The Beautiful Disorientation of Becoming

Sometimes becoming more whole feels remarkably like falling apart.

Jewish tradition has long understood that transformation is rarely tidy. Yom Kippur does not ask us to pretend we are finished, certain or unchanged. It brings us into the narrow place of honest accounting, where we face what has been broken, what we have broken and what is still becoming. The day begins with disorientation: we set aside ordinary routines, loosen our usual defenses and enter a space between who we have been and who we might yet become.

Psychology has language for this. Liminality is the space between selves: the old way of understanding ourselves has begun to fall away, but whatever comes next has not fully formed. Dąbrowski's positive disintegration offers a related idea—that development can sometimes require our existing structures and identities to loosen before something more authentic can emerge.

We celebrate transformation once we know how the story ends. We are much less comfortable with the middle—when the old map no longer works and there isn't a new one yet.

I think about this now in relation to history. As an adolescent, I learned about the Holocaust as history. I read every Leon Uris book I could get my hands on, trying to understand Jewish suffering, survival and what came after, never knowing how much family I had lost, how much I was that history. But I had something the people living through those years did not: I knew the ending. I could look backward and see what survived, what was rebuilt and the stories that eventually emerged.

Post–October 7, I am experiencing something very different. I am living inside history—history that I hope my grandchildren will one day study from the safety and distance from which I once studied the past. But we don't have that distance yet. We don't know the ending. We don't know what will be rebuilt, what will change or how this period will eventually be understood.

We are still in the middle.

I have come to know another version of this territory through psychedelics. We talk a great deal about preparation, the psychedelic experience and integration immediately afterward. But some journeys continue working on us for months or years. Relationships shift. Values change. Spirituality becomes harder to keep at the edges.

The person who returns isn't always quite the person who left.

I know this professionally, but I am also living it. Some of the walls between the ways I show up in the world have become increasingly difficult to maintain—the psychologist and spiritual person, mother, partner, friend, teacher, healer. And more importantly now than ever, a Jew. I increasingly want to show up as the same whole person in all of them.

My Jewishness can no longer live quietly in one compartment of my identity. And I have watched something similar happen for many Jewish people—identity, safety, belonging and culture suddenly becoming impossible to separate from mental health.

Which brings me back to Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is not only a day of reckoning. It is also a threshold. We enter it by loosening our grip on ordinary life, and we leave it having faced what we would rather avoid. The movement is not from brokenness to perfection, but from concealment toward greater honesty, responsibility and wholeness.

That movement is what teshuvah names.

Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but it also means return. We look honestly at ourselves, discern what belongs, repair what we can and turn again toward the life we want to inhabit.

But return does not mean going backward.

I cannot return to the Jewish woman I was on October 6. Some psychedelic experiences have changed how I understand being a psychologist. Decades of contemplative practice have changed how I understand healing, consciousness and spirituality.

Perhaps I am not supposed to return to who I was.

Perhaps teshuvah asks something more interesting of us: to gather what has been shattered, discern what still belongs, repair what needs repairing and return more fully to ourselves.

That is psychedelic integration too.

Not simply, What happened during the journey?

But months or years later: What is falling away? What am I carrying forward? Who am I becoming? And can I tolerate not knowing yet?

Transformation needs time. It needs community, culture and discernment. And sometimes it requires us to tolerate the beautiful disorientation of not knowing exactly who we are for a while.

The psychedelic journey isn't just the flight time. Healing isn't simply getting back to normal. And teshuvah isn't going backward.

Sometimes we return by becoming.

Feel it. Don’t fear it.