Bringing It To Light: My Own Gender Shadow Dance Exposed!

Last night, after that post, my brain just would not shut up. Fortunately, the insomnia was fruitful. Big time!

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When I was a kid watching tons of TV, it was the 70s and 80s. Women were forcing their way into the work force in larger numbers than ever before and men were less than thrilled. I remember ads targeting these working women with statements such as "feeling guilty over not providing a nutritious meal to your family? come to KFC!" Going back with today's mindset and watching even the Brady Bunch, or Three's Company, or heck Partridge Family, and my jaw hits the floor with what was normal, accepted behavior then that today would be considered horribly sexist. Even Wonder Woman was a secretary! Watch the movie "9 to 5", and you'll see the working woman's world of the early 80s.

The point is, when I was growing up it was a radically different time than it is today, and it's very easy to forget just how much changed in the 70s and 80s. Prior to the 90s, women in general were very much an oppressed group, and black women had it the worst. I have no idea how other minorities were treated in those times, I was 15 and under so it's not like 'world news' was high on my agenda.

But the oppression, and the labels of being the weaker gender etc were very much being actively fought against rebelled against, denounced, vilified. The war ignited by Roe v Wade is a very clear shot over the traditional value bow of "female value is tied to childbearing", a reiteration of the shot fired when The Pill was introduced and suddenly western woman had reliable reproductive control for the first time ever. These are HUGE things, and it's easy to forgot the impact they had, and the issues that raised then as well as the echoes still being faced.

When a group fights for empowerment, there's a lot of shadow dancing going on. As an impressionable kid who watched a whoooooole lot of popular media TV, I was inundated with the conflicting messages. I absorbed them, and buried them in the subconscious.

As an early teen, something clicked in me. It's like my hitting puberty triggered all the identification with the female gender that before was just being absorbed and catalogued. Anyway, the first symptom was that I became rapidly angry at organized religion, but now that I look back on it I see that everything I was railing against revolved around the treatment of and messages to women about their worth as individuals as well as an entire gender. The generational shadow dance was alive and well in me, being acted out entirely unconsciously. Compulsively.

This anger later became aimed at my poor dad, who had never done a thing in his life but support and cheer me on. Unfortunately, the generational shadow had taken firm root. The clue to just how strong came as I watching the movie "Mulan", where the daughter returns home and hands her father all of the honors she's won. He drops them and hugs her, saying he'd rather have his daughter. The level of venom that erupted out of me at this scene shocked even me. It was deeply confusing and troubling for me at the time because I had NO clue where the heck this was coming from. There was nothing even remotely sourcable in my own life. I wondered if perhaps this was a past life resentment? That never felt right, but now that I'm looking at the gender shadow of the era in which I grew up, and the gender shadow that my own mom was raised with and passed on to me, it makes perfect sense. I wasn't reacting to my dad, I was reacting as an archetypal Western Woman to her idea of what masculine wanted and valued.

I often heard how, when my mom went to school, she could be a nurse, a school teacher, or a secretary. That was it. She also had to work to pay her own way through MTSU, while her brother got all his bills paid for and went to Vanderbilt. Since she herself was so angry at the unfair treatment she received growing up, she worked extra hard to make sure that my brother and I were both treated equally, given equal encouragement and support. But she had absorbed the shadow of her own generation, just as I had absorbed mine. I wonder now how many of her very serious and real physical problems are an expression of undealt with crap?

Why am I tying the undealt with shadow to physical problems? Because, as the wheels in my brain were churning through all of this, my stomache was reacting rather extremely. The further I got on this train of thought, the more violent my stomach behaved. I've always had a strong physical/emotional connection, but this was over the top! Drinking Pepto-Bismal by the cupfull, I continued following this awareness.

Eventually, I hit on the statement of a woman's worth and where it's truly sourced from. In the 70s and 80s, Western Woman was fighting very very hard to prove that she had value beyond wife and mother, beyond her ability to have children and serve men. The backlash against women who were "only" mothers is a good example of the shadow lashing out. Fortunately, that's subsided and hardly anyone blinks an eye anymore at the whole "I stay home and raise the kids" statement, unlike even just 10 years ago. Hell, most all of the girls I went to school with put their careers on hold to raise their kids. In the 90s, that was a big no-no. I'm very glad to see that changed!

But here I am, working from home, with no kids. Suddenly I'm now engaging this generational shadow surrounding concepts of self-worth and value and contribution to the home, and I'm in new territory! Crisis!!!

The result? In May, my back when out entirely. I was bed ridden for a few days. The lower back is often the area which is affected when there are issues with finance, personal power, and also creativity. Being a dunce, I didn't really piece this together. Two weeks ago, my back goes again. While not bed ridden, it was hurting solid for over a week. Laying down hurt, standing up hurt, sitting hurt. It just freaking HURT, and it wouldn't stop. It was driving me nuts, and driving me into a depression. CRISIS!!!

What these crises were doing was opening the door for me to receive the message that my acid reflux and scoliosis have been trying to tell me for decades. They had just not reached crisis points, until now.

Back to last night. The idea that I'm grappling with a generational gender shadow revolving around questions of self-worth and value sources and contribution to the family, all brought to the fore by own life at the moment, was like a huge lightbulb going off throughout my entire physical system. It also had me running for the bathroom, where I quite literally was violently ill. As I'm in there, purging the system, these words came to mind:

Ok, I can carry this consciously now.

After I'd finished and brushed my teeth, I straighted up after rinsing and paused ... my back no longer hurt! I was ecstatic. I felt lighter than I have in a long time. I nearly skipped down the hall to return to bed at 4 AM. The interpretation of the issues involved is backed up with the location of the purging -- the solar plexus chakra, the seat of self-worth, self-identity, and inner authority.

I've had acid reflux since I was about 18. I've often said "It's like I've swallowed something that I just can't digest. I need to purge it, but I don't know what 'it' is!" Well, now I do! I'm really hoping that the acid reflux will subside also. *crosses fingers*

I write all this to illustrate just how deeply the tribal consciousness embeds itself, and to illustrate some of the ways that it can manifest. In me, it was quite literally physical. I have no doubt that had I not purged it from the system, I would have been looking at stomach cancer or some such in another few decades. I'm looking at the proliferation of breast and testicular cancers these days, wondering how much of that is related to unconscious, unaddressed inhereted gender issues within our society. Makes me go "hrmmmm".

The best news of all is that I can now think about things like the Church's historic attitude toward women, a subject which even just yesterday was a very touchy one for me, but not today. Today, it's almost a scholarly discussion. Granted there's still some lingering emotion, but NOTHING along the order that it was. I feel freed! I feel like I've just taken the single biggest step I've been able to manage thus far toward becoming that Lioness. It took some major digging to get this to surface, but I'm glad it did. I've learned a whole lot. I hope that by sharing it that it's got you thinking about the world you and your parents grew up in, and what disempowering or angery/fearful and even positive shadows you might right now be acting on without your knowing. Or the shadows that your children are being indoctrinated with.

- Lioness (in training)

Starting Down the Rabbit Hole

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)