These past few months, I’ve been learning about masks. How to sew them. When to wear them. How to navigate six-feet of separation. How to communicate with muffled words and smiles unseen.

For the past twenty years, I’ve been learning about masks in a different kind of way. In the healing traditions of Ka Ta See, the primary aim is to take off our masks to discover who and what has been hidden behind.

The elders describe the masks as the social/cultural/psychological patterns we’ve absorbed and learned from the world around us. Masks are rooted in judgments and fears, in hierarchies of better-than or less-than. Masks are made up of propaganda filled with tightly held beliefs and long lists of supposed tos and shoulds. The masks become our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, communicating, and relating throughout our everyday lives.

In a mask-based society, we are boxed in by labels and lies. The masks distort our relationships by placing a facade, a barrier, something inauthentic and inorganic, between us. We’re even hiding from our own selves.

In this turning of the times on our earth, we are being called to reclaim our humanity and to undo our systems of injustice and our addictions to violence, warring, and harm. To effectively rebuild our world, we have to begin personally on the inside. To closely examine the beliefs we’re holding onto. To listen to the voices, within and around us, that have disregarded and silenced. To unlearn. To let go of the inaccuracies and judgments. To heal. To reclaim and remember. While wearing fabric masks during this time of corona, we can still untangle from the masks we carry around on the inside.

Freedom from the masks opens a universe of potentials. We will naturally see, feel, think, do, explore, discover, learn, know, and say things we hadn’t even considered possible before.

Flourish in dreaming and awakening the possibilities…

What will it be like when we have a judgment-free existence? Personally? Socially? Globally?

How will our relationships, societies, and systems be shaped when not based on hierarchies and power-over dynamics? Imagine a human-made world that does not involve addictions to warring, judging, harming, imprisoning, dehumanizing, and oppressing. No one is better-than or less. No one’s body is up for sale. No one even has the language to judge.

How will we experience and relate with our earth when we are rooted in acceptance, equity, curiosity, and love?

How will you live, day by day, when you see yourself and everyone and everything else with the eyes of the heart?