You perceive this feeling when you have just gone through a breakup, or lost your job, and everything is terrible and terrifying and you don’t know what to do, and you find yourself crying in a pile on your bedroom floor, barely able to remember how to use the phone, desperately looking for some sign of God in old letters, or your Facebook newsfeed or on Glee, finding nothing there to comfort you?
Come on, yes you do. We all do. In this moment, in this pile on the floor, you are more powerful than you’ve ever been. You get strength and possibility during a time of change and uncertainty in life. In pieces, warrior-style, on the back of a crocodile; “never not broken,” the double negative here means that broken right down, but this isn’t the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror. It’s the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying something new and unfathomable. We can get acquainted with the power from being broken and in flux, pulling apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations. The thing about going through sudden or scary or sad transitions; like a breakup, is that you lose your future: your expectations of what the story of your life so far was going to become. When you lose that partner or that job or that person, your future dissolves in front of you and of course, this is terrifying.
But look this way, now you get to make a choice. In pieces, in a pile on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your expectations of the future are meaningless. Your stories about the past do not apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are flowing in a new way, and this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to become new again that is to choose how you want to put yourself back together. Confusion can be an incredible teacher—how could you ever learn if you already had it all figured out?
We are still left with rudiments of reptilian brain, which is where we feel fear. The predatory power of reptilians like crocodile is not located in their huge jaws, but rather that they pluck their prey from the banks of the river, take it into the water, and spin it until it is disoriented. They whirl that prey like a dervish seeking God, they use the power of spin rather than brute force to feed themselves. By riding on this spinning, predatory, fearsome creature’s attitude; you refuse to reject this fear or let it control you. You will learn to ride on it. You get on this reptilian brain that lives inside the river, inside the flow. You take your fear down to the river and use its power to navigate the waves, and spin in the “never not broken” water and that is beautiful.
In our lineage it is like a spinning, multi-faceted prism. Imagine the Hope Diamond twirling in a bright, clear light. The light pouring through the beveled cuts of the diamond would create a whirling rainbow of color. The diamond is whole and complete and because it’s fractured, it creates more diverse beauty. Its form is a spectrum of whirling color. That means that this feeling of confusion and brokenness that every human has felt at some time or another in lives is a source of beauty and color and new reflections and possibilities.
If everything remained the same, if we walked along the same path down to the river every day until there was a groove there as we do; habits or even some scars, this routine would become so limited, so toxic to us that, well, the fear would catch on, and we’d get plucked from the banks, spun and eaten. So the time of confusion and brokenness and fear and sadness is right time to get up on that fear, ride it down to the fear river, dip into the waves, and let your self break loose. You will become a prism. All the places where you are shattered can now reflect light and color where there was none. Now is the time to become something new, to choose a new whole. But remember; even that new whole, that new, colorful, amazing groove that we create, is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to. We are already “never not broken.” We were never a consistent, limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited and that means we are amazing.
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