What happens when life falls apart—completely? Every inch of it destroyed.

To be fair, sometimes it’s exactly what we’ve asked for. Maybe in a meditation to the new moon, or a prayer stick thrown into the fire, or a penny thrown into a fountain, we ask that our life be transformed completely.

In this way, we call in Kali, the goddess of death and transformation. We call on her energy to come and completely turn our life around.

When calling in Kali, we invite a destructive whirlwind of transformation into our life. We do that when we are ready for a new life, but are unsure of what we want it to look like; when we’re ready to surrender the reins to the universe. Because with Kali, we can’t always predict the outcome.

We do this because we have arrived at a point where we look around and we just know our life isn’t ours. None of it feels authentic—it’s like we’re living someone else’s life. We become apathetic and rarely energized by any of it. Our voice, our personality, even our clothes feel like they aren’t ours.

Six months ago, this was exactly how I felt.

So, I called on Kali to come and transform my life, to help me find the life I was meant to live. I had traveled and “found myself” a couple of times at this point. And each time, I had removed a layer of who I was told to be. But there are always more layers to go, and sometimes we realize we’re ready to fast-track.

I was ready to hand the reins over to Kali, to surrender my life to her transformative energy. I wrote my intention down during the new moon and tossed it into the fire. Fast forward six months and I’m sitting in a cafe 3,000 miles away.

Often times, even when we ask for drastic change, we still think we can predict the exact outcome. In fact, we feel like we need to in order to have control of our lives. So when I moved across the country for a relationship, I thought my new partner was a part of this transformation. A couple of months later, I realized he wasn’t.

I knew this transformation would involve a new career path, but I couldn’t even imagine a career outside of the traditional nine-to-five. Try as we might to control our path, even with a stellar resume and strong insider connections, sometimes the universe just says no. If we can take the failure with grace, we can see that the universe has much greater plans for us lying ahead. But in the moment, when you’re working a part-time job making minimum wage while a law degree sits in a box in the garage, it feels like failure.

Finding ourselves in need of a place to live by the end of the month, officially down to the last dollar of savings, and not bringing in enough income to pay the bills can seem like quite the dire situation. We might know that one day in the future we’ll look back on this period of time and laugh. But in the moment, it feels like we’ve failed at everything—home, finances, career, relationship.

How do we continue to get back up when the universe keeps kicking us down?

When all we can think about is our failures, we tend to focus on what we believe we did “wrong.” Why wasn’t I good enough to keep my ex-boyfriend happy? Why wasn’t I good enough to get any of the jobs I applied for? Why wasn’t I good enough to be financially successful as an adult?

Good enough. It’s not the first time that many of us have battled the not good enough’s—the feelings of being unworthy. But what if we’ve spent a year meditating on how worthy we are? Seems like we would’ve fixed that by now. Box checked, right?

Turns out that a lack of worthiness can’t exactly be “fixed.” We can peel off layers of unworthiness, sure. Those of us who came out of a not-so-great childhood had to peel off thick layers of unworthiness for merely existing. But even after all that inner work, sometimes we just don’t realize how many things we rely on externally for our own inner feeling of worthiness.

And when the universe decides it’s time for us to learn that lesson, it will throw everything it can at us to trigger our feelings of unworthiness. Because we have to feel it fully in order to move through it and past it. In order to even realize it’s there in the first place.

Move across the country to be isolated from your support system? Unable to get a job offer? Can’t keep your partner happy? Can’t make enough money to pay the bills? Can’t get financial support from family? Can’t find a place to live?

Once we’ve asked ourselves the question, “Why am I not good enough?” enough times, we can finally realize the lesson.

The only way we’ll ever realize how much we rely on externally to feel worthy is by having it all taken away. Once that happens, we can see that our true worthiness is internal.

And suddenly, it doesn’t matter that we’re left with nothing. We can be days away from being homeless, with barely any income, and feel like we have no way out. But when we are able to look at ourselves differently, to realize our own worthiness, that’s when we can see that we’re all beautiful, worthy souls experiencing life—both the highs and the lows.

Starting again with absolutely nothing—no attachments, no expectations, completely untethered—means that there are limitless possibilities to rebuild our life. We’re shaken to the core so that we can smash our faulty foundation to pieces and build a new, solid one. A foundation that’s built on worthiness, trust in the universe, and integrity.

Like any life in nature, we have to experience the death before the rebirth. Kali has to destroy before she can transform. And my life was utterly destroyed.

This void of being left with nothing allows us to stretch out our box of limitations and consider anything and everything. Our life has to become a void of nothingness for this to be possible.

Because now, we have the space outside of our limited box to be flooded with a wellspring of inspiration and creativity. We can have satisfying career ideas and beautiful housing opportunities we never even considered before.

When we release our attachment to what we thought our life would be—accepting this experience in failure as an important lesson in worthiness—we allow the universe to catch us and lead us down new roads.

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