Illness as Initiation

I don’t believe all illness is psychosomatic in nature. I believe in germ theory, in random flukes with catastrophic consequences, that the body works in mysterious ways. But I do believe each encounter with the nature of the body is an invitation into something deeper. A new way of being. A threshold to cross. An integration, and initiation, asking to be witnessed.

This medical experience has been its own flavour of medicine. I sat across the zoom screen from a friend of mine, holding our shared infections as initiations between us, reflecting on this sacred space we have both found ourselves in. There’s something here.

I read while doing research into old beliefs around the body that sickness was once viewed as this threshold between what was and what will be, this sacred terrain that only exists when the nervous system feels safe enough to let go and reorganize. And while I don’t think the infection in my body began as some kind of emotional and spiritual integration process, I’d be missing the point if I didn’t see it as such.

Infections are invitations gets scrawled at the top of my journal page. What is here for me?

See as a society we love this clear story, this before and after, this return to normal. Like postpartum bodies, post surgical bodies are anointed with this idea of how fast can you return to what was?

What if I don’t want to go back? What if there is something here for me not on the other side of this illness, or in returning to the life I had before this illness, but in the depths of it?

Saying that out loud makes people uncomfortable, I tell another friend later that night as we chat on the phone while making dinner for our respective families. We’re not taught what to do when there is no over.

Initiations are messy, but they are also medicine.

I’ve been guilty myself of adopting this idea that I just need to get better. It’s been 6 weeks already, why am I not better? Shouldn’t I have integrated this new embodied reality by now, milked the medicine from the mire and transformed it into something worthy of sharing on the internet?

What if, instead of rushing through, we allowed the sacred a seat at the table?

There is something here, and I will not move from this place until it teaches me what I need to know.

What if instead of praising the bounce back we were the kind of people who witnessed one another, hands at your back?

you embodied the crossing of a major threshold. that takes time

I’m not saying I like it. I’m not saying it’s comfortable. But I am saying allowing the initiation to purge me has revealed truths I might not have found otherwise.

Initiations are moments where life breaks you open and demands a different version of you.They’re not chosen. They’re not aesthetic. And they’re rarely gentle.Traditionally they were held—by elders, ritual, community, land. Today, most of us are initiated alone, without language for what’s happening, and we call it trauma or “a hard season” instead of what it actually is: a threshold.