The Art of Transformation

Understanding Destruction as a Catalyst to Creation

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

This is the tenth of a series called Midnight Medicine which will be released weekly. To see the other posts in the series, follow this link.

In 2015, I was on a tour in India with a crew of spiritual seekers. We spent the first day wandering through the markets of Calcutta, and one of the women on the tour came back from the market with a necklace of carved wooden skulls. 

It was not exactly pretty. 

I asked her about it out of curiosity, and she said that to wear the necklace was to invite the Hindu goddess Kali—the goddess of destruction—into your life to destroy whatever needs to be removed. Through destruction, you make room for what comes next. 

At the time, it seemed like such a startling idea to consciously invite destruction into my life. Though I didn’t exactly feel excited about the idea, it felt important. 

In India, destruction and creation are all around. One of our first stops was Varanasi, a holy city known for its crematorial grounds right along the Ganges River. In Varanasi, life and death are not separated the way they are in the West. You are never far from the awareness that one does not happen without the other. The smoke and the smell from the burning grounds drifts through the air day and night. The wood is piled up for blocks around the burning grounds, towering over tourists and residents as they move through that part of the city. Death is right there in the middle of life teeming around it. 

When someone dies, their family pays for wood for the cremation. Sometimes the family pays for the entirety of the amount of wood necessary to burn the body completely. More often, the wood simply costs too much, and the family will pay for just enough. The burning happens while the men of the family look on; women are no longer allowed to stand near the pyre. In the past, wives and mourning mothers have thrown themselves on the flames in pursuit of their loved ones. So the men stand around, watching as the smoke and fire take their dead into the other world while the women watch from a distance. When the body has been consumed by the flame, the ashes are pushed toward the river, where they can drift back into the flow of life.  

All of this happens all day and all night. The crematorium typically processes around 150 bodies per day. Relatives will pay homage to the river for taking their loved one by putting in an offering, a small basket made of palm leaf or, in some cases, tin, filled with flowers and a small wax candle. Floating lights dot the river. Every night the river is thanked with a fire ceremony for its part in the cycle of life.

And right there on the banks of the burning grounds, at the same time that the fires are burning and the loved ones are mourning, you’ll see men panning in the blackened waters of the river, backs bent over their task, ashes swirling around their feet. They are panning for gold left behind from the teeth and fillings of the deceased. 

This is a little bit startling for us to think about—panning for gold in the ashes of the bodies that have just burned.

But they are creating from destruction.

The money they garner from the gold will feed them and their families and flow into the towns in which they live.

This is the cycle of life—both creation and destruction go hand in hand. You don’t have one without the other. As Indian novelist Amish Tripathi wrote, “Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.”

But destruction is not exactly fun. 

Let’s look at the Hindu goddess Kali. There are many stories and versions about how Kali was born in battle. The Hindu Goddess Durga had created Parvati—a beautiful and composed goddess—into battle to help suppress the demons. Parvati was in the midst of a fierce battle with several other gods and goddesses. They were losing because they were fighting a particular demon who, every time he sustained a cut, just spawned more of himself. As soon as his blood hit the ground, more demons like him would sprout out of every single droplet. Parvati and the others fighting with her couldn’t slay any of these demon baddies because they would only multiply. They were overrun. 

Parvati furrowed her brow in anger and Kali, a new facet of feminine fierceness and wrath, sprang forth from her and went into battle in a frenzy. Kali is so quick and so angry that every sword cut she makes against the ever-multiplying demon is so fast that she catches every droplet with her blade before the pieces of the demon fall to the ground. Eventually, she decapitates the demons and, as some stories go, eats their heads with her enormous mouth.

She is quick enough to dispatch the demon, but by the time her work is done, she is in such a violent blood frenzy that she cannot (or will not) stop. She is consumed by her own power and has lost control. The other gods and goddesses see this and understand that if she keeps going, she will kill everyone in her path. They realize that they have unleashed an incredible storm of destruction that might end the world.

Nothing will stop her… except for her consort Shiva (yes, she already has her consort even though she has just sprung from the third eye of another goddess). Shiva is the god of creation (and also the god of destruction, depending on the moment you catch him). He sees the incredible death Kali is inflicting and throws himself down directly in front of her—sacrificing himself. Just as she is about to step on his body to take his life, she realizes who he is when she feels his godly, masculine energy. She finally stops her killing spree. 

Destruction is scary. We don’t know what’s on the other side when we start on this path. It has a domino effect—once it starts, it’s difficult to stop. 

In late 2015, just nine months after this trip to India, I found out I was pregnant. My partner and I loved each other but we had only been together for six months, so this was a bit of a shock. What was even more shocking was how terrible I felt—tired, anxious, so emotional that I could barely keep it together. The theme of Kali and her energy was still with me. Maybe it’s time for a little intentional destruction, I thought to myself. So, I started taking apart my life, shutting down client projects here and there, cleaning up loose ends, trying to prepare my life for a baby. It felt so great— here I was living out my ideas in neat, controlled little bits. 

Life had other ideas. The destruction came in hot and heavy… first, my partner’s sudden and unexpected job loss, which was the main source of our income at the time, then the need to move immediately after, and then the questioning of the relationship itself. It didn’t help that I was already a hormonal emotional wreck—after the train of destruction rolled in, I felt bat-shit crazy. At some point, I thought that you could invite destruction, but you might not get to decide how it unfolds. 

We don’t have a healthy acceptance of destruction. We focus on the new, shiny, the exciting, at the cost of all else. We like only to talk about growth but we hate the thought of decay, of destruction. But what makes it even harder is that our culture has decided that destruction means failure. It’s easy to see this everywhere. You can see it in our economy, which we prop up with ever-more crazy measures to prevent a crash that is, no matter what we do, still inevitable. A job loss isn’t just a change of opportunity; it becomes a mark on your abilities as a person, a reason to doubt yourself. Questioning a relationship isn’t a healthy and necessary reassessment of where you are and whether you can make it work together; it becomes some kind of stain on society, just another potentially broken home, never mind the possibility that it might be a better scenario for all involved. Leaving a job under less than favorable circumstances is an embarrassing thing to admit, something to be kept hush-hush, not a new beginning. 

Although it was painful, all of that destruction truly was necessary for all of the good things that were to come. In the end, we moved and established a new life in a place that we loved. Ryan started a new company that helped support our family for years, and I dove head-first into my work and created a business that supported some amazing authors and writers and generated a few incredible books. And we stayed together. As painful as it was, all of the “burning down” was necessary for what came next.  

Pablo Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” We must first allow the destruction of what no longer serves us before we can cultivate and create what does.