My life is falling apart

Sometimes in life our world seems to fall apart. We wake up and everything changes. Maybe it's something someone says or does. Maybe it's an unexpected event or accident. Maybe it's just us, but suddenly our world is turned upside down and we know somehow that there's no turning back.

The hard part of change

When we face big life changes, our gut drops. Our heart races. Our breath tightens. We feel faint or thin.

Such intense change can feel scary and unsettling. It destabilizes us, shakes our foundations, and asks us to take a leap of faith...a big one. Even if we initiate and want the change, it's scary. Thank goodness for the good people around us we can rest into, the ones who understand and support us.

During such times, it can be easy to sink into depression, to isolate and hide from the world. We don't want to see anyone when we feel so miserable. We don't have the energy for it. We might hate our life and have no idea how to fix it. We may feel defeated or hopeless. We may even want to die just to escape the discomfort.

The alchemy of change

There is a lifeline in the face of intense life changes. If we allow them to, they have the potential to transform us into something so far beyond what we've been that we could never have imagined it. All we have to do is trust the alchemical process we're going through and surrender to the changes. This kind of transformation is done for us by a power greater than ourselves, like the caterpillar dissolving into a liquid state of imaginal cells inside its chrysalis in order to coalesce into the new form of Butterfly. In the end, transformation is nothing less than miraculous.

There is a term for this kind of deep, transformative experience. It's called the dissolution of self, and it's a common part of the spiritual journey. It means there's a radical shedding of what no longer serves us so that what does can enter. But the us undergoing the dissolution is our notion of who we are—our conditioned or ego self—not our true self. The conditioned or ego self is transient and finite, a fabrication of our mind. Our true self is whole and infinite, an expression of our Divine Source.

The strange thing is that on some level, we know the change is necessary. We know the life we're living isn't "it" for us. We know that we have to let go and leap into the unknown if we are to have any prayer of discovering whatever it is we truly long for.

But knowing that doesn't always give us the courage we need to make the leap. We might be afraid of letting a love go. Afraid of going on alone. Afraid of having regrets. Afraid of sinking our boat. Afraid we'll fail and fall.

The call to evolve

Ancient sacred texts tell us that spiritual evolution is the soul's greatest desire and that ignoring this is what keeps us living in suffering. Yet even when we resist change, it seems that one way or another we're going to be asked to evolve. Either we decide we can't go on the way we are and we make a change, or an event happens that sends us falling into the unknown whether we want to or not.

Something to remember during such times is that our Divine Source always works for us and never against us. When we realize this high truth, the hard and scary parts of our journey get a bit easier to embrace.

The power of change

Sometimes we have to meet ourselves right where we are, in all of our broken down, messy, emotional glory to see who we really are, raw and undisguised. When we do, our heart opens and our compassion rises. When we view the intricacies of our lives through a lens of compassion, we see ourselves and others differently, with genuine love. That's because compassion is the gateway to genuine love. Through that lens, we realize that all the shit we humans cling to is not who we really are, and that we are way more amazing than we previously thought.

Then, something wonderful happens. We open to a new level of love inside—love for ourselves, love for others, love for Life itself. And everything changes. We see things differently. We feel things differently. We relate to things differently. We stop pushing away from or clinging to things, and we let go instead. We relax into the flow of not knowing, somehow feeling that we are safe and held, and that everything is okay just as it is.

In each moment, we are here, breathing and choosing. It's a beautiful mystery, this life, isn't it?