Sometimes life comes not to soothe us, but to overturn the world we have made. Something arrives—death, a new lover, shattering grief, the end of a dream, an encounter we cannot explain—and the spiritual house of cards begins to fall.
The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.
This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.
But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.
Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.
There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are. It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.
Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.
To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.
Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.
- Matt Licata
