You can choose to learn through love or you can choose to learn through fear. You have no choice to not learn, because everything you do - even attempts to not learn - contributes to your overall evolution. Every single choice you makes changes you. Every single thing you do creates a fundamental shift at the deepest levels of the core of who you are. Your soul is changed by each and every single action you embark on.
So what this means is that learning through love IS possible., It's simply a different method. It's a method that allows you to do everything you need to do AND be happy. Pain may be inescapable because loss is constant. But that does not have to be fear, and it does not have to be constant sacrifice and self denial. You can be happy, and content, and use that happiness and content to fuel what you are becoming.
The trick is... complicated. You must learn to bear bright and beautiful fruits without uprooting the tree. And you must learn to channel happiness not into stagnation and comfort - which, let's face it, humans are all wont to do -but rather into the same places you would channel your pain. Does loneliness have to be the prompter for innovation and beauty? I cannot believe that. I do not believe that. No, rather, joy and happiness can be even better motivators. It is simply an exercise in awareness. It is a completely different way of working.
We tend to create great things when we hurt because the need and desire to escape, process, or rationalize our pain is so intense that it drives us into things that we would not otherwise do. The man who has a lion chasing him may run faster than a man ever has in his life. And yet, might not that man run just as fast as he leaps and bounds his way to meet his bride on their wedding day? As he carries her home to their first night together as a married couple?
I think he can.
The idea that pain and suffering is necessary and constant is not one that I accept. Yes, loss and death are a part of the cycle of life. But that does not mean that creation cannot be an expression of pure joy - nothing but pure joy. It just must find a new channel to come out. We are so ingrained in our beliefs of pain as a necessary motivator (as a connection to our emotions, I believe ) that we cannot find ourselves in our joy. And yet there we are, even more present than we are in anything else. Joy can move us as far and as fast as pain can. In fact, it can move us faster and farther, because it does not attack the hand that feeds us. Pain can be there for short bursts of brilliance, but at the end of the day if we rely on pain to move us, we will eventually either run away from creation (because we will see it as a fundamentally painful process) OR we will be destroyed by our own creation, instead of being sustained and carried by it. We will, in other words, completely burn out. Pain is not something that supports a lifetime of conscious creation. It cannot. It is not a complete reality.
Joy, rather, or even cycles of pain and joy, is what supports a lifetime that completely embraces all the oppportunities open to it and does not shut down to the creation that is attempting to flower it's way through it at every second and every moment of every single day of our time here on earth.
Joy is what moves us through loss and suffering and the great agonies of this life. To love and to care is to accept the wound that will follow. This is the great gift of love; to love is always a selfless, self-sacrificing gift, because it gives even with the knowledge that the more giving it does, the stronger the hurt will be when it eventually ends.
Creating through joy. This is the possibility that this beautiful new wold offers us.. We just need to learn how to do that.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Shame Culture of Feminism
Before I begin, I should mention that the article mentioned here comes from "The F Bomb" which is a website that - IMHO - by no means sets the standard for most feminist sites. However, they did manage to nicely demonstrate the one aspect of feminist culture that I find to be abhorrent - shame culture.
Most feminists protest against the shame culture of their youth. They rebell against the shameing, sexual and otherwise, of the previous generation. Most adult feminists I know want nothing more than to prevent themselves from passing down that ingrained notion to another generatin of girls - AND boys.
And yet. I can walk into almost any feminist website on the internet and find a gem like this, which I think sums up the issue nicely:
"Also worth noting: the girl whose parents were open about sex remained a virgin, where I think most people would assume the opposite result. In fact, not fealing shame about something like sex definitely makes people feel more confident in their ability to make decisions about it and stay true to themselves." (Source: http://thefbomb.org/2010/09/easy-a-and-teenage-sexuality/)
Yes, her parents talking to her about sex enabled her to stay a virgin. Did you hear that? It is a grand thing, is it not? The height and glory of parental involvement in sex is not producing a teenager and eventual adult who is capable of relating to sex and sexuality in a healthy and normal way, it is producing a child who is able to, against all odds, remain a virgin - and in doing so "stay true to herself".
What if she had decided to have sex? What if she had said to herself, "I feel emotionally ready to have sex, I have a partner I feel safe and comfortable with, I know how to keep myself and my partner physically safe, and I want to have sex."? We are to assume, it seems, that this version would not be "true to herself". Because, after all, girls selves are inherantly and unshakeable virginal, are they not?
This disturbs me. It disturbs me as teenager reading feminist blogs and articles, and it disturbed me more a a very young girl reading feminist publications. It was where I was left, after my first kiss, after my first make out, after my very early sexual experiences. Had I wanted them? Had I felt ready? Had I felt safe?
Yes.
And yet I could not shake this notion that I had not been "true to myself". I could not shake this idea that I had betrayed some great confidence - not the confidence of my parents, family, or community, who were all just fine with it all - but the confidence in myself. The confidence to say "no", because after all, isn't that what "Strong girls" were supposed to do? Say no?
This seems like a virgin/whore shame culture espoused by the mainstream media and internalized by a child. And yet, I watched no TV. I read no magazines; I did not follow the trends. Every drop of shame that fell from me came from one source, the one I had immersed myself in - feminism.
The point here is not my personal experience - I got over it. Yet this is an experience that I have shared with many of my friends who were also exposed to feminism at an early age, always to nodding heads and perfect relating. And so it seems to be that feminism, somehow, has managed to enforce the exact same beliefs that it claims to despise. There are generations of girls and boys who will continue to suffer this until somebody has the sense to think about what they are saying, and take the step back to weed out the cliches, the catch phrases, the ingrained beliefs.
It's time to say what needs to be aasaid, not spew back phrases taught in gradeschool that do no more to dispell shame culture or this idea of virgin/whore than they did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Really, all I'm asking for is that adults think before they speak. Is that so much to ask?
Most feminists protest against the shame culture of their youth. They rebell against the shameing, sexual and otherwise, of the previous generation. Most adult feminists I know want nothing more than to prevent themselves from passing down that ingrained notion to another generatin of girls - AND boys.
And yet. I can walk into almost any feminist website on the internet and find a gem like this, which I think sums up the issue nicely:
"Also worth noting: the girl whose parents were open about sex remained a virgin, where I think most people would assume the opposite result. In fact, not fealing shame about something like sex definitely makes people feel more confident in their ability to make decisions about it and stay true to themselves." (Source: http://thefbomb.org/2010/09/easy-a-and-teenage-sexuality/)
Yes, her parents talking to her about sex enabled her to stay a virgin. Did you hear that? It is a grand thing, is it not? The height and glory of parental involvement in sex is not producing a teenager and eventual adult who is capable of relating to sex and sexuality in a healthy and normal way, it is producing a child who is able to, against all odds, remain a virgin - and in doing so "stay true to herself".
What if she had decided to have sex? What if she had said to herself, "I feel emotionally ready to have sex, I have a partner I feel safe and comfortable with, I know how to keep myself and my partner physically safe, and I want to have sex."? We are to assume, it seems, that this version would not be "true to herself". Because, after all, girls selves are inherantly and unshakeable virginal, are they not?
This disturbs me. It disturbs me as teenager reading feminist blogs and articles, and it disturbed me more a a very young girl reading feminist publications. It was where I was left, after my first kiss, after my first make out, after my very early sexual experiences. Had I wanted them? Had I felt ready? Had I felt safe?
Yes.
And yet I could not shake this notion that I had not been "true to myself". I could not shake this idea that I had betrayed some great confidence - not the confidence of my parents, family, or community, who were all just fine with it all - but the confidence in myself. The confidence to say "no", because after all, isn't that what "Strong girls" were supposed to do? Say no?
This seems like a virgin/whore shame culture espoused by the mainstream media and internalized by a child. And yet, I watched no TV. I read no magazines; I did not follow the trends. Every drop of shame that fell from me came from one source, the one I had immersed myself in - feminism.
The point here is not my personal experience - I got over it. Yet this is an experience that I have shared with many of my friends who were also exposed to feminism at an early age, always to nodding heads and perfect relating. And so it seems to be that feminism, somehow, has managed to enforce the exact same beliefs that it claims to despise. There are generations of girls and boys who will continue to suffer this until somebody has the sense to think about what they are saying, and take the step back to weed out the cliches, the catch phrases, the ingrained beliefs.
It's time to say what needs to be aasaid, not spew back phrases taught in gradeschool that do no more to dispell shame culture or this idea of virgin/whore than they did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Really, all I'm asking for is that adults think before they speak. Is that so much to ask?
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