Shedding Skins: Tending the Grief and Joy of Change͏ ͏ ͏
I’ve been deep in the unfolding if an inner reckoning, many long buried beliefs and ways of being have been coming to light. It feels like the skin I wear has become too tight and I know the only way forward is to shed this layer and take a new breath…but it can feel so complicated, hazy, and uncertain at times.
How, exactly, does one shed their own skin? Snake makes it look so easy.
The other day I was being coached by the astounding January Jaxon, my unprocessed experience tumbling into the space held between us. Though the process of sharing each thread of my unraveling felt cathartic and I was gaining new inner perspective, it was also extremely vulnerable to put my insides on the outside and have them witnessed.
This vulnerability woke up a member of my inner community whose main belief is about my voice being boring and pointless, shouting “Jessica, who really cares? Now would be a good time to stop talking.”
Though this was not messaging I heard from my family or community growing up (often quite the contrary!), oppression of one’s voice (save a select few) has been baked into the culture we breathe for millennia. However, more often these days I uncover in myself the more subtle trappings of messaging that exists in our collective experiences, rather than my own personal lived experience. Enter stage left: the “Silencer”.
In our session, I became increasingly aware of this inner voice growing louder, to the point that I needed to openly name what was coming up. I shared that this aspect was saying my thoughts and processing were boring and unimportant.
In just saying those words out loud it struck a powerful nerve and sent a shock wave through my system that knocked down all the other parts that had felt seen, heard, loved, and supported through our time together.
In giving space and voice to one part that was difficult and in need of tending, I suddenly found myself on an inner battlefield feeling like an overwhelmed triage nurse, unsure of who to tend first or how I would even recover.
Then January offered the suggestion of just taking a moment and placing my hand on my heart. This is something I love doing and offer to clients in my own practice (one of the many beautiful tools I’m integrating since completing Ellen Slater’s pioneering course on the Compassion Cultivation Cycle), but in that moment I was in such a state of overwhelm I could have never come up with that on my own.
Within seconds of placing my hand on my heart a warm and soothing force enveloped every single wounded part simultaneously and lifted each of them back on their feet.
No triage needed from one caretaker to a battlefield littered with wounded parts.
Call it love, call it the Divine, call it oxytocin. Whatever it may be there is immense power in simply putting hand on heart and breathing that defies any logic or understanding.
I have learned that shedding our skin holds both grief and joy. It invites both a loss of the familiar and a creation of the new and never before. Placing my hand on my heart has become my go to when the hard moments (which feel frequent these days) come to the surface. With this small and simple gesture a warm soothing calm washes over me, interrupting the well worn path of spiraling down.
I believe pain has a purpose, it brings our attention directly to what needs tending. And with this gesture of kindness toward what hurts inside myself, I begin to perfect the act of shedding my skin, again and again.
Each new skin expanding the peace possible when every part of me is seen, accepted, and welcomed back home.
