Shedding old skin

A snake slithers out of its old skin without effort. A caterpillar decides it’s time to become a butterfly, encases itself in a cocoon, rests, and emerges with colourful wings.

All of nature happens this way. No effort. Like air entering and leaving your lungs, happening by itself.

Want to make a change?

Take cues from the snake, the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, your chest expanding with every breath, your eyes traversing these lines.

Each time I’ve tried to make a change and treated myself as the enemy, worked against myself instead of with myself, I’ve been pushing rocks up hill.

But nature never fights against itself. Of course, there are scenes of violence, a lion ripping at the neck of a buffalo, a wolf presenting its throat to another after losing a battle. Each an act contributing to the ecosystem, without knowing so.

When you try to make a change, any kind of change and you use thought, you use willpower you become the canoe rider using a paddle, it requires effort. And because effort is finite, you end up fighting against yourself.

When you let the change happen, you sacrifice your old ways of thinking, you let your old self die, in the spirit of how nature would go about such an act, the sails on your ship unfold. Ditch the paddle and save your efforts because now you’re using magic.

Every change I’ve tried to make with effort has failed, every change I’ve let happen as if it were already part of me (like the snake embracing its new skin) has succeeded.

Painting by Jean Plout.