Fair warning. This one goes deep. Give it the time it deserves.
What do you think when someone asks, have you met the real you?
Is it: of course I have. I wake up as myself every day.
Is it the character you portray? The brand you reflect?
Is it a cultural mask? A national mask? A professional one?
We all have them. We all wear them.
A gift of the consumer model. Of education and the way we have been taught to relate to experience. The experiences we reject and the ones we collect -- more than mere choice. They become preferences set in the mind. A bias. A shortcut that allows the mind to quickly jump to the familiar.
A character.
Who loves Oreos and hates broccoli. Who is nervous around their boss. Who is anxious about travel. Who is angry when cut off on the road. Who cries at commercials.
We do not label our burps or farts. They just pass through us.
But anxiety, fear, nervousness, concern, worry, grief, shame -- we label all of those. And every time they get stimulated, we start to think we are becoming them.
It is the past playing out in the present. An old pattern hijacking the present moment.
Instead of recognizing the old unprocessed pattern playing out, we relate to the sensation. After all, we have already experienced this before. We labeled it. And it has been guiding us ever since.
The mechanism of this is not obvious.
As we get older, our awareness gets pulled deeper and deeper into the body. Monitoring the conditions we set in order to navigate the world.
But the spiritual journey is clear.
You are not your past. You are not your conditions. You are not the old experiences you have identified with.
That is when self-guidance gets handed over to preference. To the automatic pilot of the ego. Unaware that choice is always on the other side of preference.
But you are not the masks. You are not the character. You are not the conditions or the preferences set inside them.
You are you.
Your first name. Middle name. Last name.
That is already a definition. A collapse of everything you are into a label.
Born on a specific street. A specific city. A specific state. A specific country. Each one collapses your experience further into a point.
The ego requires definitions. It cannot operate without them. The soul does not. In fact, definitions limit the soul's experience -- because the soul knows it precedes every label ever placed on it.
A million years ago, there was no America. America is a concept that was invented. You were born into it. Conditioned to believe it is a real thing. And it is, as a territory. As a set of borders, behaviors, and rules.
But you do not need to identify with its name.
The soul knows it existed before the label arrived. It will exist after the label is gone.
You are the awareness that was present before any of those definitions arrived.
When we identify with something and say, this is me, our consciousness collapses to that point. It freezes. Sets a bias. Stops accepting new information that might challenge it. And becomes the only track that plays.
You can see this clearly in Myers-Briggs. People take the test, and twenty years later, they are still telling you the same result. Same pattern. Same deterministic loop. As if they had no choice in the matter.
But those results are not you. They are showing you the preferences you have set.
Mine was ENTP. But once those patterns release, every extrovert, introvert, judging, perceiving label becomes meaningless. Because the truth is we are all of it. We do both. We are not biased toward one or the other by nature. That bias was set by condition.
We do sales. We are not salesmen.
We do creative direction. We are not a creative director.
The moment we identify with the collapsed form, consciousness sinks. And we spend our energy defending that position. Even when that position no longer serves us. Even when it has already changed.
Until there are conditions.
When we learn about abandonment. Rejection. Fear. Pain. Sadness. They drag our coherence down. Repetition in the environment continues to make us feel insecure and shy. Or overexpressive. Performing.
Until the conditions become the character.
Here is how it starts.
Your parents put you to bed for the first time in your own room. They are excited. You are a big kid now. They tuck you in, kiss you goodnight, tell you they love you. They turn off the light. They shut the door.
Instantly, your heart rate goes up. Everything moves in the shadows. You are certain that something is under the bed.
Five minutes later, you come flying into their room. Panicked.
They ask if you are scared.
You say yes.
That is the moment. The first condition sets. Not because anything was actually there. Because the word scared arrived at exactly the same moment as the charge in your body. Now they are the same thing.
Next night -- before they have even kissed you goodnight, you are already nervous. You want the door cracked. You want the light on.
Five minutes later. Same word. More charge on top of the original charge.
You go from zero to a point one. Points one to five. By the time you are twenty, the hairs on the back of your neck still crawl when the light goes off.
It does not go away until you are forty, when you have kids of your own and more important things to handle.
But it never got released. It got displaced.
It sets the formation of our character.
Do you remember the first time you were put to bed alone?
Do you remember that experience?
I was six years old.
A kid three houses down. Nine years old. Bigger than me. He came running across the street.
The rule in South Central was simple. Someone hits you, you hit them back. You learn it from the neighborhood. You learn it from the men around you. The machismo is in the air before you have language for it.
He pushed me. I hit him back. We tussled.
What I learned that day -- I can hold my own against someone older than me.
That became the shield I carried for thirty years. The hero. The one who holds his ground. The one who has to win. All the merit accumulated becomes the armor. Courage to speak up when silence is probably more prudent. An overextension of confidence.
We have all been there.
Did you flee, fight, or fawn?
I sacrificed a lot for a team I believed in. Gave everything I had to that project. When the review came -- those notes were in there.
My inner martyr showed up immediately. Looking at everything I had sacrificed -- and now this team was trying to cut me out.
On a different project, I felt it right below my throat. Right at the trachea. A gate. Speak -- no speak. No speak felt like compression. Shut up. Get through the meeting. Get out.
But I had already decided to leave the company. So anything that came out was because it needed to be said. Not from frustration. Not from anger. From care.
I told him. I just kept talking. About an hour.
I felt heard. I felt seen. I felt I was coming from a place of compassion because I cared about the team, and I cared about him.
It probably gained me respect on the floor and cost me points across the industry.
When the hero goes in, sacrifices, and does not get seen, the air comes out of the balloon fast. The torso goes cold. Everything compresses into the heart. Sinking.
Then comes the reflection. Where were my people. Did I even have people.
"I did this for you. You guys should have backed me up. You should have been there."
Have you ever sacrificed yourself for others -- only to realize they were not there when you needed them?
Fast forward thirty years.
Birthday party on Catalina. My friend Foots. About thirty people who had known me since I was twelve. First time most of us had been in the same room since COVID.
I felt it the moment I walked in.
The old version of me wanted to show up. The performer. The one with the settings they had known for twenty years.
But that version had no footing anymore.
What I realized, standing there—my body had been wired to conform. Conditional behavior for every context. Situational settings for every room. That is how we fit in. That is how we survive socially.
And I realized I did not need to do that anymore.
I could enjoy my friends. I could be with my friends.
I just did not have to perform for them.
Who do you pretend to be when everyone is watching?
A few months ago, I was running a men's group.
We spent weeks on how men show up -- or don't. The last session was on the ego. I laid it out as a construct. A condition. Something built. Something that can be put down.
The next morning, one of the men called me. A doctor. His name is Paul.
He said: I need my ego.
I asked him why.
He said: I'm a doctor. People need to see me in a certain light.
I said: if you had the highest self-respect for yourself, wouldn't that naturally command the same from others? Without the performance? Wouldn't that be the real deal instead of the condition?
He agreed. But he could not fully land it.
Because the mask had been load-bearing for so long, he could not feel the difference between the mask and himself.
Morpheus said it best. I can show you the door. You have to be the one willing to walk through it.
The first tool I show people is simple. Yes and no. The mind-body connection. Easy to feel. Hard to deny once you feel it. From there -- the observer technique. Then broader ways to visualize reality more clearly. Little exercises. Each one is widening the lens.
Nobody gets there because I told them to. They get there because they felt it. I just navigated them to the entrance.
How do you relate to your ego?
How does it carry you forward?
How does it fail you?
I did not know what I was looking for.
I did not even have words for it.
That is why I went looking everywhere. Mayan. Hindu. Buddhist. Gnostic. Different practices. Different teachers. Different experiences. Spending time inside each one, trying to identify what it was pointing at.
And when I realized it was all just energy, I collapsed the entire structure into a single map. And started practicing that.
Borrego Springs was where that map finally dissolved into recognition.
It was not a giggle.
It was a laugh of astonishment. Immediately followed by the knowing, the Gnostic knowing. An instantaneous understanding of you and how it all fits and works together.
Then a cry. Because something so complex was so simple. Hiding in plain sight the entire time.
It was like my mind had been circling something it could not quite put its finger on.
Every layer removed got me closer to the center point. And then I realized that even the description of the soul dissolves into awareness. Removing that -- the only thing left was a continuum of energy. The unified field.
And of course that made sense.
Because now I could see from the top of the mountain and look down.
That is when everything spider-webbed out. All the connective tissue between everything I had gathered across the sciences, the spiritual practices, the religions, clicked into place at once. The key piece I could not define meant nothing else fully fit. Once the centerpiece was locked in, everything else followed.
I stopped looking for the thing I had spent forty years pursuing.
The question of who I am—resolved. My mind has not asked it since. Not because I suppressed it. Because it was answered.
And then the adventure began.
What is keeping you from taking the greatest adventure of your life?
That is what SOURCE maps. 108 patterns. 108 locations in the body where those conditions are still stored. The mask has an address. Which means it can be found. Which means it can be released.
Think of it this way.
From a quantum perspective, the electron field is the base field that everything is in and from. Out of it comes electromagnetism. The universal laws of energy. Chemistry. Everything else.
It is the building block of the most subtle energies -- all the way up. Subatomic particles. Atoms. Single cells. Multicellular organisms. The biofield. You.
That is the spectrum. From the most subtle to the most material.
You are not separate from that field. You are an expression of it. Focused to a point. With a name.
You are Source expressed to a point.
At its crust -- the conditions. The masks. The accumulated behaviors, preferences, aggressions, anxieties, and narrative stories that control your behavior.
That crust is what gets mistaken for you.
The mobile hanging above the crib imprints 3D before you have your first word. Then comes math. Calculus. Statistics. The physical is described with increasing precision. The metaphysical crowded out -- not by rejection -- by repetition.
Compressed into linear thinking before you are old enough to question any of it.
And then you spend the rest of your life wondering why something feels missing.
Nothing is missing.
It is covered.
The part that says -- how can I be Source, how can I be God, if I have done so many horrible things in my life?
That is the mask talking. Shame creates a deep compression of self. That gap between where you are and the recognition that all is one -- that is not permanent. That is made of conditions. And conditions can be released.
The most human question is -- who am I?
Followed immediately by -- why am I here?
The only way to identify who you are is through stillness. There are many paths. But all roads lead to the same practices and the same destination.
Release who you are not. Become aware of who you are.
Release the patterns. The conditions. The masks. All of it that was never you.
And what remains is the real you -- the innocent child, armed to the teeth with experience and knowledge. Happy. Joyful. Creative. Give your best to this world.
Helping create heaven on earth.
This is everyone. People are waking up to their skills and abilities right now. If you have not begun -- it is time. Everyone can do it. You simply need to take step one.
It is a peeling back of the onion layers. Getting to your center. To that part of you that was always there -- waiting to shine beyond the limitations of the masks.
What is salvation -- other than freedom from your own conditioning?
That is what this work is. That is what this series is mapping. Week by week. Layer by layer. One pattern at a time.
The blue pill -- back to the familiar.
The red pill -- how deep it actually goes.
Which pill would you take. And why.
THE PRACTICE -- THE CHILD MASK MEDITATION
Find a quiet space.
Close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths. Move your attention to your body. For two minutes -- each exhale a little longer than the last. Just let the body relax.
When you feel settled, visualize your child's mask.
Not to judge it. To see it.
What does it look like? What is its fabric? How do you relate to shock -- to the anticipation of a birthday present or the rejection when it was not what you wanted? How do you relate to being afraid -- of other people, of the dark, of being responsible? How do you relate to being startled? To a bad grade? To being talked down to?
Get oriented to the texture of that child mask. How you embody it. How you act it out.
Expressed, like you threw the punch.
Or suppressed, like you wanted to stand up for yourself, and instead went quiet.
Both are the same pattern. One came out. One went in.
You do not need to fix it. You need to see it.
Before you move on.
Sit with this for sixty seconds.
What mask showed up most in this issue? The hero. The martyr. The performer. The one who needs to be seen a certain way.
Can you identify the story that built it? How old were you. What happened. What did you need it to do.
And here is the real question.
Is your grip on it loose enough to let it go -- or has it been load-bearing so long you cannot feel where it ends and you begin?
That is where the work starts.
If you want to go deeper than a newsletter can take you -- three coaching slots open this month. Message me directly: wa.me/13105000884
SOURCE maps 108 of these patterns to their exact location in the body. The mask has an address. Which means it can be found. Which means it can be released. lancepowell.gumroad.com/l/ejtdgy
Each week, one pattern. One location. One practice. At the body level. Beyond the story.
If this landed -- forward it to someone it is meant to find.
Hit reply and tell me where you felt it.
Lance Powell Artist -- Coach -- 30 years at the highest level lancepowell.art