“We are all concerned with the idea of change…”I should be like this” and so on and so on. What happens is that the idea of deliberate change never, never, never functions. As soon as you say, “I want to change” - a counterforce is created that prevents you from change. Changes are taking place by themselves. If you go deeper into what you are, if you accept what is there, then a change automatically occurs by itself. This is the paradox of change.”

Frederick S. Perls

Try as we might, life’s absurdities are not problems to be rid of nor are our contradictions meant to be done away with. We can work with our reality or we can work against it.

Many of us live in a world of appearances, amputating ourselves here and there to fit into our various masks. Masks can be most helpful in navigating the world, as long as we remember it is not the mask that makes us lovable, otherwise they become our prison. We spend a lot of energy on these appearances, or who-we-wish-to-be, a perpetual self-improvement project while not nearly enough energy is invested into getting to know who we really are, just as we are.

In anthropology there are what is known as rites de passage which is based on the belief that individuals do not automatically develop into responsible, mature adults on their own but require guidance from spirit, solitude, and community to ritualistically move from one life transition to another.

The first stage asks one to separate from the usual circumstances, which is essentially one’s social conditioning - all the roles and instructions we’ve been fed from parents, teachers, culture, etc. The things we have been trained to do so we aren’t ostracized by society.

Distanced from these social conditions one is primed for the second stage, characterized by liminality, the in-between space after one way of existing begins to shed but before a new way of existence has yet formed. This is the molting snake. Without the relied-upon scripts of who we ought to be, how we ought to respond, we are free and naturally this is horrific. We feel lost. And this lostness becomes the portal through which we may be found. This is the most sacred and most difficult of the stages.

In the third stage of the initiation one re-enters into community, taking a seat at the table as a more mature, authentic being.

When relationships, roles, versions of ourselves end or change, how do you cope with the loss of these identities? From where do you draw strength to bear the things you need to bear?

“…it had never occurred to him that what was great was not always cast in a form that was beautiful.”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

Deep inner work is often liberating and destabilizing. Perhaps these forces are inextricably linked like night and day.

Entering into a therapeutic relationship where together client and therapist navigate the inner landscape of a mind can be the most worth-it of ventures. Alone, these things are much harder to do. Therapy reminds you to forge ahead, even when the rewards of the work aren’t yet apparent, even when it doesn’t seem like anyone else out there understands, and even when - to your own bewilderment - you keep making the same “mistakes” over and over again.