It is no accident that those who survive being broken and who make a home for the terrible knowledge are, in turn, at the threshold of enlightened living. Often, in our one-sided logic, we try to theorize that suffering is a prerequisite to deep living. In truth, inhabiting both sides of any paradox is what engenders deep living. In the case of the paradox of feeling, the pain of breaking and the wonder of compassion are polarities that, once accepted and allowed to mix, yield a sense of Divine Reality in everything we encounter.

If you set out to suffer in order to find wonder, a tact that is inconceivable to anyone who has truly suffered, you will only experience pain. Breaking and wonder are by themselves unavoidable. It’s how we allow for them to reside within us that unlocks the sanctities.

Likewise, if you seek to avoid breaking in the guise of preserving peace, you will never inhabit your feelings and will only sever yourself from any chance of experiencing wholeness or unity. For, as you can’t see without eyes or hear without ears, you can’t be whole without feelings.

There are many who subscribe to an emotional solipsism; believing that if a life breaks in the world and I don’t hear it or see it, then the life and its breaking do not exist. This is simply denial of the grossest sort, no matter how well thought out or articulated. Ultimately, it doesn’t protect the denier; just further isolates that person in a blindness that becomes irreversible the longer one stays there.

Because we live, there’s no escaping breaking. Because we feel, there’s no escaping suffering. Yet if we can endure the pain of breaking, depths we didn’t imagine will be brought to light. If we can outlast the abrasions of eroding, we’ll wear our inner beauties as a skin. If we can persevere through the rip of shedding, we’ll live by new sensitivities. Yes, if we can accept the decomposition of old ways, we’ll be reborn in the same life, unsure of how we got this far.

From the beginning, the key to renewal has been shedding, the casting off of old skin. In essence, shedding symbolizes self-transformation, self-initiated by a covenant to grow. Those who refuse such renewal may yet be forced to undergo transformation anyway as a result of being broken or eroded by the world. Very often, both occur at the same time; that is, we shed from within and are eroded from without. Often, the pain of breaking induces a life to shed its stubbornness.

It’s interesting that the earliest peoples believed in something that we in our hive of manufacturing have forgotten—that immortality is attainable by shedding. The Dusuns of North Borneo have believed for centuries that when God finished creating the world He announced that: “Whoever is able to cast off his skin shall not die.”