Road Map of a Soul Crisis

27 Jul

A guide through the challenges that turn into a door to your Soul

PHASE 1

The Crumbling

You got here by chance, by an event, an illness, a loss, a bereavement, a bankruptcy, a breakdown.

You are at this point not by conscious choice. You find yourself in it and you are not happy about it.

You feel betrayed, in pain, shattered, bullied, exhausted. You feel broken into a thousand pieces and none of them looks like you. More often than not you burst into tears. So much pain, sadness, grief, anger, pouring out of you and you think you are going mad.

The Crumbling feels like a punishment and you ask "Why? Why is this happening to me?" and the silence of the answer is deafening.

You feel lost and hopeless and you wonder what's the point of living? The darkness is real and thick. The body is a source of pain, heaviness, anxiety, doom, there's no joy anywhere.

PHASE 2

The Shedding

You start looking for help and accepting it when it comes your way.

Some days start to feel a bit more bearable and there's a flickering light of hope showing up now and then. At times you start feeling you are back on track, you can resume your life as it was before, but you know it's impossible. Something has cracked and it will never go back to the way it was.

The body feels achy, tired, in pain, but in a way that is more solid, less all-encompassing, and more punctual — moving through different parts of the body. Old wounds resurface, on a body level and on a soul level. The sorrows, trauma, griefs that have been left unattended, all come to visit and say hello.It feels as if someone is pouring salt on a wound, it seems like a cruel joke, it feels unfair.

In that moment you have two choices: 1) fighting, pushing through, conquering the mountain with sheer willpower, anger and strength; 2) surrendering in acceptance of what is and start observing the situation and yourselves with compassionate curiosity.

Most of the time you alternate between the two, but in this phase you still mainly choose to fight, because you know how to, it feels familiar.

You still try one last attempt at keeping the old life alive, preferring to hide from the hard truth that your old life is no longer there, because your Soul has already chosen to expand and needs a different setting.

PHASE 3

Surrendering

At some point — after a lot of back and forth — surrendering becomes the only viable option.

You are so tired and fed up of constantly bullying yourselves into being different from who you are at this moment, that you surrender. You stop fighting with life, you stop arguing with yourself whether you made the right choices, and you stop playing the movie of how things would have been so much better if only you were different, if only you were better, more decisive, more courageous, more beautiful, more unafraid.

At the beginning of the Surrendering phase, you don't stop because you choose to; you surrender because not doing it is more painful. The inner battle and constant criticism are so painful that the void of not knowing what to do after all the shedding feels like a safer risk than the certainty of hurt from constantly rejecting yourself.

The body feels achy, as if you had been walking barefoot in the desert and across mountains for weeks, months, years and now you have finally arrived. You can't relax, it feels almost unsafe, yet you crave it so much. Emotions move through your body like waves, you might feel unwell like with flu. At this point your body is taking over and forcing you to rest, whether you like it or not.

When you surrender there is a double inner movement — a soft release and a lifting upward. A void makes space within — it's beautiful, scary and uncharted.

If you are not fighting, what do you do with yourself — what is the direction? If you are not forcing yourself to be in a certain way, how do you choose things, how do you know what you like and want, how do you find your way?

PHASE 4

The Allowing

If the Surrendering often looks like giving in, the Allowing resembles more the decision to have a picnic at the side of the road when the car breaks down.

The Allowing looks like putting one foot in front of the other, no matter what.

You don't feel the pathway, but you feel your feet and, hurt or not, you carry on — but not with pushing through. You move along, you show up, you respond to life.

And when you can't trust your feet, you become still, attentive and you breathe until you feel the inner movement moving you from the inside.

On a body level, there are two opposite feelings — a level of extreme focus, presence, that you never experienced before, and at times you are still feeling very tired, not moving, empty.

You might feel in need of a lot of rest, sleep, more alone time. Your body is releasing and recovering after holding tension and being on guard for so long. You might want to spend time in nature, in silence, talking very little or nothing at all; you might want to withdraw as you heal.

There is more trust, but not in a goal, purpose, or destiny — there is more trust in the inner movement. You are slowly becoming you.

The journey you have travelled so far has been courageous and brave; you have always chosen the heart — your heart — at every turn. You have grown so much.

You have strength, resilience, patience, softness, love that before were trapped under layers of armouring, and now they are just easily flowing out of you.

It's time now that you celebrate where you have come to.

You have unlocked so much wisdom, that now you will slowly make available to others. You are loved and you can feel it.

This map describes the four phases people often move through during a soul crisis. These phases are not strictly linear. It is common to move back and forth between them, sometimes returning to an earlier phase before moving forward again. There is no "correct" pace — the time each phase takes is different for everyone.

Wherever you find yourself on this map today, you are not doing it wrong.

Each phase is part of the same journey home to yourself.

Maddalena Rodolfi

Maddalena Rodolfi