Category: Mindset

Fear wants to know. What happens when we stop trying to solve everything?

There is so much to be afraid of — or is there?

I feel myself tremendously impacted by the state of the world. Just when you think one war is over, a new one starts.

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We were sitting in church on Sunday. This particular church has the feeling that it could hold any religion or spirituality. Michelle, the minister there, holds that principle wonderfully. She is a breath of fresh air.

It’s not unusual for her to encourage the congregation to imagine their faith without the church.

What is your relationship with a higher power when everything else is stripped away she would ask?

I love this question because it challenges us to look beyond the structures, institutions, and people we might feel we need in order to access something bigger than ourselves.

I think because this relationship with life and mystery is so real for her, so alive, she is able to say it very simply.

So when she began her sermon, and the war with Iran had recently started, she said.

“I don’t know what to say about it. But my heart goes out to the people.”

What a beautiful position in a world full of opinions.

I don’t know. And I deeply care.

I found that very comforting.

This whole week I’ve tried to stay in that place of I don’t know.

Because the fear can come on strong sometimes.

And I notice how quickly my mind wants to know.

To feel more in control.
To find certainty.

I can take in too much news.
Too many images.
Too much information.

And the impact is big when fear is in the driver’s seat.

Fear wants to know.

Fear doesn’t want us to stay in uncertainty.

But life has always been uncertain.

Sometimes it can feel more uncertain than others. But the times when it didn’t feel that way didn’t mean it actually wasn’t.

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I worked with a young woman recently who told me about the horrific images TikTok was showing her — unasked for.

In some ways I feel lucky to belong to a generation that is slightly behind all of this. I’m way behind on social media. And that also feels like a blessing.

But for many younger people these platforms have become places where a sense of safety and belonging is built.

This person told me she wouldn’t know what to do without TikTok.

What’s strange to me is that we know we are exposed to more than we can handle — and still we reach for the content.

It’s easy to become out of touch with the fear itself and instead move into chronic problem-solving mode.

Especially when the world feels fragile and volatile.

So I wanted to write about fear this week.

And about working with this problem-solver in us — not against it.

Without seeking a perfect existence, the question I find myself asking is this:

What is the right level of fear to experience?

And how do I know when I’ve moved outside that bracket?

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Loch Kelly offers a powerful invitation.

He asks:

What’s here when there is no problem to solve?

Or perhaps more simply:

What if there is no problem right now?

Often something subtle happens when we ask this.

There is a little more space.

The breath becomes easier.

The chest may open slightly.

Even if you get a moment of this, it’s gold.

Because you can almost bank on the fact that your system will clench up again.

But the more references we have to this non-problem-solving state, the more capable we become of addressing the problems that are actually in our power to solve.

It’s a strange irony.

Fear often pushes us away from constructive action.

When its grip is strong, we lose what Michael Meade calls our poetic relationship with life.

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The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa once said that we live like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.

And when fear is active, the mind begins running its familiar loops.

What is going wrong.
What might go wrong.
How to fix it.

Judging.

Obsessing.

Figuring things out.

Have you noticed how many moments of the day are spent trying to figure something out?

Even when nothing actually needs solving.

If I pause randomly during the day and ask myself what is happening inside right now, I often find something subtle.

Not exactly agitation.

But a slightly edgy feeling.

A kind of background sense that something around the corner could go wrong.

And when we look closely, much of it revolves around a deep apprehension of loss.

Loss of the body.

Loss of people we love.

Loss of belonging, respect, or identity.

Somewhere deep down we know that everything changes.

And something in us tightens in response.

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From a neuroscience perspective this tendency makes sense.

The limbic system evolved to scan for danger.

It’s part of what psychologists call the negativity bias.

If you have one hundred encounters with dogs and ninety-nine are friendly but one bites you, you remember the bite.

Fear, in this sense, is nature’s protector.

The challenge is not that we have fear.

The challenge is that sometimes the fear response gets jammed.

Instead of responding to real threats, the alarm system begins firing across many areas of our lives.

Fear takes root in the tissues.

In our thoughts.

In our emotional patterns.

In our behaviours.

And when we are fully inside that loop we enter what Tara Brach calls a kind of trance of fear.

Inside that trance we lose access to some of our capacity.

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Sometimes the body itself becomes part of the defence.

A bundle of tense muscles.

The mind starts figuring things out.

Then worrying.

Then more details follow.

Thoughts keep the emotion going.

Whereas emotions in the body often move through much more quickly if we let them.

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But, what if we didn’t have a problem with the problem?

What would it be like if the difficulties we feel so intensely under our skin were not actually as catastrophic as they seem?

What if the need to solve them moved into a more creative space?

The stakes are still there.

Life still matters.

But the urgency softens.

There is more space.

And maybe, if you did nothing at all for a moment, that might also be okay too.

Crazy idea, right?

Because often there is a part of us that will downright refuse.

If things became that spacious, it might feel like giving up.

Like weakness.

Like something dangerous might happen.

I once worked with someone who said to me:

“Standing still would feel like going backwards.”

But slowing down has its own intelligence.

Slowing down comes with an echo.

Whatever we have been doing — over days, weeks, months, or years — begins to catch up with us.

The reverberations move through us.

There’s really no other way.

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When we begin to contact these feelings directly, we often discover something surprising.

Fear.

Fear that has us clenched in ways that once helped us manage what was unmanageable.

To meet fear directly can feel like a small death to the personality.

Because in those moments we go against the default operating procedures that have been practiced for so long.

And yet there is something exhilarating in this too.

We get to do something different.

Tara Brach describes this as attending and befriending.

Listening to the fear.

Feeling it directly in the body.

And perhaps sensing the life that sits underneath all the problem solving.

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At the heart of all this there may be a deeper question.

Can I really be who I am?

Michael Meade speaks about this as a poetic grasp of our lives.

Beyond the survival instinct there is also something creative within us.

Certain things light us up more than others.

Those are often the very things that put us back on our path.

To follow that nature asks us to loosen our grip on the identities we built in the past.

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If we truly believe there is a problem right now, what impact does that belief have on our body and mind?

You might pause for a moment and check.

Right now, is there actually a problem that needs solving?

Or is there simply breath, a body sitting here, and a mind that has become very skilled at imagining the next thing that could go wrong?

Sometimes the more subtle problems carry the greatest weight.

It shows up as stress.

Tightness.

A narrowing of our vision.

And in that tightening we lose contact with what might already be here —

support,

possibility,

even creativity.

Things that may have been present all along.

Waiting for a little more space.

We had our neighbours over this week. They come from a very different cultural world to ours — they are Zulu.

I don’t even know where to begin speaking about cultures other than my own. As a white South African with Christian roots, their way of life couldn’t be more different from how I was raised — even though my own upbringing was more secular than anything else. I grew up in an insular home. High walls separated us from our neighbours, and we remained largely disconnected from the people around us in any meaningful way.

My neighbour Judi (a pseudonym) is one of eleven siblings. She was raised in community. As with anything, there are highs and lows. In her world, everyone knows everyone. Privacy is scarce. Your business is rarely only your own.

And yet, I’ve always longed for something like that — a felt sense of belonging to a larger whole. Of having many brothers and sisters, both inside and outside of family.

What I’ve come to learn about myself is that building cross-cultural bridges is something I love. And at the same time, it reliably takes me far outside my comfort zone. I know I’m going somewhere unfamiliar, and it’s not something I rush toward.

I think this is a built-in feature of purpose: it’s rarely something you hurry into, and there’s no obvious payoff for the ego. Something deeper inside says move. Go there. And it’s hard to explain why you would — except that not going somehow starts to feel more painful.

In that sense, purpose may be motivated more by pain than by calling.

At a certain point, it becomes harder to stay comfortable. Comfort itself turns into its own kind of enemy, because somewhere inside we’re longing for something beyond it.

Oliver Burkeman puts it this way:

“Resisting a task is usually a sign that it’s meaningful — which is why it’s awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt ‘Do whatever you’re resisting the most’ as a philosophy of life.”

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Life Is Expensive

Halfway through the evening, Judi said something that stayed with me.

“You know,” she said, “it doesn’t matter if you have anything or not. If you have food or not. You carry this expensive gift called life.”

The word expensive stayed with me. Not precious. Not sacred. Expensive.

It broke the usual chain of haves and have-nots. It cut across circumstance. No matter where we come from, we all carry this “expensive” gift — life — and somehow we can never lose it.

Let’s name another feature of purpose here: a sense of rightness that arrives without effort, often without choice. Energy moves. Something aligns. And strangely, it feels less like you chose it and more like it chose you.

And often, what’s choosing you isn’t that sexy.

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Disappearing

Back in modern life, purpose has become one of the most seductive words of our time. Everyone seems to be searching for it.

It’s slippery — sometimes present, sometimes gone. I might be sitting in front of a sunset, and suddenly there is no purpose at all. Just light. Just colour. Just being here.

In those moments, purpose doesn’t feel deliberate. It finds me rather than the other way around. And when it does, it undoes me. There’s no story left. No striving. Just presence.

Of course, we can’t rely on sunsets to guide our lives. But they reveal something important — not what purpose is, but what it feels like when we touch it.

This brings me to another feature of purpose, following Judi’s teaching: you disappear.

When purpose is real, your will doesn’t obstruct something larger. You become more like an empty chair. And emptiness is not easy.

Feeling full often feels safer. We lean into what we think we know. Into opinions, frustrations, fears, desires. Into other people’s certainty. Into borrowed directions.

But to encounter purpose, we often have to become emptier than we want to be. Which takes us right back to the beginning: emptiness touches the very thing we most resist. And, as Burkeman suggests, resistance is often the marker of where we need to go.

I’ve seen this same quality in music.

There’s a moment when a musician is fully absorbed — when effort disappears. It’s no longer clear whether the person is playing the instrument or the music is playing them.

Nothing feels performative. There’s no story about destiny or importance. Just skill, presence, surrender.

Nothing left but the music.

That feels like the difference between meaning that inflates purpose and meaning that right-sizes it. It’s not big or small — it just is, without story attached. And yet it moves us, quietly shaping a life that feels wider, thicker, more inclusive.

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The Traps

There is a reward for following the harder impulses. They fill us in ways short-term fixes can’t. But even here, the experience is strange. It doesn’t feel like pleasure in the usual sense.

And still — who’s to say that going to a movie or sharing a meal with a friend isn’t part of purpose too? Sometimes those are precisely the things we don’t feel like doing — and we lose ourselves in them anyway.

With that groundwork, I want to name some of the traps.

We often speak of purpose as if it were a destination — something to discover, claim, and finally inhabit. In spiritual communities especially, purpose gets dressed in colour and ceremony. The shaman on the pedestal. Feathers. Symbols. Mythic language.

If only I could live like that, we tell ourselves, then my life would finally make sense.

Purpose becomes something close enough to feel, distant enough to chase. And that chase can become its own form of suffering.

What’s rarely questioned is whether the way we relate to purpose actually pulls us away from the very thing we’re longing for.

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A Project of Ego

We live in a meaning-hungry time. You can feel it in the air. Beneath productivity and self-improvement, there’s a longing — and I think it’s a valid one. Who wants to get lost in a world of superficiality?

Mythologists like Michael Meade speak about soul-level calling — archetypal energies we arrive carrying. The idea that life has a story etched into the soul, something waiting to be lived. I resonate with that. I don’t want to live as if all this is pointless. Even if we never know for sure, treating life as meaningful feels more useful to me.

And yet, this language can also seduce us. It can start to suggest that only a certain kind of life counts. A magical one. A meaningful one. A life with a clear arc.

So I find myself wondering about the ordinary.
The repetitive.
The dry and unremarkable.

Could that be purpose too?

More and more, I notice how easily purpose becomes something the ego puts on. A story of specialness. A promise that the suffering will make sense later. That the discomfort is leading somewhere elevated.

The ego isn’t the enemy. It’s protective. It wants things to cohere. Purpose gives it that — beautifully.

And that’s where the trap sits.

I’ve watched people step into “purposes” that weren’t really theirs. From the outside, you can feel it. They’re doing the thing because they think it will give them status, or legitimacy, or relief. Because it promises power, respect, belonging, or a way to fill the emptiness inside.

When purpose becomes identity — role, destiny — it gives the ego something to stand on.

True purpose, as I’m coming to understand it, is actually anti-ego. It keeps leading us to the one place the ego would rather not go. And strangely, that means we don’t have to search so hard.

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What’s Left

So after all this, what’s left?

I want to offer a simple working definition:
purpose is making something with the conditions of your life exactly as you find them.

Your purpose is to make something out of the material that’s here.

Or, as Suleika Jaouad puts it, to be creative with your survival.

It’s alchemy. Looking at your life like a garden and thinking the way a gardener would: What can grow here? What needs tending? What needs time?

Your purpose is to tend that garden as a gardener would — seeing what needs doing, dreaming about the kind of garden you want to create. And a good garden needs compost. You could say all our pain and difficulty can be that compost.

Your purpose is to trust yourself to notice the movements — and to follow them. Simple like that.

If you’re anything like me, you may feel tired, weary, or even afraid to dream. Disappointments and broken promises — from ourselves or from others — can leave parts of us that would rather not try. That reluctance is understandable.

The good news is we can meet those parts with curiosity. We can give them space. And we can still dream.

Even better, the body has an intelligence that can bring the dreamer in us alive.

The mind, though, doesn’t always trust the body to do the dreaming. The mind wants to stay in control.

The body knows no control.

Ram Dass used to say, “Relax. Nothing is in your control.”

On first hearing, that can sound less like wisdom and more like a nightmare.

Nothing?

Of course there is a voice inside that protests. That can’t be true.

But let’s step into that perspective for a moment.

What if it were true that nothing is in your control?

Would you just throw in the towel and call it a day?

Of course not. No one would. Because it’s actually impossible to do nothing.

Try it for any length of time and you’ll feel it — the itch, the restlessness, the pull toward movement.

So “relax, nothing is in your control” doesn’t mean give up.

It doesn’t mean disengage from life or abandon the wish to be better, kinder, more alive.

Hell no. If that impulse lives in you, it’s a miracle — something worth safeguarding at all costs.

But if goodness, or the will to be better, already lives in you, control won’t get you there.

It’s already happening.

You didn’t decide to have that longing.

You didn’t manufacture it.

All you can really do is follow it.

And somehow, the body knows how.

The intelligence of the body is animal, instinctual, visceral, clear.

It speaks in sensation, energy, intuition.

The body tells you before the mind when you’re in the company of the wrong people — the sinking in the chest, the knot in the stomach, the uneasy flutter you can’t explain away.

And it tells you just as clearly when something is right.

Think of a time you were about to see a close friend, or someone you love.

The chest opens. There’s space. Warmth. A subtle excitement.

That’s not thinking — that’s energy. That’s sensation.

That’s the body speaking to you all the time, quietly pointing out where you’re moving toward life and where you’re moving away from it.

Which is why, if we’re going to do any dreaming at the start of a new year, it has to involve the body more than the mind.

The mind has endless ideas — and let’s give credit where it’s due. There’s a great deal of intelligence there, and not something we want to throw away.

But it’s the body that sifts through what’s actually mine to do.

The body gives you that felt sense of this is right.

The mind, on the other hand, can deceive us.

Thoughts can arrive that sound convincing — even noble — and still be completely untrue.

Sometimes they’re just fear dressed up as reason.

Sometimes they’re desire pretending to be destiny.

The body helps us feel the validity of an idea.

It moves us out of fantasy and into imagination, where the dreamer in us can take flight, but we still have access to the roots of the tree.

Feet on the ground, even as we reach into the branches and the deep blue sky.

Imagination is where real dreaming happens — beyond fear, beyond compulsion, beyond what I’ll loosely call the lower mind.

Not to shame it, but to acknowledge it. Those lower currents — our grasping, our tightening — can keep the dreaming body bound if we don’t see them clearly.

So what is embodied dreaming, if we take seriously the idea that nothing is in our control?

It’s not passivity.

It’s not doing nothing.

It’s allowing the dreamer to play in the world of imagination.

What do you care most about?

How do you want to feel?

If there were no time pressure at all, what would still feel urgent?

Where does your energy want to go?

If dreaming is in you — and I suspect it’s one of the most universal qualities of being human — then relaxing may actually be synonymous with dreaming.

The grip of the lower mind loosens.

The imagination comes online.

The view widens.

So relax. And dream.

Relax, and follow your breath.

Follow your dreaming body.

Because if it’s true that nothing is in your control, then it’s not the mind you trust to figure out your life.

It’s the intelligence in the body — what some of my teachers call the unbroken self — that knows the movements your life is quietly asking you to make.

It’s that time of year again when we find ourselves nearing the end of a full cycle around the sun.

As a teacher of mine says: “December arrives with her bag of paradoxes: joy and grief, victory and defeat, beauty and difficulty all tangled together.” This is the season of remembering, not as a dusty archive of “what happened,” but as a living practice of honouring what was, so that it can ripen into fuel for what wants to come.

It’s also a time when we start to think about next year. As we approach the new year’s moment, it is a transition we cross never to return again. This year we are in—2025—takes its place in the library of the past. And as we continue to move into the future, things of this year that felt so important and urgent begin to fade as new priorities take their place.

The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions

The challenge in this great arc between past, present, and imagined future is that we live in a culture intensely future-focused. Exhibit A: the tradition of New Year’s resolutions — “This year I’m going to be better!”

And yet, we so often repeat the same patterns.
Because willpower isn’t enough. Motivation isn’t enough. Good intentions aren’t enough.

The Real Condition for Change

There is only one real condition for change from my perspective: seeing.

We have to be willing to see ourselves clearly. Awareness itself contains all the ingredients for the changes we are looking for. It’s unusual to think about it this way, that we don’t have to try so hard to change. In fact, the trying often gets in the way. Every year we witness people making bold resolutions, keeping them up for a while, and then falling back even harder into the old ways.

But what if the issue isn’t the resolution?
What if the issue is our relationship to the old ways?

Take an extreme example: someone whose old way is drinking too much decides to stop. It’s probably an intelligent idea. But it also reveals one of our human blind spots — the belief that we can simply decide to change and that will be enough.

The decision isn’t the problem. The how is.

How to Change

How do we change?
How do we dream a future that actually fills and guides us?

We are dreamers by nature. Every night we drift into that mysterious inner landscape of imagination that feels utterly real. To dream deeply is to be in communion with something larger than ourselves. And the dreams that most fulfill us are always, in some way, in service to life.

So the real question for the dreamer in us, the one longing for a more honest, grounded, or sober life is:

How do we move with the dream in a real and embodied way?

And here comes the part many of us resist.

The Practice of Composting the Year

The Akan people of Ghana express the art of remembering through the symbol Sankofa, a bird walking forward while turning back to retrieve an egg. Its teaching is simple and profound:

“Go back and fetch what you left behind.”

In this worldview, the past isn’t something to escape.
It’s a living source of guidance.
Nothing is wasted, every experience contains nutrients if we’re willing to look.

Sankofa is mythic composting:

• Feet in the present
• Body moving forward
• Awareness turning back to gather what’s useful

It’s not nostalgia. It’s integration.

We must look backward and make it a practice. Not clinging to what was, but composting it. The triumphs, the failures, the awkward moments and the shining ones—all of it belongs. When we bring it into the circle of our awareness, memory transforms. It becomes medicine instead of baggage.

This is not indulgence. It’s evolution.

So we reflect on the kinds of people we have been. See ourselves with compassion and clarity, with a little distance.

Watch this character go about their year. What stood out for them? What was difficult? What did they do with the difficult? To see the ways that they persevered and got through hard things. The fact that we’re still here is a testament to our strength.

We acknowledge the times that we fell down. The ways that we got up again. What is it that we learned this year about who we are and what truly matters to us?

What will we take with us next? Think like we might have left parts of us behind that had important things to tell. Now is a good time to remember, to make a space for the field of past and allow the memories to surface.

The Invitation

If this practice interests you, there are two ways to engage:

Join the Sankofa Writing Journey – We Go Further Together
A guided group experience where we reflect on the year through writing and ceremony. All sessions are online via Zoom. Three meet-ups: 10th – 22nd December. Find all the details on my website here or on Facebook.

Solo Reflection – If you prefer the recollection project on your own, here are some prompts to guide you:

• What stood out this year? What moments feel most alive when you think back?
• What was difficult? How did you meet those difficulties?
• What parts of yourself did you discover or rediscover?
• What do you want to acknowledge about your journey—both the falling down and the getting back up?
• What wisdom from this year do you want to carry forward?
• What are you ready to leave behind?

You might follow the morning pages ritual, you can read more on that here.

Set aside time. Light a candle. Write with honesty and compassion. Let the memories surface without judgment. This is how we change our relationship with the old ways—not by forcing them out, but by seeing them clearly and choosing how we carry forward. The meaning that we give these experiences, or finding the stories to tell that acknowledge the past and also give us strength to meet the future.

The dreamer in you knows what wants to emerge. Give yourself the gift of looking back, so you can move forward with clarity and truth.

Art: Sankofa by Aaron F. Henderson

The Art of Being Real (Without Losing Everyone)

A friend of mine once tried an experiment: for three months, she decided to be 100% honest with everyone. No filters. No polite fictions. Just raw truth.
She lost most of her relationships.

It turns out we’re not built for complete transparency. The social fabric depends on a little pretending. Belonging, evolutionarily speaking, kept us alive

But where’s the line? When does performance stop serving connection and start working against it?

The Phoney Layer

Fritz Perls, the unusual therapist who founded Gestalt therapy, used to say his task wasn’t to fix you but to bring something out of you, the way a sculptor coaxes form from stone. What is there in you that wants to come out?’ he would ask

Sitting with Fritz wasn’t easy. He met people where they were and gave them back what they brought to him—unfiltered. He saw the psyche as a series of layers, and the first one we meet in ourselves is what he called the phoney layer.

If you were sitting with him and he sensed you were in that layer, he would call it out immediately. “Do you know you’re doing that?” he might ask. “Do you realise you’re acting?”

People would often get defensive. Some would break through. All of them would have to face what they were hiding.

That was the giveaway. In the phoney layer, you’re not being real. You’re saying what you think someone wants to hear, trying to make an impression or avoid being seen a certain way. You’re managing the room instead of being in it.

Perls saw these pretences as the first barrier to self-actualisation.

Why We Need the Mask

We learn to perform early. Psychologists document the “social smile” appearing within months of birth; we’re trained to manage others’ feelings before we can walk. We smile when we don’t feel like it, cry when it serves us, present a version of ourselves that will keep us safe and accepted.

The phoney layer isn’t a personal failure. It’s a survival strategy. A cultural requirement.

How often do we ask “How are you?” but hope the answer is “fine”? The phoney layer has become the norm. The culture rewards positivity and punishes vulnerability. Being too real, too honest, too soon can make others uncomfortable or push them away entirely.

So what’s the cost?

When life energy is spent on performance rather than presence, something real in us gets buried. We start to forget we can drop the act. We lose touch with what actually wants to come out.

When Realness Backfires

There was a woman in one of my university classes who taught me a lesson. She brought herself so fully and vulnerably—that it became hard to watch.

She would start with “I must be honest…” and then offer something raw and unfiltered. Once, in a group discussion about family dynamics, she shared intimate details about her mothers mental illness and how it made her feel unlovable. The room went silent. You could feel people pulling back. Some subtly rolled their eyes. Her honesty was pure, but it wasn’t attuned to what the group could hold.

Later she learned to hold back a little, to read the field, to sense what the space could carry. She still brought depth, but with discernment. Authenticity without awareness isn’t strength; it’s vulnerability without protection.

As an Enneagram Four, I understand her impulse. Authenticity feels sacred to me. But I’ve also learned its shadow: oversharing, offering truth where it isn’t yet safe to be received. There’s a difference between being real and being reckless.

I’ve made this mistake more times than I can count, bringing my full self to rooms that weren’t ready, thinking honesty was always the answer.

I had a good friend who was upbeat and playful. She wanted lightness, fun, easy connection. But I kept trying to push her deeper, into more sincere relating, more vulnerability, more “realness.” I really believed this was a good impulse. But instead, my authenticity ended up pushing her away.

What I needed to do was attune to her. To meet her where she was, not where I thought she should be.

One of my biggest learnings over the years has been surprisingly odd: getting better at being in superficial conversations and spaces. I had so much resistance to it. Who would have thought I could develop that skill, or that it could actually be fun?

Sometimes the deepest act of connection is allowing things to stay light.

The Middle Path

The writer Carlos Castaneda called this dynamic “controlled folly”—a kind of conscious play within the performance. You recognise the mask, but you wear it with awareness. You act, knowing you’re acting. It’s not naivety; it’s wisdom.

In societies where sincerity can cost you belonging or power, controlled folly is a kind of self-protection. You choose when to reveal and when to conceal. You learn to read the field.

This isn’t the same as the phoney layer. The phoney layer is unconscious—you’ve forgotten you’re performing. Controlled folly is conscious—you know exactly what you’re doing and why.

Noticing the Act

So what do we do with this phoney layer and the performing parts of us?

We don’t shame it. We thank it. It helped us belong, survive, navigate unsafe spaces. But we can also begin to see it. To recognise when we’re in performance mode.

You can feel it in your body. There’s a tightness, a holding. Your breath gets shallow. You’re monitoring yourself, calculating responses. You’re not quite there.

The question isn’t “Am I being authentic enough?” but “Do I know when I’m performing?”

That awareness changes everything. Once you can see the mask, you can choose when to wear it and when to let it slip.

The Practice

Think of it as a spectrum.

On one end: fake, inauthentic, insincere. On the other: real, authentic, true.

Where do you find yourself most of the time?

Here’s what one notch closer to real might look like:

• When someone asks “How are you?” saying “I’m tired” instead of automatic “fine”
• Admitting “I need to think about that” instead of immediate agreement
• Sharing your actual opinion instead of mirroring theirs
• Saying “I’m not comfortable with this” when something feels off

Small moves. Nothing dramatic. Just slightly more true.

The invitation isn’t to strip away all masks; it’s to know when they’re on and to choose when to take them off. To move one notch closer to the real without losing the grace that keeps you connected.

Maybe that’s what Perls was getting at: not a demand for raw honesty at all costs, but an invitation to notice the act and ask—

What’s underneath that wants to come out?

Maybe the real work of authenticity isn’t tearing masks off, but learning which ones still let us breathe.