Removing the masks meditation.
In this short practice,
I'm going to encourage us to take off a series of different masks.
And we can think of these masks as personas or labels or roles that we take with us through our day.
And as I encourage you to remove each one,
I'll leave a short period of silence.
And in this silence,
You can imagine what your life would look like without wearing this mask.
What kinds of thoughts and behaviours would be dropped?
What would it feel like to live without this label?
So we begin the practice by simply filling into our breath.
Filling the rise and the fall of that rhythm of the body.
Freeing the body of any tension.
The shoulders,
The face,
The stomach.
And we can gently close the eyes for this practice.
First of all then,
We're going to remove the mask of our name.
What would it look like to take off the mask of your name?
Your name doesn't define you.
You were born and then you were named.
You are much more than this name.
We're not trying to make anything happen here.
We're just seeing what the imagination produces with these prompts.
And next we can take off the label of our age.
How is this label affecting us?
This label that dictates what it's appropriate for us to do or not to do.
Imagine removing this label.
Now we can remove the mask of being someone with a particular kind of body.
That label that we have of being someone with this body.
Maybe we like it,
Maybe we don't.
What would it be like to go about our day without that sense of our body image?
Does our sense of our body subtly affect the way we behave?
Do we think that someone with this kind of body should only do certain things?
And now we can remove the mask of our job,
Our professional role,
And everything that comes with that being someone at a particular stage in our career.
Perhaps being someone who is unemployed.
And imagining what it would be like to remove that mask,
The mask of our job.
What lies underneath your job?
What kind of life?
And then we remove the mask of our political beliefs.
Left wing,
Right wing.
Strongly held sense of how society should be.
You weren't born with these beliefs.
And now we can remove the mask of being someone with a particular kind of problem.
That big problem that you have,
That you've been carrying around with you.
That label.
What would it be like to stop identifying as someone with this problem?
Might it be that part of you is already free underneath this label?
How would your life be different if you stopped telling yourself that you have this problem?
You didn't have this problem in the past.
You are much more than this.
And we stopped carrying it with us.
And now we can remove the mask or identity of being someone who needs to prove themselves or to please others.
How does it look to take off that mask?
What would be different?
Removing the mask of being a good person or a bad person.
We can even take off the mask of being a person.
Someone with a static identity.
The same now as you were a few years ago.
This person for whom it's appropriate only to do certain things.
We can take off that mask as well and feel into the more fluid way of being.
A person is full of beliefs about how their life needs to be.
What would it be like to remove the mask of these beliefs?
Just to be open to the world.
Can we imagine taking off these beliefs?
Setting them aside?
How would our life change?
Would some of that urgency and exhaustion fall away without a set of beliefs that we need to protect or prove?
And as we sit here without the mask of our age,
Our body,
Our job,
Our beliefs,
Our problems,
What is left here?
Has everything disappeared?
Still you are sensing,
You are thinking and feeling.
There is this underlying presence and intelligence that is your being.
Can we allow ourselves to sit within that,
To trust this natural intelligence that we have?
Just resting in this openness for a final few seconds.
Here there is nothing to do,
There is nothing to prove.
The being that we are underneath all of those labels.
And resting with the breath now.
Bringing the practice to a close.
