Protection

I thought bracing myself and going hard was going to protect me from the harshness of this world. I adopted a tough stance to deal with my brothers and Dad. Dad was particularly tough and harsh with me – not meaning that he wasn’t like this with my other siblings, but it was in a particular way that he would get me stirred up.

I learnt very quickly in my family to develop a strong ability to defend myself, never the attacker. I always chose the defence positions in netball and was never one to look for a fight. If someone was not acting with integrity, not telling the truth, or didn’t have the full picture then I would have something to say.

This involved projecting my body and voice out from my body in a harsh and hardened way as we are taught to do when we go into battle. Clench the jaw hard and charge. It’s probably not how a martial artist would do it as they are more familiar with the energetic aspects of yin and yang and how those qualities move together.

For me the world I lived in was all male energy and women were becoming more male in their ways as the feminist movement really started to take hold in the late 60’s and early 70’s – a continuation of the suffragette movement of the late 18 and early 1900’s. Women seemed to begin to lose their grace and beauty then. My mother, a woman born in the 1930’s, still had that beautiful quality, but I saw it as weak.

The pioneering women had that harshness and tough protective stance, like my grandmother and great aunt. They had been women who had to work hard, often doing a man’s job due to them often away at war or trying to find work during the depression.

We all had to toughen up during troubled times – war – and do our bit to support the war effort. When I was growing up it was the war against men and the fight for women’s rights.

I never really got into the feminist movement as it really didn’t make sense to me that women were fighting to be treated the same as men. I can understand the desire to no longer be treated as a second-class human being and wanting the same rights as a man but to become like them just didn’t make sense. The women in many cases were more masculine than the men.

My boss, back when I was 27 and working in a law firm, was more masculine than her male counterparts. She had to fight tooth and nail to take maternity leave as one of the only two women in a partnership of a least 10 to 15 men. (I remember them saying it wasn’t fair that she takes time off – so they also wanted to be treated equally on some level but that did not come into play until at least 30 or more years later where men can get paternity leave.)

The other woman was an Asian lady who despite wanting to also be able to take maternity leave didn’t have that same toughness and would have easily been pushed over if it wasn’t for my boss. My boss didn’t get where she was as a partner of a large law firm without being tough. She also had to be tough to work in the court system. It was expected. She was after all working in a male dominated domain so taking on that stance seemed the only way.

I was living under the same system that demanded this toughness and harshness from the men also. I was fortunate to witness this outplay for my older brothers, both tender and delicate in their own ways with one taking the tough stance and being a bully, very rough, aggressive and very angry which had a strong physical outplay where he would punch holes in walls and doors in our house when the “bad temper" let loose.

He would chase us around the house with a hot stoker that he had sitting in the hot coals of the fire. He singed one of the dining chairs, a reminder of what regularly took place. It was awful to be tormented in such a way.

My other brother was the opposite, timid, shy and the “nice guy”. I took advantage of that as I could easily boss him around. With my dad & bully brother I still had the get up and go to stick up for myself. My sister was more like the timid brother and could easily be brought to tears by a harsh voice whereas I was the one yelling back and telling them their behaviour or what they were saying or doing wasn’t ok.

My jaw became harsh and tough and very tightly held. Even writing about this now I can feel the hardness in my ovaries. You really do have to brace more than just the outer casing of the body but the organs as well.

In fact, I have become much more aware of the effect of this hardening on my whole body, including my female parts. For example, my vulva and vagina have also suffered damage from this way of living and the feeling of having to harden up to protect myself from the onslaught of projections of who and what I supposedly am. This has come from both sides of the so-called divide between men and women. I honestly can see now how I did everything possible to shut down the sweetness that I so intrinscially felt inside, as I was being taught by everthing around me that to survive, I had to toughen up.

Both men and women have been socially conditioned in how they are to be. We are now moving into an era where the physical lines are being blurred around gender but ultimately on an energetic level aren't we all a blend of both energies male and female, a true balance?

I started to wonder, if you take it even deeper than that, soul deep, will you arrive at a point where you are in fact genderless? I mean, when we die, does the part of us that lives on really have a gender? When I started to connect to this, I realised all that other stuff going on is simply surface tension, a denial, a political unrest that is fighting, toing and froing, debating, forming opinions, and it all seemed so unnecessary. In matters pertaining to soul and soulful living isn't it an obvious truth that there is no tension, no fight? Wouldn't this be the case no matter whether you are born into a male or female body or go through a variation of genital physicality and hormone mixes? Are we not all in the end genderless and by that equal in every sense of the word?

I have learnt and am learning more deeply so these days, there is absolutely nothing to fight only love and truth to live in this life. I love being in a woman’s body because it calls me to return to my body and its communication by the simple fact that we have a womb that gives birth to the new every single turn of our cycle, like the cyclical movement reflected at us by the moon, to wax and wane, to move within the cycles.

I realised my tension with all this was fighting the cycles. It was the reason I took the pill in my late teens so I could regulate my cycles in order to have them work in with my life and therefore stop having a period/skip a period when it was convenient.

I didn’t realise until recently that when I was on the pill it wasn’t even a real period, so I had in fact stopped my body’s natural cycle and communication with me through the cycles. I was living a lie. Kidding myself that I was in control and could tough it out like the rest of them, what everyone else was doing, but my body communicated to me in other ways that eventually got me to stop and begin the realisation that I could no longer live the lie I had been living. It was calling me to return, something a woman’s body does every moment in every cycle, to return to the soulful being I am and was here within me all along.