Shamanic Dismemberment, or an Ode to My Father

A little over two years have passed since the day my father died. I won’t go into how he passed, but I love my father deeply, and his death was the most devastating, painful loss I have ever experienced. Grief, and the inability to look away from the inevitability of death, became constants in my life.

When I say Grief, I do not invoke an image of sobbing, protest, and anguish (although I definitely have had those moments). With the death of my father, I could finally understand that Grief was a pathway—a pathway to seeing clearly, to becoming fully alive, and, in terms of my own spiritual journey, a pathway to oneness, light, and looking beyond the illusion of this reality.

While in a temazcal in Mexico, I journeyed to the desert, asking my ancestors to show me what I needed to see and understand. In the midst of arid dust devils, my father appeared to me in the form in which he died—a weakened, ill man in his seventies. But he looked me in the face and angrily said, “Felicia—you have to stop thinking about me like this! It’s just death! It’s just death!”

When he said that, his skin started to melt off his body, flowing downward until it merged with the dust. The bones of his skeleton likewise began to dissolve into dust, until all that remained of him was his spirit, glowing like a luminous ball of light. Suddenly, the same thing happened to me—my flesh and bones dissolved into nothing until I, too, was existing as pure spirit, pure light. Our light spirits danced together under the setting sun. While in a trance, my father showed me what I intellectually understood but had a hard time emotionally and spiritually grasping: that death is merely an ending of the physical body and a reconnection to divinity, love, and our inherent spiritual expansion. We are everything, everywhere, all at once (yes, like the multiverse of the movie).

In order to begin anew, sometimes we need to be totally dismantled, almost torn apart—so that it becomes impossible to go back to what we once were. In ancient shamanic terms, what I experienced in my journey is referred to as shamanic dismemberment.

Shamanic dismemberment is the symbolic ritual of death (often by destructive or violent means), spiritual cleansing, and the realignment of the new spiritual body. Dismemberment often occurs during or after a great personal crisis. This unraveling is necessary, however, to reassemble into a purified, healing self that is open and clear, and in connection with the oneness of the universe. I say oneness, but one could also say God, Goddess, the Creator, el Gran Espíritu, Spirit, Nature, Mother Earth—whatever word resonates strongly in your throat. And this state, in shamanic terms, is referred to as transfiguration.

In Jungian psychology, the concepts of dismemberment and transfiguration are referred to as the process of mortificatio (ego death), access to the collective unconscious, and integration. This integration, both in psychology and shamanism, is symbolic of coming more fully into your own power, of standing in pure energy and vitality, and of releasing old belief systems, ancestral patterns, and traumas that were creating stagnation.

Over this past summer, we witnessed numerous disruptive shifts that resemble dismemberment and elicit tremendous grief—both personal and existential. Madre Tierra is showing us this, reflecting back the years of violence that we as humans have inflicted upon her. It is so hard for us to remember that she birthed us, that we are a part of her—and what she goes through, we all go through on some level. The flooding in Nepal, the earthquakes and tsunamis, the prioritization of data centers over human access to food and water, the slaughtering of horses, the massive heat waves all around the globe. We are all witnessing and experiencing the dismemberment of our beautiful Earth.

And perhaps this is where my father’s message returns to me: It’s just death. Not as a dismissal of suffering, but as a reminder that death and dissolution are part of a larger cycle. The body changes. What we thought was permanent falls apart. What we believed we were dissolves. And somewhere within that dissolution, something else becomes visible. My father had to leave his physical body for me to encounter him in another form. In the desert, his flesh became dust, and the dust became light.

We must not turn away from the dismemberment we are witnessing in ourselves, in one another, or in Mother Earth. Grief pulls us to stay present with these changes—to grieve what is being lost without becoming lost ourselves. To allow the old forms to die while remaining open to what will emerge. This is the paradox of dismemberment: it can feel like annihilation, but it can also be an initiation. We are broken open so that we can become more deeply connected to who—and what—we have always been.

This was a part of my father’s message in the desert—nothing is truly separate. We came from the earth and we return to the earth. We dissolve because we are a part of something much, much bigger than our individual form. And so while I deeply miss my father, I continue to carry the gifts of Grief and Death and the importance of his message. Grief is not just mourning— it is remembrance, an awareness, it is the pathway to what becomes possible when we stop resisting the fact that everything changes, that death is constant.

Death and dismemberment show us that underneath the flesh and bones, underneath our old stories and traumas, we have always been and always will be light.