The Initiated
Rites of Passage for Modern Evolution
What the book is
A book about the thresholds of a human life, and how to cross them with company.
A modern map for the passages our culture forgot to mark: adolescence, parenthood, love, midlife, leadership and elderhood.
From the boardroom to the circle: a former banking leader on what it really means to grow up, again and again.
Ancient wisdom, made practical for families, schools, workplaces and communities.
Not a book about having the answers. A book about one question: What is needed of me now?
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“Our children are becoming in our presence. We are still becoming in theirs.”
The Initiated: by Paula Conroy
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“The path to a greater realisation of ourselves is an in-and-down process. Not an up-and-out one.”
The Initiated: by Paula Conroy
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“Young people cannot be initiated by adults who refuse their own initiation.”
The Initiated: by Paula Conroy
IN THIS BOOK
You Will Learn
➔ Why so many of us feel lost in transitions, and why it isn’t failure.
➔ The three movements of every real change: separation, transition and integration.
➔ How a simple circle at the dinner table can change a family.
➔ Why your hardest season might be a winter, not a breakdown.
➔ How to stop standing against the people you love, and stand together against the disconnection.
➔ What Initiated Leadership looks like when a leader can hear a hard truth.
Join the waitlist now
In this book, to be initiated simply means to begin, exactly where you are. You don't need to become someone new; the work is to uncover the wholeness that was always there, and to carry it back into your family and community.
A threshold becomes a passage when someone helps us cross it.
About the author
Paula Conroy spent years in corporate banking, leading large teams and succeeding by every measure the world rewards. Then one evening she came home and stood frozen in the corner of her own house, unable to walk towards the people she loved most.
That moment marked the beginning of her own Rite of Passage. She knew she had reached a threshold and that the way she was living had to change, yet she had no map for what came next. She stepped forward anyway, with no certainty of where she was heading and no guarantee of how she would make it work.
Almost as soon as she took that leap of faith, the path began to reveal itself. A life that had already carried her from Cape Town to London and Sydney now led her to Byron Bay, and into the work of the Rites of Passage Institute. There she found the map she had been missing, and today she trains and facilitates alongside Dr Arne Rubinstein OAM.
Paula is the founder of The Frequency. She guides parents and children, adults entering midlife, women and leaders through the thresholds of a human life, using circle, story, challenge and the question at the heart of her work: What is needed of me now?
A mother of two, she writes from inside the passages she describes. The Initiated is her first book.
