“A child not born in love has many faces,” was what JustAsk – a powerful indigenous shaman – said on the mountain at the outskirts of the small West African village. In that moment I saw the many faces I had learned to mask myself with since childhood. The faces I created to get what I wanted, to protect myself, to be liked, to hide. They came startlingly into view. In seeing those ‘many faces’ they somehow fell away, and I caught a glimpse of the world as the one behind the mask – the nameless, shapeless, fluid energy of an unmasked self – the one born in love. In that moment there was no hiding, no agenda, no sense of yesterday. All there was was limitless presence. I saw the shaman as I had never seen him before. The veil between him and I and all beings was momentarily lifted. He laughed.

“You have been coming here since you were a little boy. This time you have reclaimed your unafraid, true-face.” The shaman continued, “you see who you are beyond the many faces you have needed to wear. May those faces now serve the one who sees through them. Take your medicine to the West. Put on the faces that best serve your gift, but do not forget the one who sees from behind.”

We each carry many faces, wear many masks. We have become skilled shapeshifters, camouflaging ourselves into a facsimile – a replica of something we are not. Like the leopard’s spotted coat blurring its presence in the deep wild, or the arctic fox as white as snow, or the master of disguise, the chameleon, shifting between different hues of camouflaged expression, we have learnt to become invisible by blending into the crowd, hiding in concealment for fear of exploitation. We have acquired the ability to conceal our vulnerable yet most powerful self as protection from a predatory world.  

“..for our survival we chose attachment over authenticity.”

With this developed survival skill we have gone as far as to hide ourselves from ourselves. Lost, we have become numb to the jungle of fears and have consequently separated ourselves from our authentic nature. As Gabo Mate says, “when we are very young we learn to choose between being authentic or experiencing rejection from our guardians – for our survival we chose attachment over authenticity.”

We establish response patterns from a tender, impressionable age and become adults with the ability to consciously choose authenticity over attachment, yet our trauma memory causes us to continue choosing the safety of attachment – no matter the cost.  When fear triggers past memories of trauma or rejection, authentic expression is blocked and the vital potential energy of life results in forming or reinforcing  a mask. In unconscious moments of fear we suppress a sense of comfort in our naturalness. Our egoic sense of self becomes frozen in a ‘safety zone’ where. to remove the mask, would result in some kind of death.

If you want to know your authentic self, ask, “who is the one without the mask, unafraid and ready to receive and embrace their most pure, powerfully vulnerable self?” Befriending the one behind the mask is vital in unfolding one’s authenticity. There we will find our original, true self waiting vibrantly behind the ‘many faces’ of our unloved selves.

Used ceremonially in the many cultures deeply rooted in their spirituality, masks have the power to transport one to the intersection of the seen and the unseen world (our known world and the infinite intelligence of the ‘Other World’). A mask creates the distinction between a fictional, individualistic world and the unified field of absolute reality. It separates the non-dual into duality – self and other. When we surrender and unmask at this threshold, magic awaits.

“When I reveal my true self to the tree, the tree will reveal its true self to me.”

Later, another shaman in the area – a tree shaman, taught me how he accesses the medicine in each tree. “When I reveal my true self to the tree, the tree will reveal its true self (its medicine) to me,” he said. “When you see the tree’s naturalness, the tree will see your naturalness. Nature cannot see the one that is hidden, its sees hiding as a threat. To protect itself nature will hide itself. If Nature cannot see you, it is because you cannot see it.”

The truth of Nature’s naturalness depends on the truth of our naturalness. Our naturalness depends on Nature’s Naturalness. Naturalness is simple, immediate and straight forward. Naturalness is spontaneous and authentic. Never strategizing, Nature does what is necessary in the moment. It is birthed, blossoms, loses its leaves, dies, or enters its chrysalis phase all in its own perfect time. Nature has no projection into the future or the past. It lives and responds in the present moment to its environment.

This spontaneous intelligence that travels through the natural world, we call intuition in the human world.

Spontaneous intuition. Intuitive spontaneity.

The natural world is wild, fierce in its freeness – a state where domestication doesn’t exist, where all phenomena are interconnected in purpose and unified in balanced diversity. We humans have conditioned our world to be predictable. We project the need for reliability – a sterilized domesticity, into the space of our surroundings stifling spontaneity. Yet, it is in the spontaneous where our authenticity and unreserved wildness thrives. It is here that abundance is created, our radiance shines and our naked, unmasked faces reveal themselves. The domestication that is apparent in colonized Western Culture exploits our talents, gifts and needs for the gain of an illusional separate self. It has conditioned us into a compromised distortion of ourselves.

Our natural state – our Buddha nature – is not findable. It was never lost, but simply buried. Buddha is realised. We cannot find our nature for we already are our nature. We realise our nature when we walk to the death of all the conditioned ideas and concepts we have of ourselves. When we remove the masks of the many faces to which we are attached we walk towards our liberation. By being brave beings in our unmasked vulnerability and love we make manifest the resilience of truth, of Nature.

If we are to live a genuine life of realness, honesty and sincerity – and it is absolutely necessary for our’s and Earth’s wellbeing that we do –  it is imperative that we realize the unseparated, undistorted truth of our Buddha nature, no matter how long it takes, to save our lives and the lives of all beings.

Ekan Nangaku

Using transformational awareness practices – like meditation – to slow the moments of your life down to be able to be present enough to observe the causes of the manner in which you behave, and what your behaviour in turn causes, will aid you to find more aspects of yourself to love.

If you can’t see your behaviour, or its causes and resulting effects, you haven’t slowed down enough to see what needs witnessing. Slow down more. Take up a practice that allows you a steady and spacious looking glass to clearly see what is going in your consciousness. The non-distracted stillness of meditation offers a powerful lens into the cause-and-effect sequencing of thought and the words and actions that follow.