Gender equality – does it start with women’s responsibility to themselves?
PRINT PAGE
Gender equality – does it start with women’s responsibility to themselves?
As a woman I have observed over my 53 years of life that men naturally want to be delicate and tender with not only women, but everyone. Standing in the way of this natural tenderness are many factors, one being us! Women! In our attempt to gain gender equality, we feel we have to match a man’s strength and determination when in actual fact:
What is needed is for us as women to honour the bodies we have by always being aware of the true delicate physicality of the female body.
The next reason for men to not stay with their tenderness is due societal pressures: just because a man has physical strength, society misinterprets that as a man having mental inner strength. There is also a generalisation that appears under the assumption that men handle life better because they have less outward emotions.
Women have felt this tension in men and in reaction we have felt that we have had to help men by matching their strength, usually physically but often more about the strength of doing. It has clearly not been successful for women to do this as we see more and more the exhaustion of women’s bodies playing out in society.
So when does a woman start to change the equal-ness she feels with all? For myself I remember in the early days of my relationship with my partner, before we married, I felt I equally held myself as a woman beside the man in my life. I didn’t need to bring in a comparison to what I did in my life – my partner loved me for who I was. Once we married, bought a property, followed by having a child within a year, everything changed. My husband felt an intense pressure and began to work longer hours to ‘support’ his family. He lived with such focus on the ‘doing for’ his family he forgot about ‘being with’ the people in his family. My reaction to his separation from us was to support him more by doing more to help him, even though my own workload was intense. I felt I had to be super woman, wife and mother, running here and there and ticking off lists so as to make sure I didn’t forget to do anything. By doing all this I realise now that I was trying to show my husband that I was working as hard as he was and I hoped this would bring me some loving attention from him where he would see that he was not alone in supporting the family. I ultimately hoped he would acknowledge and see that I was feeling and being just as committed as he was to raising our family in the best way we knew how.
As I continued on this path my feminine and delicate body hardened, gained weight and became very exhausted.
I became focussed on getting his attention in some way and it ran me ragged. I prided myself that I could lift the bed mattress like him and move furniture around without his help, garden all day like him and work almost around the clock. It was always strange to me back then that when I would share how strong I was with him that he never acknowledged it… he would just give a slight frown and nod. Even if I commented on how busy I was in the day – to try to gain attention from him – he would do the same and just nod. I never felt full of his love because I was looking for love through my actions and searching for attention with approval.
Fast forward to a stage of my life when I came across The Way of The Livingness and from this point I began to explore through my daily actions the concept of honouring my movements according to how I felt in each minute of the day. I changed my approach of ‘doing without thought’ to ‘feeling with a conscious presence’. I began to feel that holding myself in honour of my body was far more loving and began to focus on staying with myself always, through any hurdle in life. Even when it felt like I wasn’t being loved, I still felt I was lovely.
My relationship with myself became a priority.
I began to appreciate the true beauty inside me instead of just the physical appearance and noticed what a delicate, tender and rather fragile woman I was, whilst also realising that I possessed an enormous amount of inner strength in areas that did not have the same aspect of physical strength that men possessed.
It occurred to me that true gender equality was understanding the purpose of the uniqueness of male and female bodies and what each represents to the other: it is not to move or be the same as the opposite gender, but to claim the true state of the gender you have as being equal.
So how does all this equate to the innate tenderness in men? Well, when I started to honour and appreciate and connect to the real purpose and quality of a women’s body, my relationship with my husband changed. He started to show more attention to me, became more tender and cherished the care I was giving myself. He began to see the pressure he put his own body under, to notice the tension in his own body more obviously, and started to feel what his body needed. He realised he had set his life up in a way to not spend time with himself, me or his family, so before long he was looking at his life and making changes that felt more loving to him.
Women, this is our wake up call if you are frustrated, lonely, or feeling not loved by your partner, may I suggest that instead of focussing on what the man is doing wrong, we need to take responsibility for looking at ourselves first.
Men simply adore women; they love our soft and delicate bodies, our inner strength and they deeply appreciate when we honour ourselves. When we bring this love to ourselves they feel safe to show their tenderness and gentle ways, but when we begin to compete against them under the false idea of gender equality they may feel it is a threat to them as a man.
“Feminine Love is the honour of ourselves in gentleness. It is equally in men and in women.”
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings and Revelations pg 538
We can stop this cycle simply by honouring and appreciating ourselves first, then all our relationships will change as a result of our changing ways.
Filed under
Tenderness, Empowerment, Gender equality, Healthy relationships, Body awareness
