Shedding the Serpent Skin

📸 Taylor James (updated)

When I came upon these words the metaphor had such profound meaning.  A beautiful, almost silent, click of recognition of a similar emotion felt along this meandering path of life.  Over the past few years, I have shed skin after skin, allowing for and calling in little ego deaths along the way, to find the space in the center of my heart that is connected to everything in the universe.  I have done this by removing the scaffolding of traumas, doubts, fears and other erroneous ideas.  Sometimes it was a gentle nudge and sometimes a violent explosion of transformation, but each one yielding to a truer, softer, more loving and compassionate me.

 “A change is taking place, some painful growth, as in a snake during the shedding of skin-dull, irritable, without appetite, dragging around the stale shreds of a former life, near-blinded by the old dead skin on the new eye.  It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.”  (Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River)

I came across these words with perfect timing being an observer of the transformative process of Yoga Teacher Training where I was working.   Knowing the curriculum and the work that can come from spiritual study, reflecting on a yogic life, living in this magical town at the beach (where I am fortunate to witness beautiful healing and transformation on a regular basis.) and most certainly connecting to the shamanic perspectives of healing, Matthiessen’s words were particularly poignant.  The group begins with the energies of the Serpent, releasing the old creating space for the new.

Beginning the journey by calling in the strength of the Serpent and shedding the metaphoric skins that IF we are to grow we must transform through and discard.  Releasing old thoughts, patterns, beliefs or energies that no longer serve us for a new Self, ready to emerge and take on the next phase.  What resonates most today is not the truth in Matthiessens’s words but in that we must also remember that this is a natural process.  Nothing stays the same, change is the one constant and for snake the process is clearly physical. Perhaps if this “shedding process” was visibly physical for humans too we would accept the reality of it more easily than when the energetic and emotional skins we are shedding towards our awakened self.   For the snake the process of sloughing off the skin is a simple aspect of nature.  Not much deliberation nor repressing the process on the snakes’ part and certainly no avoiding it.

The process of shedding and transformation is a deeply personal one.  These words were a reminder for me to hold the space of compassion for all of the unseen changes of the process of awakening and evolution.  To give a silent boost of support for all that endeavor to transform and release their old in order to simply be whoever and whatever they are meant to in this present moment.