The Alchemy of Dismemberment

Last night, I woke up at 3:00 a.m., a strange restlessness sitting heavy in my chest. The kind that pulls you into the quiet hours and leaves you alone with your thoughts. I tried to will myself back to sleep, pressing my head deeper into the pillow, but the hours slipped away. By 5:30, the sky began to pale, the night surrendering to the day. I gave in, creeping downstairs for water and coffee, clutching their warmth like a lifeline as the cold air licked at my skin.

Outside, the thermometer read 10 degrees. Bone-chilling cold, I thought, the irony settling somewhere deep inside me.

I peeled back the hot tub cover halfway and slipped into the steaming water. The contrast—icy air, heated water—shocked my body awake, yet the steam wrapped around me like an ancient cocoon. As I sat there, something stirred within me—a memory, a calling. I remembered the dismemberment practice I had been invited to embody, a mythic ritual meant to strip away the layers of the self, to unmake and re-make who we are.

Closing my eyes, I surrendered to the practice. I envisioned holy oil, golden and glimmering, pouring down my body. It wasn’t ordinary oil—it was sacred, eternal, the kind spoken of in Vedic texts. As it soaked into my skin, it began to dissolve the layers of my physical being. My skin, my muscles, my organs—all of it melted away until only bones remained. I hovered there, suspended in the void, nothing but a skeleton held together by the tender threads of fascia and cartilage.

And then I saw her—my ethereal, golden self. The one who had been waiting for me, watching all along. She lit a fire beneath the cauldron of holy oil—a fire that burned without destruction—and began her work. One by one, I lifted my bones and placed them into the cauldron, washing them clean of the burdens they had carried, the stories etched into their marrow. My toes, my femurs, my ribs—all dissolved in the sacred oil, each one released with gratitude for the steps they had walked, the weight they had borne, the songs they had sung.

As I unmade myself, I thought of La Loba, the Bone Woman. The ancient one who roams the deserts of myth, gathering the scattered bones of what has been lost. She sings over them—not the songs of what was, but of what might be—and in her song, they begin to rise, reassembled into a new creation. I imagined her there with me, nodding as I placed my last bone into the cauldron. When all was done, when nothing remained, I poured the final golden oil over the mound of what once was me, offering it to the earth, the fire, the waters, and the air that had carried me through all my days.

And in that moment, I felt it. The ache of being nothing. The truth of being everything. The unbearable beauty of it all.

In giving myself back to the earth, I discovered, in the sacred emptiness, the song of my soul rising to become what I was always meant to be.

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