Pulling back the veil on our illusions, delusions, and other enchantments.

I’ve had my personal version of a life-changing, deep disillusionment.

We’re in the chrysalis, in a VERY challenging and transformative passage, with real life and aliveness possible on the other side. I’ve walked, and continue to walk, that journey and know that territory personally.

The cultural paradigm I grew up in was very traditional, competitive, judgmental, right-wrong, external-authority, masculine/patriarchy-based. Growing up, I didn’t question it. I just took it as the way things were and how they had to be. I dealt with it by going full-on into high achieving mode through my school years, competing to be “better than” and “superior to” everyone and everything I could. I went to college, got married and assumed we would have a “happy ever after” life. We had our son and bought our first home. After seven years, it was clear to me that our marriage wasn’t working and we divorced.

A year or two later, I had a life-changing, deep disillusionment about all of that. My brother was marrying his finance in the small rural town where we grew up in the same church where I had been married nine years earlier. When the wedding march started playing and his bride come up the aisle, like I had done nine years earlier, I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut and knocked all the wind out of me. When the ceremony was over, my uncle, who was sitting next to me, thankfully had the emotional awareness and skill to know something was going on. He guided me to an empty room and started humming the wedding march to help me process whatever it was.

I sobbed, raged, screamed, and stomped. I was so angry! I was not only furious, I felt absolutely devastated! I kept saying, “They promised! They lied to me! They told me if I followed the rules, did it perfectly and was the best, superior, that I’d have a happy life and be happy ever after. I did it all right, and I was superior! They’re WRONG!!! They lied! I was betrayed! None of it is true! It’s all a lie!”

I was totally disillusioned about the whole paradigm I’d been raised in, which said, “The external authorities know best, they know what to do, how to do it and what you’re supposed to do, so if you jump through all the hoops, do everything right, and follow all the rules, then life will be happy ever after.” It had NOT been happy ever after. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Once I knew how false that whole belief system and paradigm was, I couldn’t unknow it.  

That paradigm cracking open was liberating and life-changing, and has informed the rest of my life ever since then. I couldn’t go back there, and I didn’t want to. It put me on my spiritual path, a soul-led journey of seeking what was real, fumbling and bumbling my way along, learning as I went, with many more years of experiences that are still continuing.  It has not been a walk in the park, and it has been life-giving with realness and aliveness, which I wouldn’t trade for anything.

As I see it, the collective cultural lies and betrayals we’re dealing with now are a larger version of my experience. My individual disillusionment was a microcosm of that when I realized “This is NOT ‘the way things are’ and it’s NOT ‘how things work’.”

Does this feel or sound or look familiar to you? I’d love to hear about it. Hit reply and let me know.

We’re in the chrysalis, and many of our beliefs, expectations, and assumptions are dissolving and turning into caterpillar soup/goo in order to nourish the imaginal cells of the “butterfly” of a new life-centered culture and world. This gives me hope.

I regret I don’t have the name of the artist or source of this wonderful graphic, so I can’t gratefully acknowledge their creativity and skill.