Wellness practitioner Craig Cox writes;
Have you ever thought that we sometimes confuse ourselves with our many roles in life?
It’s sometimes a case of soul vs personality.
Banker, plumber, mother, tinker, tailor, IT expert, politician, thief versus the whole person that each of us, in essence, really is.
All day long we bounce from role to role, exchanging masks and fulfilling tasks as we go, but at the end of the day, who are we?
We spend so much time pretending to be someone else that we eventually forget who we really are.
If you study your performance expectations, perceived or real, within each role, you will soon find that the majority of your stress comes from performance issues related to your mask, and not yourself.
Great spiritual teachings infer that we should become like children; no mask, just us.
From early childhood we begin to define ourselves in relation to the world around us, the people around us, and more importantly, how they interact with us.
Ogden Nash wrote, “Two men look out through the same bars; One sees mud, the other sees stars.”
The opinions and behaviour patterns transferred by our principal conditioners – our role models, parents, teachers, religious elders, TV and movie heroes – become our opinions and behaviour patterns, both about the world and ourselves.
This is a natural inculturation process; one effectively employed by nature all around us. But, unlike nature, if we are confused to begin with, what are we transferring?
Left unobserved, it can very easily lead to isolation, confusion, internal judgements and depression in later life.
There is a direct correlation between the mask you wear, how seriously you believe in your role in the mask, and your life experience.
As Neal Donald Walsch said in his Conversations with God trilogy, “There is no expectation. God has no expectation of you. All you get to do is decide who you want to be and create your life to support that experience.”
This week’s challenge:
Take some time to ask yourself the following questions:
Who am I really?
Who would I like to be?
Can I read between my lines?
Can I enjoy my masks for what they are?
Can I be myself for a moment?
