Pay Attention to Your Skin
When we look in the mirror as we age, our focus is on our skin. We see wrinkles and new spots that weren’t there the year before, and we (hopefully) start getting checked at the doctor’s office for irregular moles. (Please do it; it can save your life.) The sun can damage our skin a lot.
We also have another layer of skin: the layers of skin of our minds. These layers are built up over the years from our emotional experiences. There’s an expression about peeling the onion to get to the root of ourselves. I’m referring to these layers.
Creatures shed their skin (molting) to grow bigger. Once the old skin is shed, new growth can occur. We must do the same with our emotional selves to grow and evolve.
I’ve been going through the molting stage this past year. Feeling all the pain from my past and crying it out has felt like I am shedding my old skin. I am grateful I’m strong enough to feel it all without breaking down. And with each shedding experience, I also feel lighter, more in touch with myself, and more focused on my life.
Our internal skin layers hold our old memories, past hurts, and happy times. How do we keep the good layers while getting rid of the ones that weigh us down?
It’s simple: Focus on the good while releasing all the painful ones. Being grateful for those good experiences keeps them with us while still shedding the old skin.
Just like when we use a loofah (natural or plastic) or a scrub to remove dead skin and debris from our bodies, the same is true about opening our minds to remove all the toxic thoughts. These are the negative junk thoughts that flood our minds every day—the ones that tell us we’re not good enough or make us doubt ourselves—and they all must be sloughed away.
It may not sound like a pleasant thing to do to remove our old interior skin, but the evidence of this act is as satisfying as when we get rid of dry, callous skin on our heels to reveal soft new skin. I used to use a pumice stone or callus file to remove the dead skin on my heels, but I’ve been using Kerasal Intensive Foot Repair for years, and it is the best thing to repair the cracked, dry heel skin, and it keeps my heels soft and pretty. Who knew you could have pretty heels? Well, you can!
We’ve all heard the saying, “You need to have a thick skin.” That refers to taking criticism by having a tough outside shell to defend yourself against feeling hurt. But our inside “skin” is even more important than that.
If our thoughts are making us sick or depressed, it’s time to shed them and make way for new, healthy thoughts of thinking about feeling healthy and happy. Our thoughts are everything! Seriously. We can control our lives just by thinking more positively, and the first step is to get rid of the old skin of yesterday.
Visualizing ourselves sloughing off the dead skin of the past can feel refreshing and uplifting. Imagine a loofah sponge inside our minds scrubbing off painful memories, such as words that hurt us that we’ve held on to for far too long, images that keep us stuck feeling anger or shame, or any other negative memory that burdens our present happiness. See all the old skin being sloughed away and rinsed away down a drain, gone forever. You will feel so much lighter as a result.
As we must protect the skin on the outside of our bodies by bathing and sloughing off dead skin cells, using lotions and sunscreen, and limiting our time in the sun, we must also protect our inside skin. Shedding the old is good for us. It might even manifest as relationships that fall apart, and that might be necessary to create new relationships that are healthier and better for us in the long run.
Don’t fear getting rid of the old skin. Fear holding on to it and living a life weighed down by the past. We deserve better.
Thank you for reading this, and I know if you shed your old skin, a radiant, beautiful you will appear looking back at you in the mirror and your mind.
To our skin,
Francesca
