Perhaps in this moment you are in the role of Concerned Mother? The Care-taking Son? The Excited Lover? Or maybe you’re on the phone to a call centre and you’re the Annoyed Civilian? We play so many roles as we move through our lives each day. It’s unavoidable.
The question is, do you fully identify with these roles, and each emotional impulse that comes up through the script of your body? When some aspect of your reality is unpleasing and the instinct for, say, aggression comes up through the page of your nervous system…do you respond to it? Perhaps the instinct is to submit and be courteous, diffuse it with people pleasing. Or maybe, silence? Swallow it up, it’s safer that way.
As these directions come up through your emotional system, are you blindly playing each one out? Are aspects of your wounded inner child playing you like a fiddle? What stage do you find yourself on again and again? The same drama of circumstances playing out like a record on repeat in your life.
This is the key to understand where you are blind to a wounded aspect of the self. Somewhere along the way this unhelpful behaviour got wired into the script of your body in order to survive. Maybe you couldn’t speak up to a parent and you had to swallow it up as a child. Keep it in. For the sake of a deeper need for protection, love and safety.
These dysfunctional life experiences still have us looping the same stage as adults, because our brains were wired back then and the script was written into the body.
But you have power now and it is safe to remove the mask and bring your awareness to the unhelpful role you’ve been playing. Dropping an act always hurts at first, perhaps you loose some people (actors) and bad habits. But don’t you want to open your eyes each day on a stage of your own making? With other players of your choosing? To live a life that you are consciously writing through your own embodied healing, power and awareness?
If Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage and we are merely players, then surely it is vital to be a conscious player?