Collapse as Initiation

and what mainstream resilience frameworks miss

A few weeks ago I wrote about collapse awareness in the body, how grief, exhaustion, and overwhelm live in our nervous systems and breath. Many of you wrote back, and 78 of you wonderful readers filled out the survey, sharing where collapse touches your lives and what you most long for.

What emerged was both beautiful and profound. For those who responded, collapse does not sit at the edges of awareness but threads through the marrow of daily life in how you parent, how you work, how you regulate your nervous system, how you seek meaning. Again and again, you spoke of longing for community, for being of service, for seeding hope, for bridging worlds, for embodying your unique purpose, and for a way of living closer to land and kin. And yet, just as often, there was a sense of carrying the burden alone, of it all being too much or too late. What many of you said you most wanted was connection: spaces of ritual and practice, of conversation and grief, and tools to help us stay with the overwhelm without turning away.

This is my fifth draft since that piece, as I’ve struggled to find the words for what wants to come next. In that time, a series of small events, coincidences, synchronicities, longings I could no longer ignore, all conspired to undo my careful mapping. They led me, slowly and then all at once, into surrender to what I have always known. What follows is my best attempt at capturing that…

For the past five years I have been studying how psychology might meet this moment. I have written tens of thousands of words in the form of my PhD thesis in search of an answer.

But the short answer is: it can’t.¹

What we are living through is larger than any clinical framework. It is more than an ecological crisis, though the burning forests and bleaching reefs remind us daily of the true scale of desecration. It is more than a political crisis, though our institutions are crumbling under corruption and exhaustion. What is undeniably upon us is an initiation into our very humanity.

Psychology, at its best, catalogues symptoms, teaches us skills for coping, helps us regain our footing. Collapse, however, does not simply knock us off balance. It shakes the ground on which balance was built. It loosens the weave of meaning itself, until even the assumptions we once lived by begin to dissolve. Collapse brings us close to annihilation, the unmaking of stories through which we have known ourselves, shaped our identities and imagined our futures. It strips us down until there is almost nothing left to cling to, then invites us to begin again.

The real question is whether we are willing to let collapse undo us. Whether we will surrender to being remade.

Descent is as old as life itself

When we look to the old myths, we see that times of collapse were never treated as problems to be solved but as thresholds to be crossed. Inanna was stripped bare at each gate, her crown and jewels and robes taken until nothing remained of her power or identity. Odin speared and hanged himself for nine nights on the world tree in order to be able to understand the runes. Persephone too was taken into the underworld, her descent marking the dying of the land, her return bringing its renewal.

Every culture carries this memory: that wisdom comes through sacrifice and surrender, through losing what once seemed indispensable, through the descent none of us would choose. Comfort is nice, but it does not lend to transformation. The path of wisdom is carved instead by loss, relinquishing control, and trusting that something waits on the other side of letting go.

Our present collapse is not an anomaly; it is an old pattern returning at a global scale. The dethroning of kings. The end of empires. The reminder that human beings are not the apex of life but part of a more-than-human web. subject to forces far older and larger than ourselves. This has always been the path.

Relinquishing the illusion of mastery

Here is where mainstream psychology drops the thread. As a handmaiden to industry and empire, the discipline excels at explaining behaviour, soothing distress, and restoring people to a state of functioning. Its orientation is always toward control, mastery, and adaptation. But collapse does not call for mastery. It calls us to release it. To hand the reins back to what is larger than us - the earth, the ancestors, the gods.

Mainstream models of resilience carry this same orientation into their methods. They encourage regulation, present-moment awareness, and coping practices that return us to productivity. Such tools keep us upright within the very system that is unravelling. And it is that system, with its fixation on control, growth, and efficiency, that has made us sick. Collapse will not be met by the same logic that brought us here.

Listening beyond ourselves

It is here that the mystical traditions pick up the thread. They remind us that initiation was never meant to be comfortable. They insist that meaning is discovered by entering into conversation with that which is beyond ourselves. They teach us to apprentice ourselves once again to the living world, the trees, rivers, stones, ancestors, who have always spoken, if only we are humble enough to ask.

I was deeply reminded of this just last week when receiving a tree reading from the inimitable

Katherine E. Standefer

, a shamanic practitioner based in the United States who I met here on Substack. In our session, she journeyed in vision to meet with a great grandfather gum tree outside my home. What he (the tree) had to say took me by surprise but also had me squirming in recognition.

He was kind but did not flatter. He told me that while my work might be worthwhile, it would never carry the potency I long for until I began to live it with my whole body. He said I must become “cold, wet and dirty.” He showed me the climate-controlled habits I had comfortably settled into: hours in the home office, heater humming at my side, coffee at hand. He held up a mirror to my domestication, to the way I had allowed the industrial world to buffer me from the raw elements of life. And he called it what it was - captivity.

“Those who wake others must live awake,” he told me. He reminded me that my voice is not mine alone, but carries on behalf of the voiceless: the trees, the rivers, the animals, the ancestors and the unborn.

His words reverberated in my mind in the days that followed, completely remapping my path. He made it plain that initiation need not arrive only in grand ceremonies in far off lands. It is possible also in small daily acts that strip away our insulation and remind us of our wildness. Even with small children in tow. Cold plunges that quicken the animal body. Short fasts that sharpen perception. Moments of solitude. Deep listening. Making offerings of thanks. These are not mere ascetic practices, but small gateways through which we remember our animality, our belonging and our vulnerability to the elements. Each discomfort and sacrifice loosens the industrial grip, clears out what is stagnant, and reawakens what is vital and human.

(If you’re interested in receiving your own tree reading from anywhere in the world, you can message

Katherine E. Standefer

on Substack. You can also read her gorgeous publication here:

The Wild and Holy Moment

.)

The possibility of regeneration

Collapse will do this to us collectively. It will force us into deprivation we did not choose, strip away comforts and securities that once seemed permanent. Doing it pre-emptively is an act of resilience, and within this stripping is an ancient possibility, the possibility of rebirth and regeneration.

Indigenous cultures have long carried the memory of devotion, rites, ritual, and reciprocity, despite centuries of colonisation that sought to erase them. Their survival and leadership matter profoundly now. Their traditions remind us that another way has always existed, rooted in kinship rather than individual mastery. And alongside this survival, something else is being woven: new threads stitched across places and lineages, fragile beginnings of a new culture that honours the earth’s aliveness.

Apprenticing to the mystery

The question before us is not when or whether collapse will come, it is already here. The question is how we will meet it. Will we scramble to preserve what is dying, or will we allow ourselves to be undone, to be apprenticed again to the mystery?

Shamanism, mysticism, the old ways of listening, are essential human capacities waiting to be remembered. For as long as there have been humans, cultures have turned to dreams, plants and to the guidance of ancestors and spirits. Collapse makes it clear that we cannot navigate this threshold by ourselves. The old strategies have failed. What remains is the path our ancestors always knew: to apprentice ourselves again to the more-than-human, to listen beyond the walls of the self.

If we can allow collapse to strip away our false sovereignty, something else becomes possible. Survival begins to take on the texture of kinship, and resilience deepens into reverence. We become a people who no longer crown themselves kings, but who take their place once more as kin among kin. Listening, devoted, awake.

My darling and her treasures. Photo Credit: Rose Jarman Photography

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I realise there has been a long time between publications lately. Please don’t mistake this for lack of devotion. Behind the scenes I have been listening closely - to your survey replies, to my family, to the trees outside my door, to the rhythms of my own body. Something is emerging, yes, but it won’t be a funnel or a slick launch. It will be slow and communal, with its own pulse of aliveness, arriving in the moment when the need is undeniable.

I don’t yet know the exact form. What I do know is that it will grow here, in the commons, through what we share and what we practise together. Your reflections matter. Your longings matter. The next step will become clear when the call itself speaks.

So tell me: what is resonating for you? What feels most alive in your own journey right now?

With warmth,

Gabrielle

1. Here I am speaking of psychology in its mainstream form, shaped largely by clinical, cognitive-behavioural, and biomedical paradigms. Depth psychology has long worked to bridge psyche and myth, to reintroduce archetype, imagination, and soul into psychological life (Jung, Hillman, Moore, among others). As well as ecopsychology, deep ecology, and related fields that have sought to place the human psyche back into conversation with the more-than-human world, reminding us that our suffering is not merely intrapsychic but also ecological, cultural, and spiritual. These traditions point toward a psychology that is less about individual adaptation and more about relationship, reciprocity, and initiation into wider patterns of life.