The chick offers us the wisdom… The way to be born is to eat our own shell.

“Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle.” – Mark Nepo

I think most of us, at some point, have been on the verge of a great change and felt the fear of the unknown that can be all consuming. Transformation is rarely comfortable. It feels like the world is coming to end, which, in many ways, it is.

I have experienced a few times in my life when a massive change came to be, without me orchestrating it consciously. I have had one foot in the house of addiction, with a belief that my survival rested within my eating disorder, while the other foot was wanting to move towards freedom, but unsure of the great unknown. The deepest part of us knows a change is needed; that we have outgrown our current existence.

We KNOW there is something greater to come and yet, we still can’t eat our own shell.

Here, we can think of the chick….

“Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world.

Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment—growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking—the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn’t die, but falls into the world.

The lesson is profound. Transformation always involves the falling away of things we have relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is.“

Yet the chick offers us the wisdom that the way to be born while still alive is to eat our own shell. When faced with great change—in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling—we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is within us.”

The chick offers us the wisdom…
The way to be born is to eat our own shell.
Be with what is.
Take in all that we are.
In swallowing our truth, a new beginning emerges.

The balance between trusting the unfolding and taking the action to eat our shell, is delicate. Yet, when they both co-exist, the jump into the next unfolding can have a touch of grace.

For me, the more I can find ways to let the light in, the more I find myself eating my shell ~ without even trying.

It’s like ‘letting the yoga happen,’ instead of ‘doing the yoga’.

The stories we have lived, are in us. Yet when we let the light in, they certainly don’t define us. Moreover, they are the very thing that propel us through a change and into the next beautiful stage of being (born).

Excerpts from The Chick Being Born – By Mark Nepo