The Messy Art of Breaking Down
Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash
(AKA "How to Lose Your Shit")
You're losing it, Sweet Friend.
Your friends see it, and deep in your bones you know it to be true. But what if rather than trying to hold it all together, you finally allowed your Self to simply "lose your shit"?
I have recently emerged from the breakdown phase of a midlife crisis and although it was incredibly tough, it was also wonderful. As Joseph Campbell says “Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my God you’re alive and it’s spectacular.”
But what if this pathological culture is reflected in the culture in our guts too? What then Sweet Friend?
The entire process helped me see that although breakdowns are tough, “keeping your shit together” is even tougher. It's also a futile goal. So whilst fumbling around in the toilet bowl of my previous life (desperately trying to keep my shit together), I finally asked myself:
What if I just let this all just go down the divine u-bend instead?
At the same time that all this has been happening, I have been immersed in writing a book about the Western Medical Tradition, which frequently touches upon alchemical concepts. It turns out that at least half of Alchemy could quite easily be summarized as “The Art of Breaking Down”.
The fullness of Alchemy however is perhaps better described as “the art of falling apart and rising from our ashes anew”. For people that get caught in, or identified with “losing their shit” - it ceases to be a growthful experience and you lose contact with Soul or Self as the persona is based upon victimhood.
Similarly, for those great many of us that get identified with “holding your shit together” you also become rigid, stuck and out of contact with Soul. As Campbell said, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you … it’s not your path”.
What is being held together is the floating turd of your outgrown persona that your soul is desperately trying to flush. Both processes are profoundly exhausting. The trick, I am slowly learning, is to move through these phases again and again and again, and to craft our lives in such a manner that means that this is actually possible.
Here’s my summary of the maps provided by the Alchemists, Jung and Joseph Campbell.
#1 The Blackening
It turns out that the process of growth doesn’t generally begin with a positive peak experience at a new-age workshop, (although I’m sure it can) but instead with the melancholic dark night-of-the-soul experience. This is the hero’s journey that takes them off the beaten track, into the dark forest and onto what Campbell called “a road of trials”.
If only we told our children to embrace such moments as gifts and blessings and that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek”. It is a confrontation with our own shadow and is always difficult and often painful. We place our former self into the alchemists’ crucible and are burnt down to ashes – hence "the blackening". During this process, I came face-to-face with just how self-absorbed, petty and mean-spirited I can be.
#2 The Separating
Following the overwhelming breakdown of the blackening, a process of ablution or purification unfolds. Campbell called this “the separation” chapter, whilst for Jung it is during this phase that we become aware of a seemingly irreconcilable split of opposites within us: masculine and feminine, the virgin and the whore, the human and the divine, etc.
For me, this involved several themes, but the tension between my role as a provider for my family and my soul’s yearning for creative freedom is the centrepiece. It is therefore a time of realization, and although we still journey through the underworld, the alchemical texts say that our path is “illuminated from above” by the watery moon of intuitive insight. It’s crucial to sit long and hard with the discomfort of the tension of opposites we find here, however.
#3 The Gift
Having faced the shadow through the Nigredo and sat deeply with the clash of opposites within us through the albedo, the process of transmutation now commences (citrinas). Here Campbell noted that if the hero survives, they receive a great gift or ‘the boon’, which results in the discovery of important self-knowledge.
The alchemists described this as ‘the transmutation of silver into gold’ and Jung said this is where we encounter the Wise Old Man archetype to guide us. It therefore also can be seen as a kind of ‘initiation’ of the Hero on their quest.
#4 The Phoenix
Having begun the journey with what Campbell called ‘departure’ (Nigredo) and followed with ‘separation’, (Albedo) then having worked hard to have received Initiation (Citrinitas) all our hero’s journey requires now is ‘the Return’.
This is what the alchemists called ‘the Redenning’ and it is the culmination of the four stages; it is often depicted as a crowned king or a phoenix. This is the process of emerging out of the ashes of our previous self. It is the result of ‘the great work’ of the Alchemists and what they cryptically called ‘the philosopher’s stone’. Jung described it as the merging of the ego with the Self.
From where I stand it looks like the end result of a significant house renovation; it is not the absolute destruction of the Ego, yet the old and pathological aspects of our persona that were inhibiting the real expression of our soulful Self have been broken down and the boundary walls pushed back significantly. This is the wonderful part of the Great Work that I currently find my Self within.
If all this feels too abstract and heady, the summary is:
"Let it burn, let it bleed, let it go and then leave space for something new"
With Heart,
Jimi
