Removing the masks

There is one feedback I heard many times about our event in Paris “it gave me permission to reunite the two persons in me”. They meant the two “personas” in them.

They could talk about their personal work to improve themselves or challenges such as addictions at an event where many other open minded people were.

Permission to remove the mask was granted to all of us, me included.

“According to Carl Jung and the Jungian psychology, the persona is also the mask or appearance one presents to the world.” - Wikipedia

Most people I talked to are not “one”, they have one mask they present to the world -especially in business- and the real “them” or at least who they think it is (I will keep this fascinating topic of the multitude of masks for another post).

They could share freely their consciousness or spiritual work or beliefs on one side and take a break from who they present to the world, often very different.

When the mask is really far away from who we really are it can turn into unbalance and sickness. Balance in this case can be found through addictions, sex, alcohol, too much work, stress, sugar abuse or any type of “bad” drugs… name your poison.

Working with daily meditation or plant medicine does the same for me, only the speed at which you progress is different. It shuts down the “default mode network” and lets us observe ourselves and get to know the real person or the real “spirit” behind the masks. I experienced this constantly in the last 10 years I have been working on myself.

When I was in the forest with indigenous I removed all the masks. Then I was offered another one as the Chief of the tribe I worked with, Nixiwaka Yawanawà gave me a new name. Without all the masks I created or was given since I was born the child in me loved playing with this new indigenous mask. A new name, a new way to dress, many many face paints (all different masks) even some beautiful feathers on my head sometimes created many new “personas”.

When I came back to the world this last June, I was shy to share. It might not feel this way if you follow me but it’s not random that I started writing my most transparent posts about the experience on a smaller newsletter I created, yawa.news. There I could be that new person I thought I was but really all I was, was a new mask, “learning to be indigenous”. I did not dare to write the same way on this one that has the name I was born with.

Time for me to reunite into one, the real me, that is now both an entrepreneur and working on myself constantly.

As of today I will not write on yawa.news anymore, I will only write here, under my real name, with the same focus of writing without my masks.

I have also turned-on subscription options on this newsletter. I am fascinated by how Substack has enabled so many writers to generate subscriptions.

I will start writing some subscribers only posts every week, special zoom calls with guests and offer some surprises such as priority at our events to subscribers.

The revenue will go straight into PAWA so we can improve the online community and make more beautiful events.

Thank you again for reading me and for supporting this work of helping others work on themselves through our community and events.

I am conscious that I had promised no more than one email a week here, I will post more often as of today. I hope it’s going to be interesting for you. I am really excited to experience all the features of Substack and report back on the experiment.

PS:
-the entire replay of our event PAWA.life is available for free at pawa.beem.xyz all the talks are there!

-we have started a 90-day meditation challenge just logging daily “day 1/90” in our online community, everyone can do it and many did, you can still join!