What Mask are you wearing this Halloween

Halloween is known as the day of the dead. Halloween, or Samhain, marks the Celtic New Year, a mysterious point in time when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, and people are said to be able to communicate with the dead - ancestors and departed loved ones.  Samhain is literally a world between the worlds. It was believed that on this day, the dead would be able to intermingle with the living. The living, to protect themselves from being possessed by lost souls, would dress up in ghoulish masks to frighten off the evil spirits OR to fit in with them and go undetected in order not to be possessed by them.

But it’s not just Halloween that people wear masks, maybe in a more literal and visible way we do, yet everyday we wear a mask, only these ones are invisible…even to ourselves. And we do it for the same reason: “to frighten off the evil spirits OR to fit in with them and go undetected in order not to be possessed by them.” The only difference is that now we are possessed by an invisible ‘evil’ spirit, in which we created.

We begin to construct our masks at a young age as we tried to fit into our family roles and figure which way of being would make us feel the most safe and loved. These masks were constructed to cover up deep feelings of shame, unworthiness and powerlessless.

And we don’t just wear one mask, the wounded ego can take on a variety of different masks to camouflage its perceived inadequacies. The nature of the facade that we choose varies from person to person, and most of us have more than one social mask that we wear, depending on who we are with and what stage of life we are in.  

Many of us created personas based on how others perceived our true selves and adjusted our personas accordingly to fit in, to be accepted and to feel like we are okay…creating false selves. Our false selves, then serves as a way for our wounded ego to distance itself from our deep painful feelings, in an effort to protect us. But instead, the masks that we construct to hide and protect what others (and we ourselves) have made wrong, bad, and unacceptable become an invisible fortress around our true selves.

Day by day as we continue to wear our masks of “protection”, we lose contact with our true selves. We obscure our true essence, hiding who we really are and even our ability to know and see the truth about ourselves because we have come to believe in the false self. Once our facade is firmly in place, we begin to be used by the nature of the mask we have chosen. We attract to us the very people who will help us ensure that we can continue playing the same character over and over again-even when it has become so painful that we can no longer take it. We stay glued to our false self because we believe we are the mask we are wearing.

Yet, the ‘evil’ spirits we are hiding from or fighting against is really lost fragments of our true selves. As Samhain is literally a world between the worlds, so is our everyday lives as we continue to wear our masks and live through our false selves. That is the real day of the dead.

It’s not the masks that scare us; it is what is underneath them that frightens us the most.

The Unveiling

Halloween is the time of year when we put on masks and go out and be something, someone different than we are.

Yet this annual event of becoming someone else by putting on a costume or mask, is something we subconsciously do every day of the year and perhaps a different mask many times a day depending on where we are, who we are with, the role we have assumed, etc. We often choose the mask that matches the mask of the person we’re trying to please. The masks we have chosen to wear in our varied experiences are a way to keep us safe, but hides our true self from others and ourselves.

And that is exactly what the Celts were doing on Hollows Eve … trying to hide their identity to keep themselves safe. Celts who lived 2000 years ago, celebrated the New Year on Nov. 1. This marked the end of the Summer and harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold Winter. The Celts believed that transitions, times when things change from one state to another, had magical properties.

They, thus, believed the night before New Years was a powerful time in which the veils between the two realms was thinned , allowing one to move between the two worlds with ease. October 31st they celebrated Samhain or Hallow’s Eve, when the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. Afraid the undead would harm them and cause trouble, the Celts left out food on their door steps to keep their homes safe from these ghosts.

And if the Celts people needed to venture out on this eve, they would dress up in costume and don masks in hopes of being mistaken for one of the ghosts' fellow spirits. Just as we do with the masks we wear every day. To hide our true identity, to keep ourselves safe, to fit in, and pretend to be something we are not.

Indeed October 31st - Halloween – is a magical and powerful time. A transitional time. A time to get in touch with our inner spirit, to observe ourselves more clearly as the veil of illusion is thinned. As the lines of our two worlds, our inner self and our outer selves (our own ghosts), are blurred. Opening up the realms so we can move with ease into deeper regions of ourselves and begin to remove the masks.

This Halloween I am going to be someone totally different than I, or anyone has ever been...

I am going to be me!

Happy Halloween!