There's a plant on our back patio named Melvin. A praying mantis moved in a few weeks ago, and now she's part of my morning. Coffee, quiet, mantis.
This morning she looked bigger.
She'd molted overnight. Her whole old exoskeleton was hanging beside her, a perfect empty copy of herself, and she was working it away from her body. I went in for more coffee. When I came back she'd dropped it to a lower leaf and gone straight back to hunting.
I've been thinking about it all day. Not the part where she dropped it.
The part before that.
Here's what a molt actually is.
You grow inside a hard shell that doesn't grow with you. The bigger you get, the tighter it gets, until the structure holding you together is the thing crushing you. Then it splits and you climb out, soft and exposed, and wait to harden.
And here's the part I didn't know.
During the molt, the insect has to hold completely still.
It can't rush it. It can't force it. It can't fight its way out. If it thrashes, it gets caught halfway, trapped in a shell that's no longer alive, and it dies right there. Half in, half out.
The most vulnerable moment of its entire life, and the only correct move is to not move.
That's the whole thing. That's what I want you to take from this issue.
When you're in the split, when the old shape doesn't fit and the new one hasn't hardened, the instinct is to do something. Fix it. Force it. Outrun it. Fill the calendar so you don't have to sit in it.
That instinct is the thrash. And it's the thing that traps you.
The word emotion is built on movement. It comes from a Latin root meaning to move out. That's what emotion is. Energy in motion. Energy that needs to pass through you and out.
But it can only move if you let it.
So when the fear or the grief or the shame or the anger shows up, we do everything except the one thing that works. We analyze it. Reframe it. Justify it. Distract from it. Try to convert it into something more acceptable before we've even felt it.
None of that discharges the energy. All of it holds the charge in place.
What actually works is stupidly simple and almost impossible to do.
You sit with it. You don't try to change it. You don't try to fix it. You don't reach for the lesson. You just feel it, all the way, until it's fully felt.
And then it passes. Because that's what energy in motion does when you stop blocking it.
And the strangest part is what goes with it. All those thoughts that felt so permanent and so true, the whole story the feeling was telling you about your life, those pass too. They were never conclusions. They were just the noise the energy made on its way through.
I got taught this three times this week and I only noticed after.
I pulled a muscle in my back early in the week. No kettlebells for six days. Forced still.
Before that, I went quiet online for two weeks. I want to be honest about why. I caught myself coming from a salesy place. Everything I was putting out was trying to sell instead of trying to help, and the worst part is that it felt like helping while I did it. I built Emotion Over Pitch on one principle, that your emotion cannot be the thing running the room, and there I was with my emotion running my own room. So I stopped. I didn't push harder. I sat in it until it cleared.
And I'm waiting on something big right now that I don't control. It's close and it isn't finished. There is nothing to do but be still and let it come.
Three different situations. Same instruction.
Last week I wrote that anger is a climb, not a fall. Hawkins puts anger above fear and shame on the scale.
Here's where it goes next. Anger, then courage, then acceptance.
And acceptance isn't a mood. It's the moment you stop trying to change what's already happening. It's the stillness. It's the same instruction the mantis follows, just written for people.
That's the step I got this week. Not because I'm enlightened. Because my back hurt and my mouth was saying the wrong things and the money isn't in the account yet, and stillness was the only move left on the board.
Sometimes that's how you learn it.
She dropped the shell and went back to hunting.
Stillness first. Then movement. Always in that order.
If you're in the split right now, in that tight, wrong, uncomfortable place where nothing fits anymore, I'm not going to tell you to push through it.
Be still. Feel the whole thing. Let it move.
It will pass. And so will every thought riding on top of it.
Then you drop the shell and get back to work.
Sixty-one days in. The shell is getting tight again, and I'm choosing to read that as good news.
The 90 Day Challenge is free. One Good Decision Pro included. jamesblackconsulting.com.
For the ones already moving,
James
