When Life Cracks You Open: Recognising the Invitation in Crisis
We are living through a collective crisis. It is March 2021, and we have been in and out of lockdowns for nearly a year. Just when you think you can see a way forward, another variant emerges, another restriction gets announced, another plan gets cancelled.
The whiplash is exhausting. The uncertainty is relentless. The ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.
Maybe you are working from home in the same room where you eat, sleep, and try to have a personal life. Maybe you have lost someone you love and could not properly grieve them. Maybe your relationship has crumbled under the pressure of constant proximity. Maybe you have realized that the life you were living before the pandemic is not the life you want to return to.
@usgs
Whatever your particular version of this crisis looks like, you have probably felt something crack open inside you. Something that was holding you together has fractured. The mask you wore, the identity you performed, the way you coped, it is not working anymore.
And here is what I want you to understand: when life cracks you open, it is not punishment. It is an invitation.
Crisis as a Portal
The word "crisis" comes from the Greek word krisis, meaning "turning point" or "decision." Crisis forces a reckoning. It breaks apart what was not working so something new can emerge.
Before the pandemic, many of us were living on autopilot. Working jobs that depleted us. Maintaining relationships that felt hollow. Moving through days without questioning whether this was actually the life we wanted.
Crisis does not allow autopilot. It demands presence. It forces us to feel what we have been avoiding. It strips away everything superficial and asks: What actually matters to you?
For 11 years, I excelled in corporate tech sales while slowly burning out from the inside. I kept going because that is what I knew how to do. Push through. Perform. Achieve. Repeat.
It took a complete collapse, chronic stress, severe anxiety, my body forcing me to stop, to crack me open enough to ask different questions. To examine whether success at the cost of my wellbeing was actually success at all.
Pandemic has done this for millions of people simultaneously. The crisis has cracked us open collectively. And while that is incredibly painful, it is also creating a massive opportunity for transformation.
What Gets Revealed When You Crack Open
When the protective shell you have been living in breaks apart, what is underneath is raw. Vulnerable. Undefended.
You might be feeling:
Grief for the life you had, even if that life was not serving you. Grief for lost time, lost connection, lost certainty about the future.
Rage at systems that failed you, people who let you down, the unfairness of what has been taken from you.
Terror about who you are without your old structures, routines, and identities holding you in place.
Emptiness where there used to be purpose, meaning, or at least distraction from the questions you did not want to face.
These feelings are not problems to be fixed. They are the raw material of transformation.
When you crack open, you are not broken. You are finally permeable enough for something new to enter. The hardness that kept you protected also kept you stuck. The cracking is what creates the opening.
The Invitation You Did Not Ask For
Nobody asks for a crisis. Nobody volunteers to have their life dismantled. Nobody wakes up thinking "I hope today destroys everything I thought I knew about myself."
But a crisis can comes anyway. And when it does, you have a choice.
You can spend all your energy trying to put the pieces back together exactly as they were. You can desperately attempt to return to "normal" as quickly as possible. You can numb out and wait for it to pass.
Or you can ask: What is this crisis inviting me to see? To feel? To become?
This is not toxic positivity. I am not suggesting you be grateful for your suffering or pretend that your pain is a gift. The loss is real. The grief is valid. The rage is justified.
But alongside all of that, there is an invitation.
An invitation to examine your life with fresh eyes. To question assumptions you have carried for decades. To release identities that no longer serve you. To rebuild from a place of truth rather than conditioning.
How to Recognise the Invitation
Here is how you start to see the invitation hidden in the crisis:
1. Notice What You Are Not Willing to Return To
As lockdowns ease and restrictions lift, what parts of your old life are you dreading going back to? Which meetings feel pointless? Which relationships feel draining? Which activities feel obligatory rather than alive?
That resistance is information. Your system is telling you: "That was not working. Do not rebuild that."
2. Pay Attention to What You Are Grieving Most
We do not grieve what did not matter. The intensity of your grief tells you what you valued, what you needed, what felt essential.
If you are grieving connection, that is your invitation to prioritize relationship differently moving forward. If you are grieving freedom, that is your invitation to examine where you have been living in self-imposed cages. If you are grieving purpose, that is your invitation to rediscover what genuinely matters to you.
3. Feel What You Have Been Avoiding
Crisis strips away your usual coping mechanisms. You cannot work your way out of this. You cannot achieve your way to safety. You cannot perform your way to approval.
When those strategies stop working, you are left with what is underneath. Often what is underneath is a lot of unprocessed emotion, unexamined beliefs, and parts of yourself you have been suppressing for years.
Through Compassionate Inquiry® work, I learned that we cannot transform what we will not feel. The invitation is to finally feel what you have been running from.
4. Ask Different Questions
Instead of "When will this be over?" try "What is this asking me to see?"
Instead of "How do I get back to normal?" try "What kind of life do I actually want to build?"
Instead of "Why is this happening to me?" try "What is trying to emerge through me?"
Different questions open different possibilities.
5. Trust That You Are Being Reorganised
When life cracks you open, it feels like falling apart. But falling apart and being reorganized look identical from the inside.
Your nervous system is recalibrating. Your identity is restructuring. Your priorities are realigning. This process is messy and uncomfortable and often terrifying.
But it is also how transformation happens. You cannot become something new while clinging to everything old.
What Becomes Possible
I cannot tell you what will emerge from your crisis. That is your journey to discover.
But I can tell you this: the people I work with who have allowed crisis to crack them open rather than fought to seal themselves back up, they emerge more alive. More authentic. More connected to what actually matters.
They stop performing versions of themselves that exhaust them. They release relationships that were held together by obligation rather than genuine connection. They rebuild their lives around what is true rather than what is expected.
They do not go back to who they were before. They become who they actually are underneath all the conditioning and protection and performance.
That is the invitation. Not to return to normal. But to step into what is real.
Your Self-Insights for This Week
If you are feeling cracked open right now, I invite you to notice:
What part of your old life are you most resistant to returning to?
What emotion have you been avoiding that is demanding to be felt now?
If this crisis is inviting you toward something, what might it be?
What would shift if you stopped trying to seal the cracks and instead let yourself be reorganised?
You are not broken. You are breaking open. There is a difference.
Start there.
If you have a desire for making a change in your life, follow me on Youtube, LinkedIn and visit The Self-Science Lab for more info.
Join my Reset and Rise weekly workshops or book a discovery call to see if 1:1 coaching might support your transition.
Lauren Cartigny, a Life & Business Coach and Mindfulness Practitioner
Following a successful international corporate career in Sales for leading Tech firms, Lauren faced an unexpected burnout, life and health crisis. After re-building her life, transforming her career, and healing her body, heart, mind and remembering her connection to Spirit, Lauren has created transformative coaching and experiential workshops to support you in improving the quality of your life and your career by developing Self-Leadership skills.