According to Chinese culture the tradition, 2025 has now begun a new zodiac cycle in the Year of the Snake. It is said that in this year, favourable lunar conditions will mark a great time for promoting growth and transformation. So just as a snake sheds it’s skin, what comforting or cumbersome layers can we also shed away for growth and renewal in our own lives.  

 In some ways, we too can shed our old skin like giving away a bag of clothes to the charity shop.  We may even experience a fleeting moment of regret before rejoicing in the promise of a whole new wardrobe. But it is often the case that we are not prepared to let go of the things that we really love in life when they are taken.
The year of the Snake can remind us that letting go is one of life’s hardships, that we can all benefit from paying a little more attention. And it is much easier said than done, because whether its ‘loves labour’s lost’, an offspring who’s eagerly flown the nest, that nice shiny thing you can’t find anymore or hanging on to your own stubborn thoughts. Everything comes and everything will go in its own sweet time not ours!

We can want a thing, pay the money and collect a receipt but it still may not remain with us for a lifetime. Sadly, there are a multitude of ways you might lose hold of a nice thing in life. Like when the government compulsory purchased your property for a crazed railroad scheme and thousands of folk couldn’t do a thing about it1. Capitalism will have you believe that joy is in the next diamond bracelet or fancy perfume, but it’s actually in those simple things in life that will give us all the lasting happiness that we desire. Because the truth is that the more we have and the nicer those things are, the greater their loss. And this loss isn’t hard to come by… in fact loss lies in wait around every corner, effortlessly catching us off guard time and time again.  
At some point in our lives, we will all fall victim to losing something that we still want to keep hold of, it is the basis of all mental anguish and suffering in this world. It’s a sad situation to which this modern world does not prepare us, and what makes it so hard is that it’s perfectly natural to view having things as normal because its in the use of external things that seems to sustain us… After all, it’s only human nature to want to keep hold of a good thing.

So how do we best deal with this impending and inevitable predicament? Could a pessimistic attitude be helpful here? To defend our walls well and keep a cool detachment from all nice things we come across? Or do we live, love and laugh… in the spiritual knowledge that it is in the experience of all life’s lessons that is the pact of each soul journey to enlightenment… in the daily practice of giving and sharing not keeping and hoarding… in the view that we are mere caretakers not owners… and in the remembering that life just as nature is an ever-changing landscape. A constant and incredible dance of the wheel of death and rebirth, to mourn the loss but always to rejoice in the dawning of the new day that is to come.
When were stuck for answers it is often helpful to look to the natural world to lead by example. We can see that nature does not accumulate or keepth for herself, it is always in a harmonic and symbiotic relationship of living to give and taking from earth what is needed to sustain. Because when we go we will take nothing with us. Live simple and live free.

“When you say you own something you become owned by it”. An conversation with Yogi Vishua Karma, in the kitchen of the Sivananda Yoga Centre London, 2015.

[1] High Speed Rail (HS2) compulsory purchase scandal, https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/owners-forced-to-sell-by-hs2-furious-at-cancellation-says-lawyer/5117454.article