The Shedding

There is a particular kind of silence that descends when life is doing its most serious work on you. Not the peaceful silence of a meditation cushion. The kind where the scaffolding you've built your days around — your location, your identity — begins to come apart.

We have just moved through the Year of the Snake — and I can't think of a more fitting container for what this past year has been for so many of us. Me included. The snake sheds its skin because it has grown beyond it. It sits silently and allows the process to happen, painful though it may be.

I have not written here since May of last year. The silence was not indifference — it was the unplanned result of being inside the chrysalis. One cannot narrate dissolution while it is happening. (Please excuse the metaphor pivot of snake to butterfly. They’re too good not to mix). Inside the chrysalis, old skin was shedding and new skin was forming. My marriage was ending. My identity was changing. My home of 20+ years was nudging me to new vistas and making way for new tenants. And New York City was beckoning me well before I could hear its siren song.

I wonder if any of this sounds familiar to you. Maybe not the specifics but the texture of it? The sense that something you built with great care no longer fits? That the skin you've been living in has grown tight. That the life asking to be born in you requires a shedding you're not entirely sure you're ready for. I can’t say this clearly enough – You. Are. Not. Alone.

We are living in a time of collective upheaval and unprecedented growth in consciousness. It is hitting us personally and collectively. The structures around us — political, environmental, economic, cultural — are undergoing their own dissolution.  I’ve written about this before. The old skin of the world is being shed. We are in the murky, disorienting middle of...something becoming.

It’s tempting to despair and we can forgive ourselves for succumbing to that now and then. But for the sake of “keeping going”, I invite us to see it as an opportunity.

My work in the Amazon has accelerated this year and deepened into a realm of leadership. I continue to use the teachings of the Achuar and Sapara people as guiding lights. The indigenous people of the Amazon do not live inside a story of separation. They believe that the separation experienced by most of us in the “modern world”, the sense that we are isolated individuals separate from each other and from the living world, is deeply unnatural.

For them, everything is connected. Everything is alive – even rocks. Everything belongs to a web of relationship so intricate and so intelligent that the idea of any thread being disposable — one species, one forest, one person — is incomprehensible.

The Sapara language does not even have a word for racism. Imagine that. The concept doesn’t exist, therefore the word does not.

When one begins imbibing these teachings, the personal suffering, the stuckness, the emptiness, the grief of a life that doesn't fit begins to feel more like a beckoning back into wholeness.

This is the work I am returning to, more committed than ever. Helping others find that illuminated pathway back to their wholeness; to that innate wisdom that was never lost, but that just been obscured by the “dream of modern living” as our forest friends would call it.

The people I see doing this work are moving through the world differently. With more freedom. More love. Less suffering. Not because circumstances become easier, but because the resistance, control and fixing mentality is making way for a spirit of allowing, connecting and remembering.

If something in this landed for you, drop me a note. And if you’re in your own shedding process and feel ready to talk, my door is wide open with love.