Our cultural unraveling is autophagy for us.

Autophagy is normal, natural, necessary, beneficial, and can be very uncomfortable.

"Autophagy (“ah-TAH-fah-gee”) is your body’s process of reusing old and damaged cell parts. Each cell contains multiple parts that keep it functioning. Over time, these parts can become defective or stop working. They become litter, or junk, inside an otherwise healthy cell.

“Autophagy is your body’s cellular recycling system. It allows a cell to disassemble its junk parts and repurpose the salvageable bits and pieces into new, usable cell parts. A cell can discard the parts it doesn’t need.

“Autophagy is also quality control for your cells. Too many junk components in a cell take up space and can slow or prevent a cell from functioning correctly. Autophagy remakes the clutter into the selected cell components you need, optimizing your cells’ performance. 

“Autophagy is essential for a cell to survive and function. It:

~ Recycles damaged cell parts into fully functioning cell parts.

~ Gets rid of nonfunctional cell parts that take up space and slow performance.

~ Destroys pathogens in a cell that can damage it, like viruses and bacteria.”

A very important process, right?

Can you see the parallels between this process in your physical body and the process we’re going through now in our cultural “body”?

Julie Krull wrote about the correlation between her autophagy experience during a fast and what our culture and civilization is being asked (required?) to do now:

“This is not about deprivation. It’s about discernment.

“The old leadership model says: Do more. Say yes. Increase capacity. Optimize harder.

“Health, clarity, and coherence emerge when we stop feeding what no longer serves.

“While nothing impressive is happening on the outside — no heroic workout, no

productivity marathon — your body is quietly:

~ Clearing damaged cells

~ Repairing DNA

~ Rebalancing immune function

~ Resetting metabolic memory

~ Reorganizing your internal chemistry

“The dark, uncomfortable middle days were not pathology. They were a transition.

My old fuel sources were being withdrawn. My nervous system was learning a new

rhythm. My body was switching operating systems.” (Emphasis mine)

“Most of our breakdowns are not caused by lack of intelligence, talent, or strategy.

“They are caused by:

~ Constant interference

~ Chronic overfeeding of broken systems

~ Fear-driven micromanagement

~ An inability to tolerate discomfort during transition

“. . . living systems — including teams, movements, and cultures — have a profound

capacity to self-correct when the conditions are right.

“Autophagy for civilization is not about destruction.

“It is about intelligent removal of what no longer serves. (Emphasis mine)

“It is allowing a system to say:

“We can’t carry everything forward.

“And we don’t need to.” (Emphasis mine)

This unraveling and autophagy process is giving us a chance to transform our P.I.E. (predatory, invasive, extractive) culture by allowing our illusions and our cherished, but erroneous and dysfunctional, beliefs to dissolve.

This is necessary to make room for the life we want, and we need to grieve what’s leaving to make room for what’s next. I’ll say more about this process in another post.