A Box, A Mask, and Some Linen
Have you ever seen a mummy in real life? Not like a zombie mummy, but one that's in a museum. 🧟
I remember visiting The British Museum a few years back and seeing a few huge sarcophagi. They were awesome, in the true sense of the word.
Seeing them got me thinking – we’re all just mummies.
Like a mummy, each of us are wrapped in layers. Each layer, a life experience.
We get wrapped up tight, placed into a big box and are forced to wear a mask showing a one-dimensional, flawless version of ourselves.
Yet, under the colorful adornments lies the real, authentic human.
Just like excavating a body, it’s scary to remove the layers! There’s fear about disrupting what’s underneath. Maybe it’ll be scary, gross, or perhaps it'll even put a curse on you!
But getting to what’s underneath is the most exciting part!
Once we do that, we learn and understand more about our own history and life.
We get to piece together clues that help us make sense of ourselves and the world.
Archaeologists say there's often hieroglyphics on the pieces of linen wrapping the mummies.
These are blessings and prayers for the deceased. 🙏
We have words written on our cloth too, but unfortunately, it's not all blessings.
We have life stories and beliefs written on our linen. But not all the beliefs we carry and experiences we hold are uplifting.
This linen though, is there to protect us. It wraps us up, attempting to keep our most vulnerable part safe – our heart.
Not your literal heart, although that’s pretty important too.
I mean, your emotional heart. ❤️
The big box, the mask, and the linen are all there to protect the emotional heart from feeling pain. Because pain is terrifying.
But if we don’t look at the box, check out the mask and undo the linen, the pain we feel becomes self-inflicted.
Yes, the box can keep you safe, but it also keeps out connection, passion, beautiful experiences and love.
And the mask ensures you're not seen as the wondrous being that you are!
The cloth we wear has so many old stories written on it, that if we don’t look at the stories, and update them with new editions, we’ll stay bound and stuck forever.
But the problem with this type of protection is that, you're also protected from feeling pain itself.
Wait, isn't that the point??? The layers protect you because pain is terrifying???
Sure, there’s a part of you that never wants to feel pain. It's probably a very young part that felt overwhelmed by big emotions and didn't have a safe adult to talk to about it. That's the part that created the protective layers.
And then there’s another part – a wise part, a subtle part – that knows differently.
It knows pain is important for growth.
Pain is your guide. It’s designed to move you forward. It’s here to show you what’s not working and where to look for the answers.
Whether it’s pain in your relationships, your financial situation, or the way you feel in your body, pain shows you where you need to look in order to heal.
When I was 22, at the beginning of my healing journey, I didn’t realize I was in a lot of pain. I only began to notice when I started causing other people pain.
Which then, caused me pain.
If I had continued to numbed myself to feelings of remorse and shame, or if I blocked out the sting of rejection and disappointing others, I may never have looked for the root cause.
So, I followed my pain.
From there, I noticed how tightly wound my linen was. Once I took it off, I read the sad stories I had been believing about myself.
I felt the heaviness of the mask I wore and looked honestly at the box I lived in.
Only then, could I start making the shifts I wanted to see in my life.
So my advice is this: Follow your pain to find exactly where you need to be.
Because when you listen to your pain, you listen to yourself, and listening to yourself is the first step in healing.