Life Lesson from a Lizard

The last several weeks have felt like an emotional roller coaster for me. Many of my long-held dreams are starting to come true (can you say Elephant Blessings Retreat in Thailand and Totem, my memoir about becoming an Animal Intuitive?!) but at the same time many activities that I have been loving in my daily life have been falling apart – a class got cancelled, one coaching client completed her work with me, another who was scheduled to work with me got sick and put our work on hold.

I’ve felt like the ground underneath my feet was getting unstable. And I even felt a little cut off from my inner compass and intuitive guidance. I was questioning everything and panicking about my business and where it was headed.

So I was feeling a little sensitive and vulnerable the other night when I went to take the garbage out. And then I saw him. He was sitting in the grass next to my driveway and in the fading evening light he looked like a funky stick or just something weird and out of place.

I looked closer and saw that it was a big, husky lizard. “Hi, Lizzie,” I said to him out loud. (I’m a big fan of nicknames.) He didn’t move or even seem nervous by my presence which made me even more curious. And I couldn’t figure out what the heck was up with his body.

I inched closer and saw that he had lost his tail a while ago – only a stump was left – and that was part of why he didn’t look very lizardy at first. And then i saw that he was shedding his skin – it had peeled of the front half of his body but was hanging onto the back half, distorting his shape and making him look like some weird two-bodied animal.

Why was he so calm? Why was he letting me get so close to him?  Did he have a message for me?

And then I got it: I was shedding my old skin, too. The old structures that had held me in place for the last year or so were worn out and it was time to expose my new, improved, bigger self to the world.

I laughed and thanked him as the sun glowed purple and pink in the western sky. I smiled as I marveled at the beauty of nature and the shared experiences I had with all of live – even a lizard who seemed to foreign to me.

Inside myself, I settled into this transition period, confident that I was going someplace and new structures were going to replace the old “skin” that had been holding me in place.

And within 2 days, I had added 2 new dream retreats to my schedule: Sacred Sound Healing Retreat for Healers with Phoebe Fazio near Mount Shasta and a Dolphin Light Healing retreat, living on a sailboat in the Bahamas for a week (!) with Jacyntha Kamor and Max Sendtner-Voelderndorff.

My old skin is certainly being replaced and I’m grateful to my new friend for sharing his message – and my inner guidance for recognizing it.

How is your intuition guiding you right now? What messages are you getting from inside or outside yourself? Share your insight in the comments so we can all benefit!

hugs, Cara