It's often been said that, despite appearances, many women in Western culture tend to disregard or ignore their own wants and needs in favor of the wants and needs of those around them. In all reality, I'd imagine this trait is ingrained within Woman from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean how else is she going to raise kids and see to the needs of an entire tribe if she's not inherently at some level willing to put the needs of others ahead of her own? At some point, however, her own must be tended to. I think therein lies the challenge that many women face, of which I am no exception. The problem though is that this precept is one that has as many foundational underpinnings as any other relationship with the Self, and finding our own personal connection to this is our own challenge. This post is me trying to explore this concept in a way that opens doors for future or deeper exploration. It's a model, one that I've found helpful even though the process demands that I be willing to listen to the emotional surges which are my guideposts. Here goes...
Precept: I shouldn't have any personal wants or desires for myself.
Problem: I have a very hard time even recognizing, let alone articulating, any deeper wants beyond "I want dinner" or "I want to do this today". Without giving any recoginition and thereby conscious validity to deeper wants, they find hidden or even destructive ways of being satisfied.
Digging around in this problem, I felt an emotional reaction when I revealed something that I wanted which had to be darn near dragged out of me. That reaction was an extreme discomfort to being vulnerable, to being open to rejection. Now I've done a few posts on receptivity and vulnerability and how these relate to what men respond to within the Feminine, and in those posts I admitted that I had a problem with this facet of myself. I didn't quite realize just how large that problem was until I felt as if I were naked at Grand Central Station after finally admitting to something important to me that I didn't even know was in there.
Alison Armstrong uses the example of women being afraid to need something of their own because if those needs are rejected then she's left alone to be eaten by lions. That a woman's placing others before herself is a primal condition. Remembering this, I wondered if perhaps my own relationship with this aspect of the feminine was that same thing.
Anyone remember those logic problem of if A then B, if B then C so therefore A then C? I tried that to see if there was some emotional response. If want then rejection, if rejection then death, therefore want equals death.
As I typed those words, I paid very close attention to how I felt about them, to how I emotionally reacted to them. For 'if want then rejection' I definitely felt a response, so I'm taking that to mean correct. For the rest of it, nothing. The primal and emotional minds were both unmoved by the words, so those aren't correct for me. I went back to the drawing board, changed out a few words and came up with: If want then rejection, if rejection then alone, therefore want equals alone. Now THAT got an emotional response, and a rather strong one. This is the right track for me.
Using my emotional awareness as a guide, the idea of being alone is the one that needed to be explored. What came out was "if I am alone, then I'm alone with myself" and that statement literally had tears coursing down my face. Clearly I have a problem with that idea.
My first thought was to ask "What's wrong with me that this is the case?" I think it's a very basic response that women have, the tendency toward negative re-enforcement, and it's one I've talked about before. This question though also invites a downward spiral of self-blame, recrimination and rejection. I'm trying to accept who I am, good and bad, pretty and ugly. Acceptance and blame are counter-productive, so this question has to be thrown out the window.
Since I'm not really good at that sort of thing, I turned to my husband for a positive way of addressing this problem. True to form, he had an excellent suggestion: "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" I knew this was on the right track because even just typing the question had my chest burning. You see, this question isn't looking for blame. This question is opening doors, inviting me to look at myself. It should be noted that the previous question had zero emotional impact -- my emotional self can handle the blame game, but the open exploration game caused a surge of almost panic.
Besides this one question, there are a great many more than could be asked, but because this one had such a powerful reaction I started there. Other questions include those of the relationship between my own self-worth and the feeling that I deserve or don't deserve to be happy and therefore don't recognize my wants; taking a look at whether or not I place value judgements such as 'legitimate or not' on desires before they are even consciously recognized. Of course, once all these are considered, I need to go back and find out if my non-recognition of my own heart even related to the idea of "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" What if want and alone are actually unrelated, and the upwelling of emotion is triggered by 'alone' and unphased by 'want'? But the question highlighted above is where I'm starting for now.
While I won't be posting all the gorey searching, I will share the most useful tool that I used to dig around in myself for this intensely honest and frankly painful but oh-so-liberating inner exploration. That tool was to look at my own resentments towards other people. The initial response to this question was an interior innocent batting of the eyes and a "but I don't resent anyone" denial. Blatantly untrue, but this is the face that social conditioning likes to wear, the face that my ego self likes to pretend is true. Alas, it is not. I wrote down the names of 5 people in my life that sprang to mind, and then spent about 20 minutes just writing about them. Since this is for me, I cut loose. It started out with really nice verbage, couching all the perceiving wrongs with innocous wording. Eventually, something broke and out poured all this genuine emotion.
Now, the absolute hardest part of this process but CRUCIAL is to just let it flow. My social conditioning was trying desperately to put the brakes on this process because it was 'bad' and I was admitting to myself for the first time just how 'bad' I was. Folks, resentment is a poison, and like poison it has to be purged if healing is to take place. Letting it fester in the deepest part of myself while I pretended to be all goodness and light and forgiving was only killing me, leaving them utterly unaffected. Even afterward, when I had filled page after page with a level of rage I had NO idea was even there, those folks are still unaffected and yet I feel so much lighter, freer. I can now see them in my mind's eye and finally there is no inner lip curl at the sight of them. I am free to finally see them.
What came to me during this process is that I chose the symbol of the Lioness far more appropriately than I could have imagined. Why? A Lioness is, above all, true to herself. She knows who she is, and accepts it. There's no "a lioness should be this" in her thinking. She just IS. She is a killer, and is fine with that -- indeed, relies on it to feed her sisters/mother/aunts/cubs. She is also a caretaker, a loving and loyal member of her family. Good and "bad", she just is. I'm starting to realize that in order to fully embrace the Feminine, I have to be just like her, I have to embrace all that I Am without judgement (tricky tricky!). Here goes: I get angry at people. Phew!! You'll just have to trust me when I say that finally admitting to that was like pulling out teeth. Ultimately, since I want to be majestic and powerful and feminine, I first have to know all that I am so that I can accept who I am. Eventually, I'll be able to drop the (in training), but I'm far from there yet. Until then, I remain a striving
- Lioness (in training)
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