Regulation and being disturbed on the healing path

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.

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Grief is the midwife of new life

At times, we are asked to bear witness to a shattering. To the death of an old dream - me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out.

In mourning what has fallen away, a previously hidden threshold begins to appear.

Grief is not something we "make it through" and emerge from unchanged. We don't finish it, but stand in awe as it takes us apart and pieces us back together.

It is a faithful companion of the unknown, moving not by way of the straight line, but by circle and spiral.

It holds us through the darkness as well as the light, until another life begins to gather itself.

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The rich soil of grief

There are times when life does not ask us to rise, heal, transcend, or become better versions of ourselves. It asks something far more difficult. It asks us to descend.

To allow the structures we’ve built our identity around to loosen and, at times, to collapse entirely. The dream of who we thought we would become. The life we imagined would unfold in a certain way. The image of ourselves we worked so hard to protect. There are seasons when something underneath all of that begins to die, and no amount of positive thinking, spiritual effort, or psychological understanding can restore the previous arrangement.

And while the mind often interprets this as failure or mistake, the older traditions understood something different. They understood that there are initiations that arrive not through light, but through darkening. Through disorientation. Through grief. Through being taken underneath the surface of things.

In many of the ancient stories, the Goddess leads us downward. Into the earth. Into the cave. Into the mud and the underworld. Not as punishment, but as participation in a deeper rhythm of transformation that the modern world has largely forgotten. There are dimensions of the soul that can only awaken in the dark.

There are times when we are meant to be undone.

Not forever. Not as an end in itself. But because something false, exhausted, or too small can no longer carry the weight of our life. And so we are brought closer to the ground. Closer to the body. Closer to grief. Closer to the vulnerability we have spent years trying to outrun.

This descent often feels unbearable because it asks us to relinquish control. To stop managing the mystery. To stop demanding immediate clarity. To stop treating sorrow as an interruption to life rather than part of its deep ecology.

But when grief is allowed to move consciously, something begins to soften beneath the surface. Frozen places begin to thaw. The defended heart becomes more permeable. Perception changes. We begin to see differently, not because we have escaped suffering, but because suffering has humbled and ripened us.

The old alchemists understood that there are phases of transformation where everything appears ruined. Where the vessel blackens. Where certainty dissolves. Where we are stripped of the fantasy of mastery and brought into direct contact with what is fragile, mortal, and unfinished within us.

And yet something sacred is often taking place there.

Not in spite of the descent, but through it.

There are seasons when being brought into the earth is precisely how the soul is restored to itself.

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