MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 3

DISSOLUTION

The core task of the dissolution phase of the Journey to Soul Initiation is to break down or dissolve your current identity in order to make room for your new identity.  This identity will be forged in and from your soul encounters at the bottom of the soul canyon.  This new identity might be a mythopoetic identity or it might be a revelation of your true purpose.  We’ll discuss this more in the next phase.

The loss of your identity is really disorienting and difficult.  We’ve all worked hard forging an identity that has gotten us this far; we’re invested in it and it is hard to let go.  Plus, the identity we’re about to destroy has grounded us in the world, given us ways to act even if they haven’t been as productive as we’d like them to be. 

Dissolution is highly threatening to the ego and this can only be managed if you’ve done enough wholing and self-healing.  Thus dissolutions can and perhaps should be aborted if you are too disoriented or if your external life becomes incompatible with your dissolution.  Successful descents depend both upon preparation and having enough support.  Stop if you don’t have enough support or have not done enough preparation.  Your preparation and support certainly don’t have to be perfect, just sufficient. I certainly stopped my dissolution at least three or four times in order to get my schoolwork done.  Further, I think no one should push you to enter dissolution.  Only do it if you sense that you are strong enough.  Don’t let anyone overrule you about this.  

If you abort, go back to wholing and self healing practices until you feel more capable.

So how does this less than enjoyable phase start? Plotkin argues that there must be both a life crisis and a call to adventure.  Without the crisis you can ignore the part of you that wants to go deeper and dissolve your current identity.  Without the call to adventure, you might not have the courage to let yourself descend. Plotkin writes there must be an “Utter loss of faith that there is anything intrinsic or essential to any social or vocational role.” (p.71).  You must believe “The old familiar life must change in some fundamental ways” (p.78).  It helps if there is a commitment to something larger than yourself such as Jung’s commitment to his patients, Joanna Macy’s commitment to personal growth (as I read it), Thomas Berry’s commitment to a spiritualized cosmos, a commitment to the well being of the planet etc.

The start can either be from a voluntary descent but is more commonly experienced as an abduction. The example that Plotkin uses for abduction is Persephone’s abduction to the underworld.  We have solid examples in the story of Joseph and in the story of Tammuz who goes to the underworld and needs to be rescued by Inanna so that the rains might return.

Plotkin rightly believes that you can intensify the descent.  He gives a few different methods including writing letters to the call to adventure and making yourself more vulnerable through such methods as wandering in nature, breathwork, dreamwork, active imagination, entheogens etc. I spent a lot of time wandering in nature, doing dreamwork and active imagination during my dissolution.

Dissolution is a really difficult, disorienting and necessary phase. It’s not for the faint of heart and I wish everyone great courage as they undertake this phase, whether they have been "abducted” or whether they have chosen to descend.

MY EXPERIENCE

My dissolution began in New Mexico where I moved after I was fired from graduate school. I had a vocational plan—I’d do some kind of low level psychological work for a year and then go to school in social work and become a social worker.  It was something I’d thought about as early as my sophomore year in College where I’d written a paper about Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook exploring the protagonist’s choice to focus on helping individuals rather than work for the “revolution.”  I thought I could make a concrete and tangible difference for real individuals, rather than hoping the trickle down effect of whatever else I might do.  I had a job for a year with kids in residential treatment who’d been taken from their homes because of abuse and neglect, and then I earned a Social work degree. I was in New Mexico for three years.

I was feeling very lost, that’s for sure. I didn’t have any idea if I’d be any good as a social worker-- not like being a world class academic that I could have become but didn’t want to be. And I wound up in New Mexico which was just perfect because of the barrenness of the landscape, mile after mile of sand and scrub brush, scarce pine trees in the mountains, cottonwoods along the few bodies of water.  It turned out that I was really responsive to the landscape around me; the barrenness of the landscape reflected and let me see the barrenness inside of me.  I spent a lot of my time in the mountains of New Mexico knowing that I was empty inside and feeling into that painful, painful emptiness, but embracing it and not running away from it.

That’s the task of dissolution, however you get there. You need to recognize/feel/know in your soul that you are empty.  That emptiness is a prerequisite for a vision that will let you discover your true identity, the reason you are on the earth in this place and in this time.

I was still seeking and wound up doing some neo Native American ritual practice.  In hindsight, this was a perfectly terrible example of Cultural Appropriation, but it validated my ability to respond to the more than human world in a very physical way. That helped buttress the south facet of my Self, using Plotkin’s model.  Given that the South is my weak facet, this was an important piece of preparation.  I did my first vision fast, four days in the Sangre De Cristo mountains in Northern New Mexico. The vision fast helped in two significant ways:  I knew that I needed to find my way back to Judaism in some sense and I felt really good about my ability to fast and to survive.  Sure it was only four days and the water was provided for us, but for a suburban boy, that was something. I felt more whole and clean after the fast, though I still felt empty and had absolutely no idea who I was.  Perhaps the vision fast marked the achievement of enough preparation that I could really let myself dissolve. As I said above, dissolution is not for the faint of heart; it takes a ton of courage to let yourself dissolve and it is absolutely scary because the ground you are standing on doesn’t feel solid at all—at least that was my experience.

I started to have memories of repressed trauma from my childhood.  I read like crazy about childhood trauma, and all of a sudden my life started to make sense. That was the good news.  The bad news was how incredibly painful this all was—another hallmark of dissolution, I suspect.

I was in school—sort of.  Academically, it was really easy for me, which was a good thing, because I got into this rhythm where I would go to classes, do the minimum reading required, go to my placement and spend the rest of my time working on my own issues.  Then a month or a few weeks before the end of the semester, I’d shut down my dissolution and make sure I wrote the papers for the courses.  I’d abort my dissolution, because I couldn’t write papers and do the dissolution—it was one or the other.

For a while I lived in a trailer adjacent to the National Forest.  I’d spend evenings either working on my childhood trauma or dancing to the Talking Heads, and every morning I’d hop the fence with my drum, find a spot to sit amongst the sage and pray to the four directions and pour out my heart.  Not so different than what I do now, only I use my Jewish heritage to call in the spirits of the four directions and I call my praying hitbodedut following the practice of Nahman of Bratzlav.  At the time, I had never heard of hitbodedut.  

By the time I was ready to graduate from school, I no longer felt as empty as I had when I came to New Mexico.  I’d gone through enough dissolution and done enough praying, that I knew that I wanted to return to a lusher Continental Climate with trees and grass and rivers, take my place as a social worker making a difference for kids and I sort of knew that I needed to find my way back to a different kind of Judaism, though I really couldn’t articulate what that meant at all.

In hindsight, I wasn’t as ready to end my dissolution as I thought I was.  Certainly my phase of intense dissolution was over, but I have short circuited my dissolutions probably both because they are really hard, and because I wanted to be settled and grounded, even if I wasn’t fully ready.  While I have gone through other periods of dissolution, as Plotkin says, none are nearly as intense as that first period of dissolution. If I had known about Plotkin back then (this was 1990) and had he come up with the model of the Journey to Soul Initiation (which he had not yet), I would have realized that I was making plans prematurely, that I didn’t get know who I truly was or why I was born in this place at this time. I didn’t have a vision of my true purpose and I didn’t have a mythopoetic identity.  I might have stayed in New Mexico to dissolve a bit further and to enter the bottom of the soul canyon without disrupting my life as much as my move did.  But I felt ready to be someplace wetter, greener, a place I could call home.  I will pick up the story after I discuss the Soul Encounter in the next blog post.