Hidden Gems: Meet Jacqueline Freeman of Rites O’Passage

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Jacqueline Freeman.

Thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
There are many threads that have come together in the work that I do today. 

The abuse I experienced in my childhood set me on a path to finding meaning and purpose in my life. My background in teaching writing, literature, and Women’s Studies certainly factor in. So does my time as an academic coach. My struggles with my body. There were difficulties in my relationships while I learned to love myself. 

I took some drastic measures to try to break out of cycles that I’d seen plaguing my family for generations, including moving to a foreign country, two divorces, converting religions, and several career changes. 

Reparenting work did the most to shift me out of the worst patterns and help me start building love in my life. That’s where I focused during the low tide that followed my second divorce in 2009. It was during this time that I realized that my first husband had treated me the way I treated myself. That he did to me what I did to my body and my emotions. He had just been agreeing with me! 

I spent two years just going to work, coming home, doing that inner child and shadow work, and starting all over again the next day. It was a dark and difficult time when I’d lost my social and religious support networks, but it was a cocoon for me to transform how I related to myself and how I moved through the world. 

As I continued to learn more and learn how to love more, my relationship with my past and with those that had harmed me shifted. They were no longer monsters but humans who were hurting who had hurt me. Around this time of shifting understanding and increasing forgiveness, a growing awareness of the ancestors began. I didn’t really know much about it in the beginning, so I started with small things like just recognizing how hard they’d struggled to stay alive and keep their children alive so that I could be here now. 

After a few years of just bobbing along on my own with it, a course on Shift Network about ancestral lineage repair caught my attention. I was really attracted to the teacher, saying the system he used was designed to promote psychological and spiritual safety. I’d had some really terrifying experiences in the past and knew that it’s not all “love and light” in these sorts of realms. 

As I was going through the course, I was planning a Truth and Reconciliation Tour of the US. I wanted to visit not just the places where my ancestors had entered the country and where their final resting places were but also places of big import to the country’s history: where the first and last slave ship entered, where the Tobacco Brides entered, where Sacagawea was taken from her people. 

I became certified in Ancestral Medicine and became a supervisor for future trainees. The process of ancestral lineage repair is a multi-faceted healing, and I quickly found that my initial training wasn’t enough. Training as a psychopomp followed, and two years of training as a SEIDR, a sort of Norse shaman, followed that. All these modalities have given me powerful tools to help clients go deep to get to the source of what’s been causing them pain and unlock the talents and gifts that are waiting for them in those dark places. 

We all face challenges, but would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has been a long and winding road full of obstacles and challenges, from the intergenerational trauma that bleeds into my fears of fully stepping into my power and being seen as being true to my gifts and resisting marketing pressures to chop things into smaller and smaller bits and sugarcoat the depth of the work that I do. I spent much time and energy trying to engineer some marketable box for myself. 

When I stopped that and fully claimed what I’m good at– walking clients through the dark depths to release their pain and find their gifts–things started opening up for me, and my business finally took off. A weekend workshop isn’t going to change your life. Change that lasts takes time. It takes time to do the work and integrate it into your life.

Time to release, time to establish a new pattern, and strength and courage to stay the course when old patterns resurface just to make sure you’re really ready for a new way of being. 

I appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Rites O’Passage?
I am a ritual healing practitioner. I design ceremonies and rituals to mark the big rites of passage in our lives–weddings, births, deaths, house, and business blessings–as well as healing ceremonies and rituals to help us release what is no longer serving and welcome in a new way of being in the world. 

Most of our emotional patterning was laid down before we even had language. Rituals and ceremonies are the language of the subconscious and help us get to sources of healing that are not available in traditional talk therapy. Ancestral lineage repair is a powerful process that helps us not only begin to shift intergenerational trauma that’s bleeding into our present and sabotaging the work we do to change ourselves and our lives, but it also cultivates a sense of belonging and support that is incredibly healing. 

Reparenting With our Ancestors helps us to cultivate our Healthy Inner Adults and get them behind the wheel of our lives. Most of us have wounded inner children driving our lives. Wounded inner children feel alone, overwhelmed, and incapable of changing their situation. They’re exhausted.  

Something has gone terribly wrong for them to be driving in the first place, and they’ll wreck our lives to try to get someone to notice their driving and get an adult in charge. Through the course, we learn how to establish a Healthy Inner Adult and how to successfully hold space for big emotions. Boundaries and deep, loving relationships with the body are a big part of this work. 

Many ritual practitioners only like working with folks who are well-versed in spiritual and meditative work, but I love working with folks on all parts of the spectrum. Teaching folks about grounding into their bodies and finding their “yes” and “no,” learning how to set and maintain boundaries, and learning how to protect and cleanse themselves emotionally and spiritually is life-changing for my clients and so rewarding for me. 

I have a month-long self-driven course called Grounding, Boundaries, Protection: Take Root to Take Flight, available on my website. It’s very affordable because these are foundational skills for everyday living and thriving. I’m happy to do that work with folks one-on-one, but wanted to have an option that fits into any budget. 

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love that you can be on a mountain trail and feel completely submerged in the wilder world, then be off the trail and have coffee with someone in 15 minutes. Having wilder places so accessible in such a large city is really a best-of-both-worlds scenario. 

We live in Woodlea-Melrose in Central Phoenix and just love all the great places that are within walking distance from us. Local businesses that each have their flair and flavor make life so rich, and we’re incredibly grateful to be here. And working on a patio in February while the rest of the country is having blizzards? Creme de la creme! 

I also LOVE the monsoon rains. I lived in The Netherlands for a decade, where it was always grey and cloudy but very rarely RAINED. It was just like having a spittle in your face all the time. My first monsoon rain here in Phoenix, I was dancing at the door, watching the rain come down in sheets. Finally!! RAIN!!!! 

The summers suck. Everyone knows that, but when it comes to extreme seasons, I’ll take our summers over blizzardy winters any time. I’m not going to slip and fall and break my hip in the sunshine. Or throw my back out shoveling sunshine off the driveway. When the sun goes down, it’s tolerable, so you can still get out and about, so I feel like it’s not as isolating as an intense winter. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ritesopassage.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-freeman-61488158/
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/free-jacqueline