Falling Apart, and Coming Back Together
24 April 2022
by Kristina Renée
I was at a local coffee shop a week ago or so with Julian Hawk, my son. He asked about the electric scooter sitting near a middled aged man. The man heard my son’s inquiry and replied with a nervous laugh, “it’s my mid-life crisis.” Before I had a moment to realize it, I heard “it’s your rebirthing” come out of my mouth. Once it landed in the ether, I was reminded of a quote about things falling apart and things coming together, that often in our culture we call a crisis.
Here is the quote...
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy"
— Pema Chodron
Our current model of soceity teaches us that there is only so much room for our “crisis”, transition or what we could look at as an initiation; that there is not ample space for these parts of ourselves to unravel and transform through us. I wonder what it might be like if we were to understand and allow ourselves to embrace and perhaps revere the process of our death and rebirth, our falling apart and coming back together?
We are constantly changing, our cells, our bodies, the world around us, Nature, the process of death and rebirth is happening even as you read this.
And yet, as humans change challenges us in many ways. The ego-ic mind doesn't like this constant motion, this natural wheel of Nature. The ego wants certainty in a world that is uncertain, so it clings to the idea that things are static or finite. These attachments, as well as the aversions and mis-knowings, especially without clarity, can cause us more suffering, which effects all aspects of our being and of life.
How we welcome or don’t welcome the falling apart and coming together process of ourselves will impact our well being in the way we we meet or have met the experience itself.
I am currently completing a class called The Path of Service with my beloved teacher, Isa Gucciardi. The class highlights how our initiations, and how our path of service, is impacted by our responses to our initiations. That is to say, the way that we meet the experiences of our initiations or transitions determines how the experience itself will unfold. This will impact future initiations or transitions, thus becoming an unconscious drive for our intentionality on our path of service. There is a lot more to unpack here, and I recommend taking the class yourself if you wish to dive in a little deeper, especially if you are a caregiver or parent.
In addition, and this is important, the way in which we meet trauma in our lives will determine how we will experience the trauma, and the way in which we will meet future trauma.
If we’ve had supportive places to land and time to process our initiations and trauma, our falling apart and coming back together, perhaps our experiences to the transition may feel safe and well integrated. Often, this is not the case, which causes a disconnect to ourselves and to the world by the thickening of our attachments, aversions and misconceptions in an effort to feel safe and secure. As our defenses enhance, guarding our core vulnerabilities from the experiences of the trauma or transitions, we become more disconnected to our authentic self, often leading to our sense of feeling alienated or separated.
That is, until we peer deeper into our inner world for clarity, healing and transformation.
The good news is that we can learn how to find healing in how we met our initiations and trauma. Healing happens in safe relationships, which can be modeled in a therapeutic setting. As we build, or in a sense rebuild, a safe container within ourselves for healing, witnessed and guided in a secure an compassionate therapeutic setting, we regain and reclaim our own personal power and life essence for our self healing and self trust.
In this way, we begin to rewire our brains, which in effect, transforms the body’s holding patterns around our core vulnerabilities and our thought forms, allowing us to connect to our authentic self and highest good. This translates into all aspects of our being: mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. It effects all of our relationships as we learn how to build relationships that model safety, uphold and respect boundaries, deepen self trust and allow for vulnerabilities to be seen in healthy, clear and supportive ways. It also impacts the way we will and can support our own and others transitions or crisis; the falling apart and coming back together.
and so may it be for me,
so may it be for you,
so may it be for all,
blessings,
Kristina Renée