The art of breaking

Every time we use our muscles, there’s a complicated process of tearing down and rebuilding going on. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics, only that our bodies grow and develop through a constant process of destruction. I’ve had conversations on and offline with other people, Druids especially, about the importance of breaking in other ways too. You can’t build a new way of living, seeing and being without breaking the old one.

From a training perspective, the easiest way to get rid of old ingrained habits / conditioning is to simply train yourself into a new set and replace them. Old behaviours disappear, but if the ideas, feelings and beliefs that gave them sense are all still hanging around, it can get messy. New behaviour plus old thoughts equals total chaos.

I’ve learned to see breaking as a helpful thing more than a fearful one, but this has taken practice, and the practice has been messy. I remember the fear I felt knowing that I was not going to be able to hold together, that emotionally and mentally I was falling apart. I also remember the words of the dear friend who gently explained to me that I was going to have to do it, that my whole sense of self and world view were in such a mess that the only way to heal required me to first break down the old. It hurt like hell, but I walked through it, crawled my way back and started the rebuild.

I know there are more coming. We did a little experiment last week. I drew my body shape. Tom drew my body shape. They clearly weren’t the same person. I had a strange experience which triggered it, seeing myself by accident and thinking I was seeing a fairly slim person, realising it was me and watching the reflection become fat. My body image is clearly not the same as how Tom sees me, and I need to deliberately break the beliefs that are making me see myself in certain ways. I’m going into that one voluntarily.

I can see other things ahead that are going to be emotionally intense, and bound to take me down into the darkest places in my own mind. I fear this. I fear the inevitable pain. I also know that trying to protect myself by not facing it will hurt a lot more in the longer term. There are things that have to happen. Only when the egg cracks can the chick emerge. Only when the seed splits open is there a new shoot. Birth is never clean, tidy, or painless. Mending broken things is a bloody, visceral sort of process. Healing hurts. Dead things coming back to life always hurt. (bonus points if you can place the quote). I’ve spent time in the numb, dead place that is depression, and I know that however bad it is feeling pain, not feeling pain is one hell of a lot worse. Where there is pain, there is life. Not feeling, is hideous and whatever else happens, I am determined not to go back there.

So, as my muscle tissues break and reshape, so does my mind, and my whole emotional system, which is also innately biological. I break to rebuild, I look round for examples of how this works other places in nature, and I am hugely grateful to the people who have helped me get through.