I felt called to offer a psychospiritual perspective on mask-wearing. And I want to start off by sending loving compassion to whatever feelings you have in response to mask-wearing, being asked to wear a mask, being required to wear one, wearing one, not wearing one, seeing others wear one/not wear one, etc.
One of the many things I love about Facebook is that it helps me see so many different perspectives (whilst understanding that there are many many other perspectives that I never get to see!)
I believe that we are each in a continual journey with our own consciousness, and that each of us can have really different responses to similar experiences, depending on our thoughts, beliefs, history, cultural background, lineage and so on.
I love seeing that every one of our responses can point us to places inside us that need more compassion –
from unmet needs in the here and now;
to deep values we hold;
to painful experiences in our past that are asking to be lovingly heard.
And if you believe in ancestors, the collective unconscious, ancestral memories, past lives or parallel lives, then you might see ongoing very long-standing themes that show up in us, also asking for our attention.
For me, this process is two-fold – and always consists of Love AND Will:
Loving compassion for whatever is showing up in us AND
Having the capacity to act in alignment with our values.
Given that preface, let’s talk about masks.
I would love to share about three key themes:
Having choice and autonomy.
Being free to speak and express.
Care, protection and safety.
Each of us might relate to each of these in different ways.
Most English-speaking people live in what Walter Wink called the domination culture. In the domination system, power-over, coercion, force and guilt are used. The domination culture has been passed around the world through colonisation. I believe that the domination system came out of the perceived split between spirit and matter that first happened 3.5 thousand years ago, according to Jeremy Lent. From perceiving ourselves as separate to life and disconnected from Life, came power-over.
The domination system is alive and kicking. In every sphere of life, power-over, coercion and guilting people into taking action have been used – from politics and the judicial system, to the education system, to parenting paradigms and birthing institutions.
This means that most of us who are English-speaking adults probably experienced thousands of times of:
Being coerced into doing things that we didn’t want to do;
Adults using their greater physical, economic or psychological power to make us do things;
Our needs for autonomy and choice not being honoured;
Our “no” not being heard and valued;
Being punished or guilted or threatened;
Our natural feelings of frustration and outrage in response to all of these not being heard.
I call all of these ‘Will-Hurts’ because they are all ways that our natural Will, the source of our innate power, are not honoured, leading to what I call a silted up willingness channel.
We still live in a domination system, which means two things:
Where our beautiful needs for agency, autonomy and choice, which is where our deepest sense of an individual self life, are not met, we are likely to feel a number of feelings:
Powerlessness, resignation, frustration or outrage.
PLUS, all our past feelings from all the Will-Hurts we experienced as children and younger people are likely to come up.
So, we might feel both outrage around a law to wear a mask, and those feelings might be related to our present needs for autonomy, as well as times in the past where our needs for autonomy weren’t honoured.
I find that the more we understand our own unique themes in our lives, and are able to listen with loving compassion to feelings from the past, such as the outrage of the 2 year old us who was forced to do things against their will and then punished when our outrage showed up in a tantrum –
the more we are able to respond to the present situation from our true power, our true Sacred Will, rather than responding from our younger parts that are showing up to be heard.
Listening to younger parts of us, and ancestral themes, makes a huge difference to how we are able to respond in the present, and even more, which part of us we are responding from.
For example, perhaps your ancestors have experienced severe oppression. If you believe in past lives or ancestral memories, perhaps you or your ancestors experienced imprisonment for speaking up against the system. Whatever you believe, we each have stored memories and feelings from past powerlessness.
The more we can hear these past feelings related to Will-Hurts, and offer reparative experiences, the more our willingness channel gets unsilted, and the more likely we are to feel a deep sense of embodied power in bringing about change to the domination system.
This means we feel an empowered sense of having agency, of responding with a resounding Neo No to power-over and coercion, and a clear sense of acting from our deepest self and values rather than from the younger parts of us.
I wonder if this resonates with you? I wonder if you have felt feelings of powerlessness or outrage related to masks, and if so, whether these are also themes that have shown up for you from the past.
The second part is that we are talking about a mask over the mouth and nose.
Again, in this domination culture, most of us would have grown up not having our true voice or the full range of our feelings being deeply welcomed.
Very few of us who are adults now had parents who were able to lovingly listen to all the tears we needed to shed, to our frustration and our beautiful tantrums, nor to our outrage.
Few of us would have had our yeses and no’s deeply respected and welcomed, or our own thoughts, preferences and perspectives valued.
Some of us would have experienced this much more severely than others. Some of us would have been distracted by sweets or a dummy/pacifier when we cried. Others of us might have been shamed, punished or left alone to cry.
So, being told to put a mask over our mouths might connect us with all the times we were silenced in the past.
Some of us might have that even more powerfully in our ancestral line.
Your ancestors might have been whistle-blowers, campaigners or dissidents.
What you read in the next paragraph might help you connect with painful feelings. Please skip it if you prefer.
And again, if you believe in the collective unconscious or past/parallel lives, you might also have a sense of accessing memories of being gagged, being dragged off of a soap box, of being tortured or even killed for speaking up against the system.
And then there’s the third piece – masks as protection and masks as care and consideration for others.
Again, these can relate to here and now needs, as well as help us connect to unmet needs and unexpressed feelings from the past.
We may particularly value care for ourselves and our loved-ones, particularly if we are they are elderly or are health compromised or particularly at risk in some way.
In this case, we may really want to wear a mask or might have really strong feelings when others are not willing to, because it doesn’t meet our needs for care or safety.
If the first part I talked about above was most related to Will-Needs and Will-Hurts, this third section is most related to Love-Needs and Love-Hurts.
Our Love-Needs here might be for consideration, care and mattering.
And we might also connect with the Love-Hurts from the past. Times where people didn’t consider our needs, which again is very common in childhood and in the teenage years in this domination paradigm.
We might also have experienced losses where we didn’t get to cry and mourn, so that those show up as more fear in the present and more fear of loss.
Again, the more we can compassionately be with these younger parts of us and the feelings from the past, and provide loving reparative experiences, the more we are able to stand tall with our Love-Needs in the present.
For me, listening to feelings from the past and healing old themes helps us be even more deeply clear about where we stand in the present, from a stance of,
This is where I stand.
This is what I want and am willing for.
This is what I am not willing for.
We can increasingly stand here from our I, from our centre of Love and Will, because we have honoured our Love-Needs and Will-Needs and are listening to the feelings from our Love-Hurts and Will-Hurts.
I wonder if you’re feeling particularly called to attend to:
Will-Hurts around unmet Will-Needs for autonomy, choice and agency;
Feelings from the past around being silenced or not being heard;
Love-Hurts around unmet Love-Needs for care, consideration and mattering.
What are those younger parts needing so that they can be heard and given reparative experiences?
I believe that we are being invited to attend to these at this time, so we can stand more clearly from the true powerful loving beings that we are, holding our younger parts with deep compassion, whilst staying faithful to what we say YES to and what we say NO to in the present.
What are you not willing for?
What do you stand for?
Do you know when you’re responding from the younger parts of you and when you’re responding from your I?
Big love to you in these big times!