Shedding
When my 11-year-old son allows me to cover his face with kisses, I savor the sticky sweetness. For tomorrow (or in 5 minutes) I will be met with the eye roll of the emerging teenager. An old skin is shedding, and a new skin is simultaneously emerging. What allows which skin to be exposed right now is a mystery to both of us. Allowing the nature of his being to be wild, free, unpredictable, and uneasy is the act of loving I try to choose.
If you’ve shed your skin recently, you know that it is an awkward, itchy, and humbling experience. The act of stepping out of the skin that no longer fits asks us to trust we are somehow becoming more real, and in our innate capacity for a righteous unfolding.
Some events in life, like a close encounter with death or disease, force the old skin to rip off at once, leaving us reeling, at a loss of core cohesion. In an instant, we are something like new and the old is something like gone.
Other experiences slowly pick away at the dry spots, leaving us half decayed and have raw. This both skin leaves us like a teenager at prom, wearing a tuxedo with a face full of acne. The midlife crisis comes to mind, for my own recent shedding conforms to this framework of experience. It felt like this…
It’s all happening at once. A dying self and a birthing self. As the skin of old sheds, this self of us dies, and the nature of death is destruction. The dying pieces of who we are refuse to go on and stop right here, erupting into a storm of chaos as they expire. This experience happens through us but is not under our direct control.
The process began with the disabling of the old way of being. Much to my dismay, I simply could not function in the same way. My body and mind refused to be responsible to my old methods of being, no matter how hard I tried to comply with expectation and routine. For a year or more, I tried to bring myself into alignment with the way I should be and watched with frustration as a growing rebelliousness emerged.
In the middle, I broke. The parts attached to the old skin broke through my diligence and committed to the death of their story lines. Everything and everyone were renegotiated and wild was my only state. Here the damage was volatile as people who belonged to the old me were no longer in harmony with the new. This storm in my life felt violent but it was oddly nourishing, for the forest fire of my shedding removed the overgrowth of superfluous and strengthened the remaining oak trees of my true people. Love expanded ferociously in the most surprising ways.
Maybe (!) now I am in the final stages of my shedding. What is here now is still raw and unfamiliar. I don’t know her well, but I know that it is more true and I trust the process and accept the responsibility to love and understand her. I have learned that there is nothing to do but allow what is happening to happen and to give myself grace.
I have learned to trust that love will follow my brave. That when I reveal my newest skin…and not-love pulls away…love is all that remains. And with a freshly burned forest floor, there is abundant space for love to express its oxygen. Indeed, I have nearly choked on the immense flow of love in the air as my new skin screams with surprised bliss at the love that just keeps coming.
Still, you cannot un-know what you learn during the shedding season. What is revealed about who chooses to love and how is plainly simple to see. Those that cannot love us simply haven’t lived their shedding in a while: they have forgotten what it is like to lose the capacity for coherence. They too will remember one day how it is to be wildly unsettled, and those that can’t see them will humble them to their misunderstanding. I have already forgiven their departure, for I learned to love what they couldn’t, and my love was what I really needed.
On the other side of the midlife crisis, or the discarding of the old skin, is a peaceful quiet, a sacred and simple ease. An upgraded vibration runs through my body that prevents me from acquiescing to what is not true. This has taught me the art of silence, for my truth is simply for me. I’ve learned to say less and feel more. To let go of storylines that served the former skin requires a deep presence with the truth of this moment.
Still, there are people in my life now who pull my truth forward and mingle theirs with mine as they reflect me back to myself with a radically loving witness. To them, I am grateful and humbled, for I do not know if I’ve done the same before, but I believe that I will now.
Ultimately, skins shed for our benefit. To remind us of our continual capacity, in fact our true nature, of rebirth. It’s the pulse of instinct to create a self-ing experience, and to use this one life to make many. Yet we are not a self at all, but an ever-flowing experience of awareness, hovering in and around this human skin suit, pulling ourselves together enough to appear solid, but really at our most honest form, we are completely free of matter, including the skin we wrestle to leave behind and the skin we believe we are taking. Shedding, whether we allow it or not, unfolds us back into ourselves again and again. I recommend embracing the process.