Shedding Our Shells

The following is an edited transcription of a talk Kyle gave at the Freedom Experience that we just had this past month in North Carolina. This experience was all about discovering our roles, noticing our public and private identities, and letting go of our limiting stories to be able to move into a new phase of life. This passage is a metaphor that Kyle uses to illustrate the necessity of shedding our old lives in order to move into our new ones.

A crab eventually outgrows its shell. Because they can’t grow their shells they have to shed them in order to become a bigger crab. The crabs that haven’t shed in a while will sometimes have barnacles growing on their shells, and their shells are really thick and hard. These crabs have filled up all the spaces in their shell so they are jam-packed with meat. When you go to cook them, they are heavy and dense.

When crabs shed their shell they have to go underground as they start to form a new one. If you catch one at this phase they are light and fluffy, their shell is fresh and clean, and their shell is squishy and not hard yet. They are vulnerable. If you cook them and eat them they only have little strands of meat and little strands of muscle because it hasn’t filled all the way out into this new stage, this new shell.

That’s what it’s like when we shed our ego or our identity. Sometimes we come out of our old shell and we notice, “Oh I’m feeling really tender here and feeling a little exposed.”

I promise that a new image and a new identity will form and a new ego will form around this new space. And, even though there is more space to move into in your new form, there is going to be another point where even that new shell will need to be shed to make more space.

I think we should be doing this ego shedding annually or every two years because when you fill up all the space you just don’t fit in the same shell anymore. There will come a time when your shell limits you in pursuing the life you want.

At the Freedom Experience, we lead you through a process to shed your shell and free you up to have more ability to grow, to gain altitude, and more options in life.