Shared Transformation Issue 11
SHAMANIC DISMEMBERMENT
A woman experiencing a lengthy Kundalini awakening told me of a period where she was having frequent nightmares
from which she awoke screaming. All these terrible dreams had the same theme: "they" were hacking her
to pieces. Eventually, these dreams began to change, and instead of being chopped up, dream figures were putting
her back together in a way that made her -- like the Bionic man -- "better and stronger" than ever before.
This is a classical shamanic dismemberment experience. It is a symbolic transformational drama which has been
recognized in the wisdom traditions from time immemorial. In Sumerian mythology, Inanna was a sky goddess who
had to pass through seven gates of the underworld, each time being stripped of deeper parts of her being until
she was naked and lifeless. In the book, Shaman's Path, Rowena Pattee reminds us of the Egyptian enactment of
this drama in the myth of Osiris, the pharaoh who was slain, dismembered and supernaturally resurrected to conceive
his son Horus. In the Greek mystery religions, Pattee says that "Dionysus was torn to pieces by the Titans
while his heart was rescued by Athena, goddess of wisdom, suggestive of the wisdom born of the dismemberment experience."
In all of these stories, something magnificent and creatively abundant occurs after the original being is broken apart. These myths infer that all creation is the result of a single divine Self which has been sacrificially fragmented. The Inuit Indians of the Arctic celebrate Takanakapsaluk, the dismembered goddess whose severed parts form all the creatures of the sea. And in pre-Aztec religion, the earth itself was created out of the dismembered parts of the goddess Tlalteuctli. As the myth goes, ever since she was torn apart and turned into the earth, Tlalteuctli has wept and cannot be consoled accept through the "blood" of torn open (i.e., spiritually consecrated) human hearts. "To sacrifice our hearts," says Kate Duff, "is not to give ourselves away, but to keep ourselves true, by freeing our hearts from distraction and realigning ourselves with our appointed destinies. Ironically, we often find our true selves, and engage our souls, when our hearts are broken, bleeding or sacrificed." (from The Alchemy of Illness) Those of us who are being transformed may have graphic dreams or visions of being brutally cut up or torn apart. This phase may be preceded (or accompanied) by visions or dreams of catastrophic disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, nuclear holocaust, etc. Our primordial fears are triggered by these scenarios. This is one of the most physically and/or mentally arduous stages of awakening. Unfortunately, some of us also have literal dismemberment experiences when the Kundalini is purifying our bodies and psyches. Our bones, joints, vertebrae, internal organs, eyes or other parts of the body may be gravely affected by the process. Serious injuries or diseases may occur which seem to be permanently destroying us.
Our very survival seems to hang by a thread. For some, the fear of death looms large during this period. For others, death would seem a welcome respite from the terror and agony of the "dismemberment." With or without sickness, life imposes sacrifice upon us. But especially if we are seriously ill, we are forced to relinquish things which are most precious to us. These sacrifices, says Kate Duff, may take the form of "our savings, marriage, mobility, or pride, even our own flesh and blood." Through these losses, "we are reminded that nothing lasts forever or belongs to us; everything comes from and returns to an original source..." At its deepest level, the dismemberment experience dismantles our old identity. It is a powerful death and rebirth process. Dreams, visions, or actual physical sensations of being torn asunder usually -- but not always -- involve intense suffering. In Where The Spirits Ride the Wind, Felicitas D. Goodman notes that Siberian shamans regarded dismemberment as an essential phase of initiation for healers. To her surprise, Goodman discovered that this archetype seems universal. In her trance work with Westerners, those who had spontaneous dismemberment visions were invariably destined to become various kinds of healers. The Jungian analyst Albert Kreinheder (a healer of psyches) went through an excruciating "initiation" in the form of rheumatoid arthritis. In the the long and painful course of this illness, he came to realize that "The symptoms open you up. They literally tear you open so that the things you need can flow in... With every symptom there comes also a symbolic content, and it is the task of the soul to expand itself so it can include the invading images and symbols... The disease always carries its own cure and also the cure for your whole personality" (from The Healing Path by Marc Ian Barasch).
Joan Halifax echoes this same understanding in her book, Shamanic Voices: "The shaman is a healed healer who has retrieved the broken pieces of his or her body and psyche and, through a personal rite of transformation, has integrated many planes of life experience: the body and the spirit, the ordinary and nonordinary, the individual and the community, nature and supernature, the mythic and the historical, the past, the present and the future." With her typical eloquence, Halifax declares that "To bring back to an original state that which was in primordial times whole and is now broken and dismembered is not only an act of unification but also a divine remembrance of a time when a complete reality existed."
The positive side of the dismemberment experience is that it eventually leads to a "resurrection"
- - a higher state of spiritual development. In especially painful and frightening dismemberment experiences,
it also helps to know that most traditions teach that the more difficult and extreme the transformational process,
the greater the result. Knowing this has given me hope and courage during the most difficult periods of my own
dismemberment experiences.
--El Collie
© El Collie 1995