The Hermit's Shell

I missed (again) the Sunday meditation and the dharma talk at LP Chalee Hermitage because other commitments pulled me away. Maybe that is why I picked up The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo again. It has been sitting on my shelf, waiting. The book is set up as a daily companion and reflection: a quote, a small story, and then a simple practice to carry into the day. Nothing loud or complicated. Perhaps deep. Just honest invitations to look inward.

The entries from November 10th to 16th caught me by surprise. They felt like they were speaking directly to the things I have been wrestling with: suffering, karma, the middle way, impermanence, and the speed of life in this technological world where everything wants our attention at once. Sometimes it feels like life moves so quickly that I am living on the edge of myself, without space to breathe or reflect.

I have to admit that I live in my head more than I want to. I am a professional analyst at work and an amateur analyst of life at home. I analyze everything, turn it over, inspect every angle, and then inspect the inspection. The more I do that, the duller I feel inside. Overthinking scrapes away at my spirit instead of helping me understand anything.

Something Nepo wrote made me see how tightly I have been holding on to an old shell. My shell is made of identities, roles, expectations, and emotional defenses, all the things I use to feel safe. But safety and aliveness are not the same. Sometimes the shell that protects me is also the shell that keeps me from growing. When it starts to crack, my instinct is to patch it, to put a bandage on it, to pretend nothing is changing. But cracked shells do not return to what they were.

If I let it break instead, if I allow myself to shed it the way a hermit crab sheds a shell that no longer fits, then there is room to breathe again. That is the wisdom I keep circling, slowly and gently.

When I refuse to let go, when I stay trapped in overthinking, something inside me splits. My heart pulls me one way and my brain pulls me another. I try to move forward, but I feel myself torn between emotion and analysis, instinct and fear. My body is here, yet my mind wanders into worry and imagined outcomes. That split brings anxiety, emotional numbness, and suffering. It feels like being alive on the outside while fading on the inside, as if wearing a mask that hides everything but the exhaustion. A despair mask.

The only thing that has ever helped heal that split is to stop running. Not from the world, but from myself. From fear. From impermanence. From the truth that everything changes, and that no amount of analysis can stop that.

Facing fear directly is uncomfortable, but it is also freeing. I can ask myself:

What is real right now? What is only fear? What is hope? What is fact?

I have learned that I cannot offer empathy, kindness, or care to others if I do not first offer it to myself. To love others well, I have to love myself. Even if the peace comes only in a brief moment, those moments are enough. They remind me that impermanence is not the enemy. As Buddha taught, it is simply how everything moves: birth, death, growth, letting go. Everything is impermanence.

So now I am trying to live more in the middle way. Not clinging, not rejecting, and not trying to glue an old shell back together. When it cracks, it cracks. It is better to find a new shell that fits who I am becoming.

I am learning to let my heart and my brain line up instead of pulling me apart. I am learning to give myself the same compassion I try to give others. I am learning to breathe again.

Like a hermit crab, I will keep moving into whatever new shell life offers. Not to escape, but to grow.

Hermit crab!