moves through us and from us. We often forget that in our early beginnings as humans all of our movement was done on foot. we had no cars or trains or horses. We wandered with the feeling of soil and rock beneath our soles. Feeling the surface of earth and skin meeting and receiving great nourishment from just this contact. Often as we walk nowadays, we are simply trying to get from point A to B, we rarely move slowly, we don’t often feel like we have the time to saunter; Always needing to get something done, rather than just be where we are.
Walking has always been a powerful medicine for me. As children my father would take my sisters and I out for long walks, walks to find berries, walks to look at flowers, walks over ancient cedar roots, walks on shorelines, and cliff edges, walks through villages, the neighborhoods of his childhood, walks underneath the milky way, and along dark roads at night. The medicine of walking comes from not trying to get anywhere, it comes from just moving with current of life around you.