Recently I dreamed of a young woman who was having a conversation with the director a mortuary. She was planning her funeral. She told the director, “I’d like to be dismembered. Cut off my arms and legs and head and then cut my torso into sections. Place all that on a funeral pyre and set it on fire.” She continued, “I want my family and friends to be part of this ceremony by observing it.” I’m thinking that such a dismemberment will be painful. As I am thinking this the funeral director, as if reading my thoughts, says, “we will give her injections of medicine. She won’t feel a thing.” I then think how painful it will be for family and friends, especially her mother, to witness such a dismemberment and creation ceremony.
While this dream can certainly reflect my own dismemberment and transformation, death and rebirth process, it reminds me of the shamanic practice of dismemberment and a reminder that we are all going through a dismemberment at this time. In the shamanic traditions, after the dismemberment, we are re-membered, put back together into a new form. This “re-membering” is the co-creative process with Spirit that we are currently in. Perhaps the dream suggests that if we can step into this dismemberment process with some choice, willingness and consciousness, it won’t be as painful as it might be if it is thrust upon us unconsciously. I have written about this in a previous post. Since dismemberment was the subject of this recent dream, perhaps the unconscious has called me to visit the previous post. You can access that post here.
A Modern Day Dismemberment
Currently we are in the midst of the dismantling of a system. In fact, I would say that we are undergoing the dismantling of several systems—a political system, a governmental system, and a cultural system to mention a few. The disassembling of these systems is throwing many of us into personal crises—affecting some more directly than others. From the shaman’s point of view, we are undergoing collective and personal dismemberments.