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There are many ways to transform. If you are a caterpillar, you have to eat and eat and spin and spin a thread around you, and hang upside down and wait and wait and dissolve and dissolve and then emerge, new.
In some cultures, rites of passage helps to craft a container within the community, in dialogue with the gods and for the quest of one individual self -embarking on a ritualized process, facing fears, facing odds, surviving against adversity of nature or challenges and then returning, changed.
In some communities, dance is a gateway to transformation. The body doesn’t lie. It hold secrets and it holds trauma and it contains the key to repatterining itself.
There are workshops designed to facilitate transformation -you can choose a menu of modern day transformational tools to facilitate any number of changes in you at any time. Even in Sedona, there is a foot spa dedicated to deeper transformations of self, during the process of a manicure.
I’ve thought about transformation for years -specifically since living in Moscow during a time of great upheaval and change. Governments can supposedly transform an entire people too. One day you are a communist, the next you are a capitalist, and there is quite a journey in between, to undo the old and take hold of the new.
Witnessing an entire country breakdown was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. It was a larger than life experience. I witnessed and documented just a snapshot of what I saw through my then 19 year old eyes. Revisiting the story, two cycles of seven later, and diving deeply into the belly of the creative process while integrating somatic therapy, five rhythms dance and writing was life changing. I had intended to simply, ‘know myself’ by mapping out my life stories and then dancing them to better integrate, release and discharge forgotten memories and secrets held in the body in the guise of frozen traumatic energy or stories.
As I look back on the process, I see that more than anything, working with our life stories is akin to alchemy. The Alchemical process never was simply a quantum leap, or a ten minute energetic ‘download’ or meditative experience to encode affirmations or release a thought. Writing life story is more like the caterpillar eating and eating and eating its way through the leaves, in order to prepare for the next stage of metamorphosis that is to come. It’s a preparation. Spinning and spinning its web, the caterpillar encloses itself off from the world. Words have this effect too. It’s a sorting, editing, looking back and weaving worlds with ones own words.
It’s a kind of backwards review or ‘ruchschau’ in which one looks back on the story, on one’s life, on one’s day, or on an entire chapter, and watches it in reverse. It’s a kind of karmic re-shaping by re-examining, by integrating through looking back. Adding in writing and dance rooted me in the process, kept me from simply spinning around in my head with it, and crafted a new identity within me. I claimed my story. Fully. I owned it -the mess, the beauty, the rawness, the tragedy, the confusion, the enormity of that specific chapter. I followed threads of grief further backwards into motherliness and womblike stories; I rewrote creation stories for myself. I followed place based threads to native stories and repatterned a nativity story within myself, rooted to place. I followed storylines into the mythopoetic landscape of the Larger than Life Storylines and found golden threads, which I wove into the fabric of my own life.
I sometimes think it’s strange that we don’t do more writing for treasure, that we don’t dive into our stories more deeply. Collectively. Perhaps I am here to remind the world that we can. That we can indeed change worlds with words. Inside and out. Writing requires only a couple ingredients: Time. A pen. Paper. Or fingers and a computer. Dedication. Commitment. To self. To imagination. To story. Sometimes one needs a guide for entering the cave of the self, the webbed world of stories, to assist with the sorting, threading, weaving and reshaping.
Annete Pirso, Mokos (goddess of family and protection; weaver, spinner)
Anyone can do it. Anyone can dive into their story from anywhere. It’s like traveling to another world. When I lived in Russia, my favorite Babushka, Lyudmilla, who lived an hour on the outskirts of Moscow, in endless rows and rows of Kruschev style communist apartment buildings, born under Lenin, lived under Stalin, made $5 a month to support she and her son Kolya, used to say: I never had an opportunity to travel. It is why I love looking at postcards and reading books. I call it arm chair travel. I travel by chair to other worlds.
You can travel to other worlds within -worlds you formerly lived through, and perhaps, didn’t fully glean the magic in the making during the journey. We all have stories to tell. We have all had difficult, beautiful, messy, awkward, terrifying, tragic, sad and ridiculously funny stories. We are products of the human condition, experiencing ourselves becoming human. Transformative language arts can change your life. Can change your story. Can change your relationship to your story. That’s a powerful tool. To be an alchemist. Who knew, that all along, the caduceus was really a pen, and that your story, was indeed The Great Work of your life?