Notice love invites us to remove the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we can no longer accept or live within. The path of removing our masks, requires dismantling the life we have come to think is real, tolerating pain, and seeing through our suffering. What makes the journey worth it is we long for reality more than we want to hide inside illusions of those masks. Recall the story of the Golden Buddha. The gold of this buddha was hidden for centuries under simple plaster and clay. It went unnoticed, a reminder it seems natural we develop layers of ego coverings, that we learn ways of hiding, enhancing and ignoring our True Self. When we feel really fearful, the covering gets thicker, more solid. We add layers to what is always here and do not recall the gold. We are identified with the coverings and forget the Truth of Being, our genuineness. Turns out, "real" is not how we are made. Its not our outer coverings symbolized by plaster and clay. Something more formless, intrinsic and pure is awake. As we shine the light of awareness on the plaster coverings, we bring the warmth of love, humor, acceptance to those coverings. This is what melts them so golden authenticity shines through. As we grow more mindful of our patterning (represented by the coverings), we realize the illusion of the anxious, needy, lonely self. It dawns the underlying radiance is more true to who we are than the clay coverings. Wakefulness, openness, creativity, aliveness only shine through as we allow maturity, inner wisdom to reign. The poet Rumi reminds us that is is through love that pain transforms into medicine. We are our own healers that transform into beauty and goodness with perfect timing. We know we are supposed to love ourselves into healing, to face the ego states and love ourselves through it. The most fundamental layer of conditioning is the one that does not recognize the painful coverings are illusions. We hate ourselves for the coverings. We are supposed to love the coverings, the parts of the ego that make it hard to open tour heart to ourselves. When negative emotions arise, we are taught to dislike or hate ourselves, and the master emotion, shame shows its head as if "something is wrong with me/us". Every emotion has its place and can get amplified. We are culturally- rigged with a deep fear of judgement and rejection. Whatever comes up, we come to believe we shouldn't be feeling this way. The core feeling of badness imprisons us in the mind until we are ready to let go of the covering that glues itself to all other coverings. In the stress of life, we forget the subjectivity and realness of each other. The key to being real is to remove layers of conditioning, to listen more attentively to each other. The messages of bad "other" repeat. Shame is exacerbated by cultural caste systems. We are wired to not like our own conditioning and think that is who we are. The healing comes from seeing and loving the conditioning so it can become more transparent though we have an aversion to it. The gold of loving awareness is always available, much like the sun is always here regardless of how many clouds exist in the sky. Through love, all pain and suffering dissolve. Clarity remains.