The Truth About New Life

Most mornings, I pull an animal oracle card. I’ve gotten everything from peacock to hyena to earthworm, and mystical child of the earth that I am, I love to see what lesson each creature can impart.

One day this past week, I pulled tarantula.

I have a healthy respect for spiders, but no real fear, so I was more intrigued than repulsed by this possibility.

A tarantula can represent experiencing transformation, facing your fears, and patiently weaving your destiny. It also encourages us to confront hidden shadows, embrace our authentic self, and trust our intuition, especially when navigating life’s sticky situations.

What I didn’t realize is that tarantulas regularly shed their shells. And grow entirely new everythings.

This means a tarantula has multiple opportunities for resurrection—a tough, tender, and miraculous rising from what is dead and gone. A leaving behind of the hard and prickly shell for a new existence, one ready to fit and serve the new you.

One post I read included a video that showed a tarantula shedding. It was like watching someone pop a pimple—a whole lot of ewwwwwwwww!!!! followed by a weirdly satisfying sense of Oh, would you look at that!

What was constricting, hard, and no longer a good fit or worth hauling around was gone. As the creature gently emerged, there was a sense that—soft as the new thing was—the story could only get better from here.

But how—when it feels so much better and safer to know what we know.

Trusting what we don’t know? Who wants to do that?

Sometimes, it is right and good to hold on. To remain and repair. To honor the commitment. To not cut and run when things get hard.

I think this can one of our biggest lessons as first-time humans—to learn how to remain in the challenge, and even to say, “Yes, this belongs.”

It’s often what I invite my yoga students to do, especially in poses they hate. I, for one, hope that whoever came up with chair pose had to sleep on a bed of nails. But even as I think that, I know the pose is doing good work in and for me.

It’s a question of grit—a staying with, even when—especially when—it gets hard. And grit gets celebrated as a virtue for a reason.

And at the same time, when we let go, we hold space for who knows what next. It reminds me of a guru who once complained the ripe fruit in his life wouldn’t fall.

If we hold on so tightly to what was, we leave no room for the sweet and juicy what might be.

So how in the name of all that is holy do we know which to do—and when?

That, my friend, is the crux of being real. And human. Brave. And messy. And a whole lotta vulnerable.

It can be so easy to strap on our shells and forge our way into the battle of everyday.

And yet I’m learning more and more that good work and good love leave both me and the world softer. To get there I need to be less armored.

This ain’t easy. In fact, to help me do this work, I’m going to a delightful young man who shoves needles into my body and then attaches electrodes to them. The result is this insistent thump, thump, thumping deep inside my neck and shoulders—and it is finally softening the tension I hold. I can literally feel my body coming out of its shell.

Nor is this process pretty. The new tarantula in that YouTube video? It’s a moist and gooey mess. If you’ve ever had one of those gut-wrenching sob sessions, when you are just trying to let it all go . . . well, let’s just say there’s a reason it’s called “an ugly cry.”

Changing, healing, resurrecting—we can love those words and hate the actual process.

Of becoming.

New.

Lighter.

Softer.

More vulnerable.

But it’s a chance to say, “Yes, this belongs. And oh, here comes a unicorn.” Some unexplained magic trotting into the empty space we braved holding.

So yes, trust stillness and change and tenderness.

And rise. Oh, brave one, rise.