The Mask Whisperer

"Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls." Mother Theresa I had someone say to me the other day that this world has no joy. Just sit with that one for a minute. No joy? Doesn’t that sound hopeless? I was left with this empty feeling in my heart and her words have reverberated in my head ever since. No joy? How sad is that?   I think that she was referring to the relentless negative news that fills our newsfeeds and how beat down she felt by it all. The media - mainstream or social - is a constant barrage of all that is wrong with the world. Climate change/natural disasters, sexual predators, shootings, animal cruelty, war, insane dictators armed with nuclear weapons....it just goes on and on. If you focus on all of that then I can imagine how one might feel there is no joy in the world. A few years ago, I bought a mantra band that says, “Choose Joy.” I wear it often as a reminder that joy is a choice. It's not something you should take for gran...

“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,...

“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 th...

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 ...