Coming Home to Ourselves in the Season of Shedding
There’s something about this time of year that invites us to slow down, become quieter, and turn inward a bit.
The mornings are cooler. The evenings arrive sooner. The leaves are letting go, and the garden is beginning to return itself to the earth. Everything around us is settling into a different rhythm.
Today is Halloween or Samhain, a familiar threshold in the Wheel of the Year when we turn our attention toward our beloved dead, the ancestors, the stories that came before us, and the things that have reached the end of their season.
I’ve been sitting with that idea of endings a lot lately.
Not necessarily the dramatic, everything-must-fall-apart kind of ending. But rather the quiet kind, where you realize you’ve outgrown something. Where an old way of seeing yourself doesn’t quite fit anymore. Where you look back and recognize that you’ve traveled a good bit of road, even if you haven’t always noticed the distance.
And I keep coming back to the idea of shedding.
There’s something fascinating about watching the natural world prepare for winter. The trees aren’t fighting to keep every leaf. They’re returning what they no longer need to the earth. The garden isn’t failing because it’s no longer blooming. There’s work happening beneath the surface that we can’t see.
And with the upcoming New Moon in Scorpio on November 9, I’ve also been thinking about scorpions a lot, too, and the way they shed their exoskeleton as it grows. That old protective structure eventually becomes too restrictive. It has served its purpose, but the creature has grown beyond what the old skin can hold.
Before the old skin comes away, it can become dull and cloudy. The creature may seem less vibrant for a little while, but underneath, new skin is developing. Once the old layer is shed, the colors and shine are revealed again.
I find myself wondering how often we experience something similar.
How often do we continue wearing an identity long after we’ve grown beyond it?
How many of the ways we learned to move through the world were really ways of keeping ourselves safe?
How many expectations did we inherit?
How many stories about who we are came from somebody else’s understanding of us?
Sometimes we carry those things for so long that we forget they were ever something we could question.
But here’s what I’ve been thinking about: I don’t believe every season of growth requires us to burn everything down and start over.
Sometimes we have already done the difficult work.
We’ve dug through the soil of our internal gardens. We’ve pulled out what needed removing. We’ve tended the roots. We’ve established boundaries, learned some hard lessons, and built a foundation that might be stronger than we give ourselves credit for.
At some point, we have to let ourselves actually live in what we’ve built.
We get to use that foundation.
We get to grow from it.
We get to decide what belongs in the next season of our lives without treating everything that came before as something that needs to be destroyed.
A little about acceptance…
We talk about releasing, letting go, moving on. And sometimes those words get tangled up together in ways that don’t quite fit.
I’ve come to appreciate the distinction between acceptance and forgiveness.
Acceptance doesn’t mean excusing what happened.
It doesn’t mean reconciling with someone, making peace with something that was harmful, or pretending that the past was somehow a necessary lesson that we deserved. (Ok not gonna get off on the topic of spiritual bypassing and abuse right now butttttt…)
Acceptance is simply acknowledging: That happened. It affected me. It shaped some of the ways I learned to navigate the world.
And then recognizing that it doesn’t have to keep defining every choice I make.
We can honor the people and experiences that brought us here without giving them permanent authority over who we become.
We can remember without returning or romanticizing.
We can grieve without making grief our entire identity.
We can appreciate the ways we survived without requiring ourselves to keep living in survival mode.
And we can be proud of how far we’ve come while still recognizing that there’s more to process and accept.
I sometimes think of healing like peeling a particularly stinky onion. You work through one layer and discover another underneath. Just when you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of something, another little layer presents itself.
But that doesn’t mean you’ve gone backward.
It means you’re seeing something from a different perspective than you did before.
The trick, I think, is remembering that we are allowed to enjoy the garden while we’re still tending it.
We don’t have to spend our entire lives looking for the next thing that needs fixing.
Staying rooted while remaining connected…
There’s another idea I’ve been sitting with: interbeing.
In Zen Buddhist philosophy, interbeing speaks to the way everything exists in relationship with everything else. Nothing is entirely separate. Our breath connects us to the world. The food we eat, the ground beneath us, the people who have shaped our lives—all of these things are part of the conditions that allow us to be here.
I find that a beautiful way to consider our place in the world.
But being interconnected doesn’t mean we have to disappear into everyone else’s needs.
We can be part of something larger and still be our own person.
We can love people without becoming
responsible for every feeling they experience.
We can offer care without taking on every burden.
We can belong without abandoning ourselves.
That’s where I keep returning to the energy of a mighty oak.
Deep roots. A strong trunk. Branches reaching outward.
An oak isn’t invulnerable. It experiences storms, loses leaves, sustains damage, and changes with the seasons. But it has a foundation that allows it to continue growing.
I think that’s the kind of sovereignty I’m interested in cultivating.
Not becoming untouchable. Or acting like we need no one. Not pretending struggles don’t exist.
Just being rooted deeply enough in ourselves that we can recognize what we need, accept support when it’s offered, and navigate change without losing our sense of who we are.
And so, in the season of Samhain…
I’ve been thinking about our beloved dead, the people whose lives and choices made some part of our own possible. The ancestors we know by name, the ones whose names have been lost, and the complicated histories we inherit whether we asked for them or not.
We don’t have to romanticize the past to remember it.
We don’t have to carry every story forward as a manual for how we should traverse our life.
But we can acknowledge what came before us, take what is meaningful, learn from what was difficult, and choose what we want to cultivate in the generations and communities that come after us.
Outside, the leaves are returning to the soil. The earth is preparing for a quieter season.
Perhaps we can take a little guidance from that.
Maybe this is a time to notice what we’ve outgrown.
Maybe it’s a time to recognize the foundation we’ve already established.
Maybe it’s a time to stop treating ourselves like an unfinished project and start enjoying the life that’s here.
We don’t have to rush the shedding and we don’t have to know what the next season will look like before it arrives.
We can simply take a breath, feel our feet on the ground, and remember that we’re still here.
Still growing. Still connected. Still becoming.
And that’s something worth honoring.
May we remember those who came before us, honor the lives that shaped our own, and have the courage to grow beyond the stories that no longer fit.
May we enter the darker half of the year rooted, at ease, and a little more at home in ourselves.
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