Playing with Personas

When our consciousness first entered our body it had no masks. A mask is a character that serves as a tool for relationship and is developed in response to the environment.

We are both consciousness and the ego masks that we use to express that consciousness within the body. As the ego’s need for attention, love, food and warmth are not fully met by the world around it, we develop masks or personas that serve to motivate people around us to meet our needs.

As we grow, we continue to expand our tool set of personas based on what works for us in the environments we are in. As we do, part of us forgets our essential self and comes to believe we are the masks we created to meet our needs. As a baby we may have gotten attention by yelling. If that persona remains strong we may now you believe we are a raging person, when in truth that is just a tool we continue to find useful to intimidate others in a way that gets us stuff, as it always did.

It is one of life’s paradoxes: the tools the essential self needs to survive in a body are also the masks that hide it’s brilliance. Once we get the survival thing down, many of us spend the rest of our lives searching for the essential self we lost behind the masks. It is still there of course, but sometimes it takes death to unlock the memories and set us free.

Each persona has many gifts to offer, as well as limitations. Our relationships are really a dance between the persona’s of each person involved. The creation process of new personas never ends if we continue to seek out new environments.

How many of your personas get expressed in relationship? What can you see about each other’s essential nature through them? How do they relate to one another? It can be fun to find out! To find your persona’s look at what you think, feel, do and say in different situations. You have hundreds of them, but they can be grouped into several areas: work persona’s, lover personas, service personas, family personas, etc. As a personal side note, this book is under the general umbrella of my teacher persona, which partners with my shaman, mischief maker, superior articulator, wise one and lover to provide lots of interesting content for you. [grin]

Action: Write out a list of ten persona’s. Look at how they each serve you and note their limitations. Share this list with a friend or partner.

Contents

Cresting the Waves:

A guide to sailing through life on

Relation-Ships

Dane E. Rose