Shedding ~ an Act of Release and Renewal
By Susanne Martman
A childhood memory of a brown manilla envelope left at the doorstep “for Susanne,” has stayed with me over the years.
Anticipating a pleasant surprise, I’d peeked inside and seen looped rolls of silvery coils. Reaching down, I discovered the whole thing was connected – and that what I was holding in my hand was actually a snakeskin! My six-year-old dreams of exciting possibilities turned quickly to disappointment and repulsion.
I slid the unusual gift back into the envelope and soon forgot about it. Many months later I came across the envelope again – and this time felt a stirring of curiosity. Why had someone left this unusual gift for me?I noticed how weightlessly the shed skin rested in my hand. With one finger I hesitantly touched the silvery scales. I marvelled at how the snake had slithered away leaving behind such a perfect from-fitting case.
Likewise, through the ages and in cultures worldwide, humanity has responded with ambivalence to the mysterious gifts of this creature – both as an earthly form that wriggles, startles and bites, and a mythical form that writhes, transforms and undulates with meaning. The snake of our unexpected encounters that often evokes fear with its readiness to strike transforms into the serpent crossing the path of our growth – a profound living metaphor for movement and change. Gary David writes,“The difference marks a shift from the natural to the mystical, from fear to reverence—from instinct to insight”
Many living things shed: the caterpillar leaving its cocoon, the dragonfly emerging from its exoskeleton, the deer casting off its antlers, the tree letting go of its leaves. Each release clears space for renewal, not by erasing the past but by carrying it forward in a new form. Before the renewal, though, comes a subtler phase – the sense of having outgrown something that once fit – without yet knowing what will take its place. It’s a tender uneasy time when what’s next feels close but indistinct, like a presence moving just below awareness.
The serpent’s earth crawling form, the living animal the snake, shows this process vividly. As its skin tightens and clouds, a thin fluid forms between the old and the new, dulling its eyes and senses. Irritable and restless, the snake searches for rough ground, cracks the old scalesaround its head, and works for days to free itself. When the snake finally emerges, the cast skin lies inside out and torn – a lifeless reminder of what once was.
The new skin is soft, moist, and loose – not yet hardened by time, but ready for growth. Like other reptiles, and insects too, the snake must pause to adjust before resuming its life. The butterfly crawls from the chrysalis and waits for its wings to dry. The dragonfly pumps fluid intoits wings before taking flight. The tree keeps tender young leaves tight in the bud until warmed by spring.
Shedding isn’t a choice, but a response to inner pressure, a sense of the old skin becoming too tight for what’s growing inside – a call to cooperate with life’s generative pulse. Slithering about its earth minding business, there’s a knowing that a time of change is coming. Each shed marksboth release and renewal – a quiet transformation already at work before the old has fully fallen away.
As humans winding in and out of our daily lives, it’s often through meeting a limit that we realize our skin has become too tight for the burgeoning life within: a time worn self-image, a career taking new directions, an illness, a relationship changing. The way of the serpent is often to initiate the shed, seeking friction to begin the process and learning further through acceptance and courageous engagement with the limit. Every significant life shed involves a change in meaning - child, adolescent, adult - and each new skin comes with a profound transformation that carries both the loss of what was and the gift of what is becoming. A change of meaning at that level is a change of being.
A Continuum dive bids entrance to the waters of change and calls for a willingness to shed the bindings of our landlocked habitual ways. The undulating serpent, representing the movement of water on land, finds fluid expression in the soma as the meeting place of silence and symbol “on the edge of now.” Often waiting to be revealed beneath the dry surface of “life on land,” a watery world of sensing, feeling and experiencing invites exploration.
Scripts are one of the many forms our skins may take. These stories we tell ourselves shape our thoughts and guide our actions, like stage directions for where and how to respond in a given scene. Scripts are more than habits – they are structures of thought based on memories ofsimilar experiences from the past. Shedding a script is akin to a change in meaning. In the case of the snake only the shed skin stays on the scene, but in our human dramas these familiar scripts often linger to be reenacted again and again. Gradually, over time, old scripts loosentheir hold and are replaced by new ones that allow greater freedom of movement. Like an abandoned snakeskin, a script that’s wearing thin is evidence of growth – an act of renewal rather than of rejection.
We can only guess how the tensions of shedding may be experienced by other creatures. Mammals alone respond through the affect system, an organism’s initial response at a primary, physiological level. It’s a knowing that begins with somatic sensing and grows into feeling as what’s sensed reaches conscious awareness. Eventually emotions arise from similar experiences of sensing and feeling based on memories from the past. The presence of negative affects – fear, shame, anger or distress – generally signals that we’ve reached a limit.
Acceptance of a limit and a willingness to grow with it often comes with grieving – leaving behind a comfortable skin and letting go of what once held us. Fear may also surround our human shedding processes as well as other negative feelings, like shame and anger.
Turning to the mystery with interest, rather than instinctively recoiling, as did the little girl I once was, there’s a chance of catching glimpses of the shedding process that glimmer with insight – excitement hiding beneath fear, grief ready to face acceptance, shame in the shedding that beckons approach, anger stirring the movements of change and distress yielding to transformation. As we grow and integrate learning from the past with that which is presently emerging we receive the serpent’s timeless symbolic gift of the Ouroboros, holding sacred through cycles of release and renewal, the promise of eternal return.
