The Mask Whisperer

“No apology has meaning if we haven’t listened carefully to the hurt party’s anger and pain.” Harriet Lerner I love Brene Brown . If you aren’t familiar with her work, Google her. She has TED talks, books, a fantastic presence on Facebook, and so much more. She is a research professor at the University of Houston, an author, and speaker. The majority of her research is about vulnerability. She’s definitely worth looking into. Anyway....Brene posted a list of her favorite books recently and on that list was Harriet Lerner’s book “Why Won’t You Apologize? : Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts”. I ordered it right away and read it cover to cover in a couple of days. I won’t go into a full on review of the book but  if you do nothing else today, after reading this blog of course, buy this book and read it. As someone who witnesses people’s pain (their masks) - and who has had my fair share of it -, I can tell you that pain is as prevalent as oxygen. It’s also as i

"Before we can thread together a life that rises in the presence of sorrow we must include loving ourselves through acts of self-care." Maria Sirois. I’ve said before that masks cover the real you, and that masks are a way to protect yourself from facing your feelings - which is never a good thing. While masks can be protective, they can also prohibit your spiritual growth. And yes,  it is imperative that you grow spiritually. The problem is that when we wear masks for years we lose sight of who we really are. The first step into living a more authentic life is becoming aware of the masks you wear and when you wear them. Being aware is a very big step. The second step is learning how to love yourself. Most people don’t even know what that means, never mind how to do it. What you also may not know, is that self-love is the most important love there is. That’s because you can’t be love- ing  if you don’t love yourself. ****A word to the men reading this blog: S

“The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark and the more haunted this house becomes.” John Welwood What if...... One day, March 25, 2016 to be exact, I was watching the news while something simmered on the stove. It was bad news after bad news after more bad news. It was all just so depressing. I shut the TV off, picked up my writing notebook and wrote this:  What if we are to blame for all the bad things in the world? What if coming here to earth was a very special gift given to those souls worthy of the human experience? What if we are wasting the opportunity by not being loving to each other? What if our only purpose here on earth, in these human bodies, is to increase the collective energy of the universe? What if the only way to do that is to be more loving? What if we are failing? What if we are letting the dark side win? What if our hearts are the answer? What if? All of the wisdom traditions claim that we are all one.

“We can’t avoid pain, but we can transform our response to it.” -  Sharon Salzberg  In my last blog post, I wrote about the masks we wear. Some may have been left wondering, what the hell is a mask, and what the heck does she mean she can see it? A mask is invisible, protective armor we wear to cover up our pain. .....to cover up our pain..... We all have pain. And don't we know it by the amount of shootings, suicides, drug overdoses, divorces, etc. that happen every day. We are all hurting. A mask is our ego's way of protecting us from having to deal with our pain. Put on the mask and viola! the pain is gone. Or so we think. The pain never goes away until it's dealt with.  You name it, there’s a mask for it. Here are some popular masks that I see every day. The perfection mask. The jealousy mask. The “I’m fine” mask. The people pleasing mask. The pillar of strength mask. The angry mask. When I see someone trying so hard to be perfect, I

“The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.” - Parker Palmer  Who are you? Do you even know? Authenticity is something I value tremendously, but not everyone knows what being authentic means. Not only that, but even if you do know what it means, it can be scary to live from that place. Openness and vulnerability aren’t valued in our culture. Somewhere along the line, we were taught to hide behind masks and become the people we think people want us, or need, us to be.  Don’t show your weakness! Don’t ask for help! Don’t be anything less than perfect! Don’t cry in public! Don’t tell anyone you did that ! Don’t tell anyone you are scared! I could go on, but you get the point. We spend all of our time hiding our true self, afraid to be judged. Even worse, we don’t even know who our true self is. Take some time to ask yourself, who am I? What do you come up with? You might say, I’m a teacher or a parent or ­­­ (fill in the blank).

You cannot think your way out of a box made of thoughts - Krishna Das Have you ever been by hijacked by emotion? I talking about the kind of hijacking that happens when you least expect it. You’re going along with your day, just fine, and BAM! you hear someone say something, or you read something, or you hear a song that evokes strong emotions such as grief, anger, or maybe, if you’re lucky, love. I was going about my day a couple of weeks ago feeling pretty good. I had some stress but it was low-level stress and so I wasn’t overly anxious or sensitive. Then, in a moment of downtime, I checked Facebook. I read something that someone had written and suddenly I felt intense sadness. Intense isn’t even doing the feeling justice. It was overwhelming. The person’s innocuous post about something they were going through (that was similar to something I went through recently) brought back feelings of grief that were lying just beneath my surface. I had dealt with my grief, as one