If you allow yourself to feel your feelings, to ride with them like waves until they move through you, you will go deeper into yourself and your own imperfections. While there is no doubt that dismemberment encompasses the darkest of hours it is also the place where the magic of transformation actually occurs.
Dismemberment begins with an experience of being (and feeling) completely and totally out of control. People report a range of experiences that on one end of a spectrum might involve enduring numerous months or more where your job and life demands stretch you beyond anything you ever encountered, and on the other end of a spectrum could include loss of your job or home, divorce, major medical condition, memory of sexual abuse, family estrangement, death of a loved one, or even homelessness. During the depths of this phase, you wonder if you will make it.
Key here is that in the depths of this cleansing, not only do you feel like you are out of control, you feel that you are challenged so far beyond your capacity to cope that you are quite unsure how “you are ‘doing’ your life.”
During this descent you will want to physically be at home or something that feels like home and simply “to be,” to be alone, and to be quiet. To say you want this type of solitude is an understatement—it is though your body is demanding to have stillness in the similarly undeniable way that your body says “I must eat” when you are hungry.
During this challenging time of survival, intense emotion, and self-reflection you wash away old patterns, beliefs, and identity. As you cleanse yourself of yourself, you make space for a new you, a new identity. This phase can occur over months or years.
