or “The little death” for the non-French speaking among us, is a moment of transience and melancholy, a strange kind of clarity, emptiness and stillness far less macabre than the term suggests and far more macabre on personal level than the death of the body. It’s a glimpse of endings or sorrow accompanying them, equally applicable to awakenings and loss of consciousness during fainting or falling asleep as well as to a great surge of life force expulsion like an orgasm or achieving a goal. It is an emotional landscape of death and finality and a necessity to be experienced.

La petite mort is what in a way happens when we change and mutate, when we have a breakdown of one sort of another due to the dissonance that hit the cornerstones of the psyche so hard that they cannot be ignored anymore. Reverting to your former ignorant self after what you have understood now is impossible. Once the information changed the very fundaments on which you’ve built your mental or emotional existence on the burden, guilt and shame of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change. Breakdown, disassociation, dissipation and the rummage left after are completely equal to a breakthrough by their emotional force and they are one and the same. Our response to them is only defined by the virtual reality of language we choose to depict them in. Lasting change comes only if you die a little to the previous form of yourself you so strongly identified with. It really does feel like dying once you see the old habits and patterns exposed for what they are. You find yourself in the infinite white space where the you that can now be reborn after having gone through the pain of this petit mort is free to choose who it will be. It is a scary moment because you don’t yet know who you are, and if you are not who you believed you were up to now how can you orient yourself in the world and react to it without a set of values and stories to hold on to.

Most of the crucial changes we’ve ever undergone were never the romantic “I’m slowly figuring it out and then effortlessly warping into 2.0. me”. They were cruel massacres including readiness to sacrifice and let parts of yourself that are no longer useful or good or downright harm you, even if you hedonistically indulge in them, flat out die. The process is experienced as a real sense of something being lost, because it was. And that is a good thing. You don’t refine the self by piling on more layers. The process of coming into yourself is pealing of the unnecessary. You know that voice, the internal quiet judge that just looks at what you do and whispers “You don’t really believe this anymore, you are faking it, this is not how you really feel, you’re doing this for attention, you don’t care about this issue, you’re not fully present in this…”? This voice is the precursor of the petit mort coming and it will get louder, or you’ll continue to ignore it and forever stay the same because evolving is difficult. You’re not the story, you’re not this circumstance, this situation or any particular emotion that arises, you’re not the crowd you hang with, the family or community you were born into, your habits or background. It’s all changeable… if you’re willing to die a little first.