fragile (adj.) from Latin fragilis “easily broken,” from root of frangere “to break”
Big spiritual processes are often predisposed to break you down. Especially in Kundalini Awakening.
They need to break down your identity, your attachments, your ideas of how things should be, your expectations, your identification with the past or the future. Something else wants to birth through you, and ‘you’ need to make space for that. These things are in the way and would stop this birth from happening.
Sometimes the breakdown is an easy or mild one, where your life continues uninterrupted.
Sometimes the breakdown process is like an avalanche, an enormous, momentous pressure that takes everything out, exhausts you, reduces your capacity to run your life, or asks you to take time off from life.
Sometimes it strips you of your ability to participate, leaves you exhausted or in a variety of altered states that don’t get recognized as altered states, but are labeled as ‘something is wrong’.
Our personality, our identity will always resist being broken down. Unless you have cultivated a relationship with this experience of being broken down, you will resent and fight the breakdown process. Unless you can identify something meaningful in what is trying to happen you will struggle, fight and hate – it is OK to fight and hate, that is normal.
At some point in time, you will recognize that what is being asked of you is to surrender.
Once you have reached surrender, whether as an active choice or when you had no choice left, and you have been broken down, and transformation is underway, change happens at every level of your being – you will find yourself in the state that I call fragile.
Fragile as a part of spiritual transformation is an important and sacred state of being.
We neither understand nor value it in our spiritual process. We call it “wrong” rather than sacred.
Not understanding fragility can cause you a lot of suffering.
Fragile is the point between being broken down and emergence. It is the liminal space between the two.
Fragile is the place where the deepest and most sacred transformation is happening because it is the only place where it can happen.
Being fragile in a fragile state is like being in a pause, the pause between two enormous geological processes – the first a breaking down, the second a rising up.
In the same way that the earth has broken down its mountains into the sand, it then raises them back up as a continental uplift. And in between, there is a pause.
We are the same.
When I have been in this place, I quickly recognize it, and I find myself saying, “Oh, I am fragile right now” and I feel that what remains functional in my system is so minimal and shaky – the subtlest organization remains, all else is in flux, no longer solid.
What is happening in that flux is important to my destiny and future, it is my job to protect it. To take care of my fragility while that transformation takes place. While I am liquified inside.
In states of deep fragility, in the most profound transformations of my life, I feel like I cannot cope, at times, with the energy of anyone else. I cannot go to the supermarket. I don’t want to go outside. Even the energy outside is too much. I have to stay in, and be humbled, low, still, be nothing.
If I put any pressure on my system in this phase, I will break – my system will break. It has left very little available to me to protect itself, or maintain itself while something sacred is happening on the inside. The most important thing I can do is give it the space it needs, and protect myself.
Because something sacred is going on, if I put pressure on my system when it is fragile I will get emotional, stressed, and unable to cope because all my resilience is in use elsewhere. I risk harming, and disconcerting the very powerful inner transformation that is taking place. This is a time for me to be away from the world and unavailable to it.
Even inside the fragile states, there are flirts and signals of what is being birthed, deep peace, glimpses of profound calm, moments of high awareness or intelligence. Reminders of things I am becoming, they speak to me and continue to allow the trusting that even though my primary way of being in the world is unavailable, it will return.
This is a time of trust and faith and surrender.
At some point in the fragile phase, I begin to sense, inside the liminal mush of being nothing, the new is beginning to take form and structure. Parts of me begin to feel solid and organized. A battery starts to recharge.
This is when I feel the other side.
The cells are reorganizing.
When that gets enough energy, emergence will begin. I will emerge from the fragile state. Energy will suddenly return. Capacity and functionality will come back online, and I will begin to engage with myself and life again.
Emergence is amazing because I get to discover what I have become and what has grown in this life and this being. I get to see how reasoning has expanded, consciousness is more available, spaces are filled. The way I discover this, the way I go about my life, discovering new capacities, powers, strengths and new wisdom that was not there before.
Wisdom I did nothing to earn except to be willing to be fragile, broken down, and allow myself to emerge.
It is not fun to be broken down, there are times I wish I could change my destiny and walk a different path for sure, but when I unfurl those butterfly wings and find I can fly in a whole new way, I find that being fragile was worth it.
This gift of flight would not be possible without that pupae phase.
I have become an expert in this cycle. Most of the time they are small, but recently in this moment of writing it is enormous.
I know that what will unfurl from this is less about who I am, than about who I am to serve. All the gifts of consciousness that will burst through the door of fragility will be to serve others, and so it is for you on your awakening journey.
How does fragile speak to you or show up in your own spiritual transformation? Have you befriended her? What has she gifted? Please share your reflections in the comments below.
Read Part 2 and Part 3 of the Fragile blog series also here.
10 Comments
Oh Myree, thank you for mapping this for me. I realise now that this is what I have referred to as “bedrock”. Times when due to transformation and growth (often in times I’ve also had to expand a great deal of energy advocating or battling against other forces), I’ve come to a point where I have had to rest on bedrock where it is calm, quiet, solid and holding. At bedrock I am able to then rest, transform (as if in a cocoon) and wait for my energy and resources to build back up again so that I can step into the world.
More recently I’m aware that I’ve had to push through this time given the demands of work and family. As I type I’m more aware that because I haven’t allowed myself time on bedrock, I am continually pushing myself to the edge of burn out.
I am curious if you have some strategies and processes that may support this process when we don’t have the ability to step away from the demands as much as we’d like? My system is crying out for some time alone – a week or 4 but that seems to have an expense to others that seems to great to be able to honour.
Much love to your healing, transformation and rejuvenation processes.
xx
Thank you for your description of bedrock dearest Joelene, I can so relate to this. It sounds like you have excavated and know this place well. I love and appreciate your questions about how to allow bedrock while in the midst of daily life and supporting others. In some part it is up to the intensity of the process itself. Some fragile processes have no option but to fully stop even if you do not want to stop, you are totally stopped. Angela wrote of this here in another comment. I sense it really requires you to deeply relate to the fragile process and what it needs and negotiating with it, and again this is only possible if it is not the true bedrock stop I talk about above. Curiosity and dedication: How to connect and find what the fragile process truly needs and then give it to yourself and the process in manageable doses. Ideally if this is possible then the big collapse of fragile may never be necessary.
Big love!
Dear Myree,
Such a helpful and moving post and so aligned with what I have felt but been unable to name or fully recognize through different stages of Kundalini. A very welcome encouragement to lean into and to allow the fragility, to make room for it, and to honor it. I am finding myself in a fragile state after having had covid and have been trying to just allow the rest and space you have described and to release the resistance and the fighting to need to do and function normally. I have come to see how I actually really needed to slow down and how the slowing down is now allowing me more room to process and to come back to center. I am catching up on sacred sensitivity and feeling more peace in my system to be able to be present with the teachings. Sending big hugs and wishing you a beautiful emergence.
Love, Angela
Oh I loved so much your reply dearest Angela, and how this article helped you give space to your own fragile process as a result of Covid recovery, and finishing the hidden gifts, treasures and what was most needed most deeply. I love how you became aware of the unmet need to slow down and be. Thank you so much for your openness and beautiful sharing. May fragile times when they arise, hopefully with big gaps, continue to be supportive of your most powerful and meaningful transformation.
Big love! Myree x
This was so soul soothing. From my heart to your heart. Thank you for taking the time to write this from your cocoon Myree.
Hugs Sandi x
Ohhh I am so glad it was soul soothing, thank you so much dearest Sandi!
Big love!
I love this Myree! And relate to this deeply. In my inner work over the last few months I have surrendered more and more to being in the totally (fragile) liquified state of my transformation. I was just googling the other day how a caterpillar becomes goo, her body dissolves, before restructuring into a new beautiful winged being and thought that’s me! Maybe some flirts of new structure being formed in my gooey chrysalis.
Ohhhh I so relate to the power of a butterfly metamorphoses too dearest Jess! I am fascinated by the liminal cells that hold the maps of what the mush will become and act upon the mush to call it into new form like a siren calling across the wild oceans to a new land awaiting. I send blessings to your gorgeous, ever so sacred mush and all that emerges from it.
This has helped in my understanding of where I am in the process immensely. After your class yesterday I was a little lost thinking I couldn’t even form a coherent question, but I knew I was where I was suppose to be. A place I could not name, until perhaps just now, reading your latest offering.
Thank you so much for taking on the task of being a guide for those of us hobbling around partly in the cocoon and partly out, not understanding what we are anymore. Fragile is such a delicate word-I love it.
Many blessings
Oh Dee Dee I am so glad this provided sweet and important mapping, I have been hobbling around too in moments in my own journey for sure!And thus so joyous to share my own hard earned insights and wisdom. I can feel you there, resting gently and deep in the crucible of fragile, of change and of wholeness. Big love!