Reclaiming Lost or Silenced Parts of Ourselves
What if healing didn’t look like clarity, but like chaos? What if art wasn’t about genius, but about surrender? What if transformation came not from knowing, but from not knowing at all? In a world shaped by logic, performance, and rational brains, it takes some courage to feel connected to our emotional selves.
This is the terrain of the avant-garde, a lineage of thinkers and artists who challenged the known and reached for the unconscious. But beneath its radical surfaces lies a deeper, older pulse. One the West rarely named.
To understand it, we can follow a symbolic thread, from cadavre exquis, the surrealist game of fragmented creation, to African mask rituals, where transformation is embodied, not explained.
The Surrealists and Cadavre Exquis
“Cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.”
“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”
In the 1920s, a group of Surrealist artists and writers in Paris developed a game called cadavre exquis, French for “exquisite corpse.” One person would begin a phrase or drawing, fold the paper to hide it, and pass it along. The next would add their part, unaware of what came before.
The final result was strange, fragmented, and often unexpectedly beautiful.
But to the Surrealists, this wasn’t just a creative exercise. It was an invitation for the unconscious to take the lead, for the collective to shape meaning together. They weren’t looking for coherence. They were searching for truths that couldn’t be reached through logic alone.
In today’s context, cadavre exquis reminds us that what’s broken, scattered, or disjointed can still carry meaning. That healing doesn't have to be linear, it’s more like a labyrinth.
The Mask That Dances You
Across many African cultures, masks are not worn, they wear you.
In traditional initiation rituals, masks aren’t decorative. They’re transformational. A mask may represent an ancestor, a spirit, or a cosmic force, and when it’s worn in ceremony, the individual steps into something beyond themselves. The everyday identity dissolves. The ego steps aside.
These ceremonies mark true passage, from child to adult, outsider to initiated one, individual to vessel. And this transformation doesn’t happen through explanation. It happens through movement, symbol, story, and rhythm. Through the body.
It’s not metaphor. It’s embodied shift.
The Shared Architecture
What binds these seemingly different practices?
Both are collaborative, breaking the myth of the isolated self or artist.
Both bypass the rational mind to invite the unconscious or ancestral.
Both dissolve fixed identity, making room for something new to emerge.
And both are, at their core, ritual technologies, not just tools for expression, but for change.
While one emerged from Paris cafés and the other from ancient communal ceremonies, both operate on the same core principle: truth is revealed through symbolic dismembering and reassembly.
On Meaningful Transformation
Modern life teaches us to seek meaning through systems. To optimize. To heal in straight lines.
But real transformation is rarely linear. It takes time, patience and dedication to find our way in labyrinths. There is no magic solution.
I believe the future of inner work is experiential, symbolic, and embodied, not in opposition to the intellect, but deeper than it. Often, the most meaningful transformations don’t happen through answers. They happen through process.
We are not here to just make sense. We are here to make contact.
What’s Possible When We Remember
We live in a time that often encourages us to package ourselves, to make our identities clean, clear, and ready to explain. But the truth is, most people are far more layered than what they present on the surface. It takes a lot of excavation to remember and reconnect with our authentic selves.
Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that have been quiet isn’t about returning to a past version of who we were. It’s about integrating what still lives inside us, creatively, symbolically, and in ways that feel safe and supported.
When we reclaim the mask, not as metaphor, but as portal. When we let the body speak what language can’t. We don’t just heal. We re-member and we re-author.
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