Your social mask is the wall keeping you from getting everything you truly want. This is your invitation to become the alchemist of your life. You decode your heaven on earth and go through the alchemical process.
The alchemist is a master of himself so that he can master life. People thought alchemists were turning lead into gold, but they're really crystallizing their soul into form. Alchemize your golden potential.
Welcome to the Golden Life. Welcome to the Golden Life. My name is David Gilbert.
Today, we are going to go on an adventure to understand what it means to shine your light fully and the obstacle that gets in the way. Now, for the sake of being human, we all are guilty of this. What is that? We love to fit in.
It's a core need of ours, especially when we're young, that stays with us through the rest of our lives, to want to belong. We are social mammals. We depend on each other to survive, to live.
And if we're going to thrive, we absolutely have to work together. Now, it's easy to go through life, I'm speaking from my own experience; to think we can do this life thing all on our own, right? If we just do what we got to do and be strong as a man nowadays, and don't tell anybody about your feelings, and just put on a good stoic face that you got this, no matter what's going on, you'll be golden. You'll be gravy, baby.
But I can tell you from my own experience, that is not how you create a thriving life, your golden life. And the only way for you to truly create your golden life is to be able to shine your golden light. And how do you do this? Well, first, we have to acknowledge, and I want you to think about this, how often do you wear a mask? And if you haven't thought about this, how often do you show up in a way to try to show up as what you think somebody wants you to show up as? Now, if you're like, David, I never do that.
Well, I know for a fact you do. Because once again, right, we grow up through life, we're little kids, we learn that if we show up in this way, we'll get this kind of feedback from somebody, or this kind of attention, and we'll get rewarded if we show up this way, but not this way. So if you are completely unconscious to wearing the idea of a mask, well, then you're absolutely wearing a mask.
But if you are a little bit conscious to it, well, beautiful, you've taken a big leap in starting to get in touch with your authentic self. Because it is when we get beyond the mask. Like, why do you want to get beyond the mask? And David, are you saying the mask is fully bad? Like, I just need to burn it down? No, like, this is a neutral viewpoint we could take on as being the alchemists of our life, right? But it is, does it come down to, is it empowering or disempowering? And what happens when we put up a mask? Well, I know, because I've been wearing a big mask, I call it a emotional wall, so much of my life.
I've talked about the circumstances, the environment that helped cultivated that wall, and going through life, and just being scared, and holding on to this pain of hurt, and not knowing what to do with it. And that just kind of helps solidify the mask. And it's been this process, even to this day, of getting back from this four-day Awaken event to continuously tear down this wall.
And first of all, like, why? Why do we want to tear down the wall? Well, the wall is what's getting in the way from you of feeling your authenticity, right? Which we could go a little bit deeper. If you go a little bit deeper, what are we talking about? Your own love, your love for who you are, your love to express who you are, your love to share the unique art you're here to share with the universe. But if you try to fit the mold of who you think you're supposed to be, and put on this face of being that person, when deep down you have something you want to say, or something you want to create, and you're not doing it, well, that's why you're feeling so damn bad.
That's why you can be in a room of a bunch of people, and feel isolated. Because you're putting on this mask, instead of trying, not trying, instead of being who you truly are. This can be scary too, because if you were to just, you know, if I were to come over and just burn your mask, I don't know what that, and I'm not going to do that.
But if you did, it's also scary too. I can speak from my own experience, because if you shatter a way of being that you've been your entire life, there's this whole other way that you have no idea. So it's literally going through the rebirth process.
But some tips on how to do this with a little bit more grace, right? Number one is awareness. First, if you are unconscious to the fact that you are wearing social masks, you are showing up in certain ways to fit societies, or your environment, or whoever you deem important is, you know, what they think you think, that you think that they think how you should show up. Well, that's step one.
And this is the first phase of alchemy, right? Getting in touch with the unconscious forces, whether it's in our own psyche or within the universe. And then step two, awakening to your true desire. And the word desire roughly basically means of the father, of the, you know, the Latin context and of the father.
So this is the universal desire of the father, which another way I like to think about is like that heart's fire that often gets down to this dim ember that we have to fan. And when you fan and like create space to really and get touch with what you want to create out of life, like what your golden life actually looks like as a vision, or the art you want to create, or just getting to know your heart. Well, when you do that, you can start to build that muscle, build that fire up.
And then finally, the third phase is to bring it together. So this is where you practice a new way of being, right? You go do some transformational thing, like the alchemical journey, and you'll get in touch with your mass. And you'll get to have the experience.
This is part of the second phase. Have the experience of your higher self, right? I have the wings, the white rose, the second phase of alchemy. And then you know what that feels like.
And then from there, you get to practice integrating, embodying, crystallizing that feeling, that frequency into form. And that's the third phase. So as you awaken, you can go through practices that help you do that.
And I'm going to share some practical ones that I even, you know, went through recently. Some of the most powerful tools I've discovered to help discover the shadow work. This is what we're talking about, right? The mass, the social mass, but also the shadow of who we think we need to be.
Instead of just getting in touch with our inherent freedom, that boundless, timeless, energetic being that you are. How do we get back to that place? We started in source, how do we get back to? That's really the journey, right? You know, separating from source, thinking we're completely disconnected, thinking we have this wall from the universal source, like thinking a fish has a wall between it and the ocean. But how do we break down that wall and get in touch with our own essence, as well the true essence of the universe? So I'm just going to share some of the practical things that I've been through recently, that have been some of the most powerful tools to break down.
I'm in the process now, it's a constant process, 35 years of working towards how do I embody my golden self, my authentic self, and continuously trying to break down this wall. Well, I've had two very powerful experiences in the last month. The first one was I went out to the Hive in Austin, this beautiful place with my brother, Ronnie Joseph Martinez, and his girlfriend, Maria.
And we did this, we did a lot of things. So I'll just give you the highlights, hopefully so that it inspires ideas for you to take away, and then be able to put in place in your life. The first one is called Family Constellations.
And this is something I could shoot a whole podcast, just talking about this alone. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to allow you to look that up on your own.
But what this looks like is you can have people play out, accessing the field of information. And I'm sure you don't have any context of what I'm talking about, unless you've heard about Family Constellations. This is to say this is some Jedi shit.
If you have the opportunity to find a Family Constellation experience, I'm not going to spend too much time talking about it today, but I highly recommend checking it out. Why? Because you will see the force is real. You'll be able to experience your life story from other people feeling into it and playing it out in a specific container that will give you feedback of what's going on in your life.
It is wild. It shows you that there's all these other tools of breath work and psychedelics and things. But really, if you just learn how to access the field of information, the quantum field, you can get all the information you need.
Now, we also had a men's day while I was there and my other brothers from the Divine Masculine Embodied Men's Group that we facilitate. And we did this practice where we had these masks. And it's funny because this was an idea I had previously because I know I've been going through my own big evolution of tearing down the mask, at least another layer of it.
And in my mind, I was like, I got to get this papier-mâché and this will be fun to do with my kids. But it's been so long since I did papier-mâché. So I just put it off.
Who wants to go get all those supplies when you're busy and put it together and you know, yada, yada, yada, excuses, stories. But you can also just buy masks on Amazon, which Ronnie Joseph did or Joseph Martinez did. And we did this beautiful exercise where you got to draw your mask of how you portray yourself to show up in the world around others when you're not being your authentic self and everything that you put on that mask.
And then we did this whole exercise of you wearing the mask, looking in the mirror at yourself while other people read what they see on your mask. And it is a painful yet beautiful experience. And then after that, we took the mask and we put it in the fire.
Right. And then we went right into a Tesma scowl. So true, burning away of everything that we thought we were.
But this is such a simple ritual of saying, no, I've gone through a big evolution. This is no longer who I am. And I honor, I honor that that was a part of me.
I honor that that was part of my journey. It led me to this level of awareness. But now I'm ready to go to the next version.
And I'm ready to go deeper into my intentions, whether that's, you know, coming from your heart or being more confident or being more bold or being more fierce in what you do. And then the other really transformative experience when it came to my own social mass and helping me work through that was this event called Awaken by The Gap. And I'll have it somewhere in the show notes so you can just look it up.
But this was a four day full day experience where you are going to get to know your blind spots. And in the following podcast, I'm going to talk about integrity, right? Becoming the alchemist and being committed to who you're being or becoming. What are we really saying? That you're living in integrity.
When you live in integrity, you make a commitment or a promise and you keep it. But we all go through life in ways where we break promises. And this, there's so much to talk about with this Awaken event.
But when you go through life and then you break a promise and you continuously do that, it's showing you how you're a blind spot and how you're showing up in life. And sometimes we, not sometimes, we like to think we're showing up one way, but we are not always showing up in that one way because we are one little tiny perspective in the infinite perspective of the universe. So the beautiful thing with the Awaken experience is that you got direct feedback from everybody else in the room.
We had 50 people at the event and you are getting very direct feedback of how you break promises as well as how you think you're showing up versus how others see you showing up. So this is to acknowledge the mask that you're wearing, but also how we get in trouble. Oh, I think I've been doing those things.
Oh, I've been, I think I've been showing up in this way, but that's only your view. So getting in touch with reality. So I'm going to share a little bit more about that experience and commitment and the power of your word in the next episode.
But if you know that you've been feeling disconnected or unfulfilled or like you are struggling to create intimacy with others, it's because you're giving more power to your mask versus allowing yourself to get uncomfortable or messy to let your true self come through, whether that's through expression by having a vulnerable, deep conversation with somebody that might feel a little uncomfortable, whether that's giving yourself space in your life to getting in touch with what really excites you or thrills you with what's your heart's desire to create in the world, or whether that's something that you just don't feel connected to life in general and you've been putting on this mask of the things you think you need to go do in life to be happy or just to get by, but on some level, your soul is screaming for you to show up in a different way. So the power of alchemy is that it always starts with the intention, right? It starts with the will of your mind. So if you're like, David, I know I need to change, but I don't know what that looks like.
Beautiful. Just start with the mask burning ceremony. Just set the intention into the universe that I am ready to release this mask so I can embody my golden self and I can do so with more love, grace, confidence, and possibility and go through that ritual.
And when you do, let me know how it went. And I also invite you to invite a friend. If you know somebody who loves transformation or who wants to find more joy, peace, and happiness, send this episode to them right now.
Let them know, hey, buddy, let's go do this mask burning ritual together. And let's start living from our hearts and shining our golden light. Thank you for joining me today.
Stay golden.
