Let me tell you about masking.

It is masking the traits that are seen as aberrant and hiding the truth of what you are really feeling.

It is at once vulnerability and weapon.

It can be unconscious, and it can be conscious

Under enough duress, the conscious choice no longer an option.

You escape in order to survive.

Now, you are remembering to understand, understanding to remember.

Remember and rewire that your body and nervous system began this loop when this thing happened way back then and way back when. It was entered without your now supervision and it's been functioning as the tape and the code for most of your life and memories, until now. The now we choose to become conscious of the persona. Then, we can choose to engage it, or just stand by and watch and learn as it completely transforms the energy of a being and a space, taking over with such ferocious grace of wounded animals and caged fighters. If you are that type of person, a being of fire and smoke and storm, hills and sand and promises, destructions, grieving, loss and poetry and archways and crossroads what you will be masking is the deep subterranean cavern of power and the sparks of insanity (electricity) that blaze across it. Masking is the appearance of a normal life and temperament when you have a mood disorder. It is pretending you think like someone when you in fact think in a completely different way. It is appearing one way but feeling and thinking something else. It is pretending to like people that you do not, in fact, like. It is trying things when you feel like stopping. It is staying quiet when you see something not quite right. It is acting in a certain way in order to fit in. It’s giving away one’s hopes and dreams to the wind, a loss that haunts you until the day you die. I wanted to say sacrifice, but I know that intimately how a sacrifice works. If you loved your hopes and dreams, if you really loved in the fire in your belly your passion and vision and muse and mind’s eye image, daydream material, you just have to ‘survive’ until then, you would never let it go! Better than surviving, you go for it and work for it and show up for it and do anything in your power to make its happening easier. If you let go of you dreams, it was a passive action. You let go. You let your hand go limp, relax, unclench the muscles. You let something near and dear to you slip right out of your hands without much provocation. Unless it was a whole lot of beating and torture, this dream don’t stop for nobody. The show must go on over here, for me, and it has kept me alive many a time, and brought me safely through thorns. I won’t let go. I won’t be coerced out of it, I won’t forget it or trade it in or sell it. It is my birthright. If you let go, it was a choice and a loss, but not a sacrifice. A sacrifice is a conscious and deliberate action to prepare and offer a very dear and near part of us. Something that we care about deeply, something that we are gifting, something we are doing in presence of our guides, gods and goddesses with a precision and readiness. We offer up this part of ourselves symbolically as an exchange between us, a monument or celebration, a dedication to a time or a thing we did or happened. There is so much wisdom stored in every inch of experience if you but cup your hands around it and hold it close, and then in the format that most represents that experience or thought you are having that you wish to gain clarity around, release or alchemise, you select an object and engage in a process or action with that object. This action symbolises your relationship with the notion, memory or process, or presents a gift, see above, and energetically and notionally as well as materially and physiologically, you do whatever it is you are going to do with the thought/thing/etc.

So giving away hopes and dreams, that’s masking. It’s not noble.

We give away parts of ourselves, forget things that are important, doctor and sanitise who we really are to get by in the world.

If masking is this persona, and you are seeing your connection to it and/or your many masks, then you see the dilemma because we all look through mirrors and glass around here. What we see is very much a game of light and smoke reflecting to us only what we ourselves also contain, experienced in the material world as matter and different physical objects, creatures and identities. We experience otherness in this format that is quite expressly different on the level of the stars and celestial beings. Oneness made way to duality, in this world of opposites and all the shades in between.

Being the true self is a SCARY thought to most people. That is the world we have inherited. On the one hand, and all the spectrumite steps in between to get to the one we are building. One of truth, justice, alleviating suffering, righting wrongs, opening new paths, enriching lives, cleaning up, creating something NEW, putting back together the broken, allowing difference to thrive, sitting back and watching nature’s cycles and listening instead of talking so much. Opening our eyes to ourselves and each other, and turning it into a world where we can look at each other and see me.