Post seven of seven, in section Hard Truths
Buddhism is a religion or school of spirituality that was created for men by men. It is a patriarchy in one of its purest forms.
This is reflected in a number of ways, but is no more apparent to me than the way that the heart states are understood, taught and expressed through it.
The heart states are an intrinsic part of your being. And I believe that cultivating them is vital in people’s capacity to wake up.
Buddhism describes these innate qualities of the heart as loving kindness, equanimity, sympathetic joy and compassion.
These versions of the states are really good things to have access to, but there is a flaw in the system. They are more about thinking loving thoughts than actually being in direct contact with feeling your body, which is a reflection of how Buddhism favours the mind as the ultimate source of experience. This creates blind spots that discount the reality of a lot of the immediacy of directly felt experience.
Thinking loving thoughts is different to feeling love in your body.
If you only focus on cultivating loving thoughts, this can create a shadow that reinforces the systemic oppression that exists in collective karma. It results in people exiling huge parts of experience – the bits that aren’t necessarily ‘nice’ or ‘light’. I talk more about the details of this in this post.
Recognising Power Imbalances
If you are a man reading this, you may not be aware of this, but there is a huge part of a woman’s system that is built around surviving social interactions. To avoid being completely oppressed by the power imbalance that everyone lives within, women have had to adopt coping mechanisms that men don’t have to think about. Women are constantly appeasing, accommodating, changing their truth, coping, absorbing abuse and more. This is an incredibly draining experience to be in and it takes a huge amount of energy to maintain.
I once spent an afternoon looking at a cork board in an art gallery. It was at an exhibition about women’s oppression; the cork board was an invitation for women to share the ways in which they had been oppressed and the emotional weight of it made a huge impression on me. There were hundreds of post-it notes pinned to the board of examples of all different types of micro and macro oppressions that women had experienced. What struck me was not how shocking I found it, but how I related to every single one of them. How I was so used to being undermined, oppressed, belittled, underestimated, kept small and abused that it was like the most obvious thing in the world.
Written into my heart is the fact that if you get any group of women together in a safe space and start to talk about sexual abuse, every single one of them will have a story that usually starts, ‘it’s not a big deal, but…’ after which they will reveal some sexual abuse that happened to them that is in fact a big deal.
“Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.” Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Women’s empowerment has come a long way, but be under no pretence that it is either safe or comfortable to be a woman in this world.
Women are significantly more likely to be depressed than men. They are significantly more likely to be unhappy in their marriages.
We live in a world where men’s issues often get more attention, or are framed in more serious terms than women’s. Just one example of this is that erectile dysfunction studies outnumber PMS research by five to one. Largely unrecognised is the genuinely debilitating pain that PMS can create – women cope with unimaginable levels of pain because they have no choice, while society quips about ‘the time of the month’. This is deeply symbolic of how women’s challenges are treated.
I can’t even imagine what this must be like for black women, women in serious poverty or women from any other oppressed section of society.
Privilege and Power
As animals, humans are always subconsciously hyper-aware of who will win in a fight between them and the people around them. This impacts how everyone feels and behaves all the time.
As a woman, you are always in the weaker category. You know that you can’t win anything by physical force, so it is incredibly common for conflict to become a shadow. Women learn to avoid conflict in order to survive, either by being nice or by being passive aggressive and manipulative.
Just imagine being surrounded by people who not only are physically bigger and stronger than you, but who have been in positions of power their whole life. A woman walking into an office or a bar, is like a man walking into the middle of an elite private school rugby team.
Women are surrounded by people who have power over them at all times, but aren’t willing or able to recognise it.
It’s a huge blind spot for everyone. The double bind of being a woman is that you can spend your entire time accommodating people and that gets taken for granted (so much so that a lot of women don’t even know they’re doing it) or you can stop accommodating people and people will react very strongly.
Be nice or be unsafe. That’s the common choice that you are given as a woman.
The accommodating comes from someone having to pick up the slack for the collective shadows and challenges that are present in experience. People don’t have the capacity or inclination to be with the challenging bits of life, so someone has to take on the burden of accommodating everyone else. This runs incredibly deeply through people’s energetics, sense-making, relationships and ways of looking at the world. The energetic and emotional burden of this is huge.
Often, neither side of men or women can see the depths of how much of this goes on because men can’t even possibly imagine how much energy goes into accommodating and women can’t even possibly imagine what it would be like to not be afraid and accommodating people all the time.
Take a moment to imagine that all the people in your life are genderless beings and you will probably notice how their behaviour differs. Both how they act differently and how the expectations that you have of them are completely different, based on their gender.
Where does this come from?
For a woman, creating or escalating a conflict is almost always a bad idea, so as a woman, you learn to use every possible technique to avoid it, including papering over serious challenges and incredibly deep pain or sweeping these things under the carpet.
Depending on whether you tend to internalise or externalise your shadow this will either be through pacifying others through kindness or manipulating them through passive aggression.
Showing up with love is about being willing to meet what is in experience without blaming or attacking anyone. This includes kindness, but studies have shown that people only recognise kindness when it is enacted by those who are higher status. People who are lower status are expected to be kind as a minimum behaviour.
They are required to carry the weight of the negative and challenging stuff with humility without making a fuss and when they don’t, people get angry at them.
When someone has power over you and they choose to be nice, that’s kindness
When someone is expected to be nice all the time and it’s a problem when they aren’t, that’s systemic oppression
The Shadow Side of the Brahma Viharas
Here is a list of the Buddhist heart states and some common examples of how women, and those in a position of submissiveness, have learned to adopt them to survive.
Loving Kindness – assume the best of people, don’t tell a man they are wrong or do anything that might humiliate them, be nice and you might get what you want/ not get hurt
Equanimity – boys will be boys, men are less emotionally mature, you will do more emotional and domestic labour, you will have to work harder for less money and less recognition, just accept this
Sympathetic Joy – you will laugh at hurtful jokes, you will get less pleasure in bed, you will make more sacrifices for your male partner to succeed, you will take joy in the lives of your children rather than your own successes
Compassion – you will be expected to be naturally empathic and understanding, you will be expected to take care of people around you, when you don’t do this and you express clear boundaries you will be much more likely to be considered rude and selfish
Adopting these heart states and cultivating more loving thoughts only works when you are already in a position of power. Otherwise you are stuck in the shadow sides of this, and rather than practicing them creating more freedom it makes the shadow stronger.
The Buddhist ways of relating to the heart states are only liberating when you can choose to do their opposite.
If you could win by being aggressive and instead choose kindness. If you could take control of a situation and instead choose equanimity. If you can be greedy and hoard things to yourself and instead choose to be happy for others and if you are able to be selfish and instead choose to care for others.
If you don’t have that option, because you have no power in the system and you are just expected to adopt these states to appease others, then they aren’t a practice but a means of controlling you.
The problem with the heart states is that we do not, in fact, need to ask or teach women to be more kind, we actually need to empower women to take up their space in a healthy and functioning way. To reclaim the space that would make things more balanced, without creating new dominating structures.
For practice to be empowering for everyone, there needs to be space for both women and men to be authentically present without having to assert dominance.
There’s also some important benefits that open up for men from this more balanced place – there are large parts of men’s experience that have been oppressed by this system, too, and while they have to sacrifice some privilege and control, they can benefit from things like more emotional safety that are more often reserved for women in the current system.
In order to do this properly and sustainably, people need to be able to do the work to firstly be aware of this dynamic and secondly be able to be with it in a more spacious way.
While it may be confronting for everyone initially and requires an acknowledgement and relinquishing of privilege from some people, there are deep benefits for everyone once you get out the other side of it.
This is the heart-work that is most needed in the world; it’s not about papering over the cracks and putting on a nice facade, it’s about showing up for the realness of what is going on in experience in a whole and courageous way and to work through underlying issues in a productive way.
This has the potential to create more freedom for everyone.
Empowered Heart States
The way that I teach the heart states is different. It is about connecting in with your capacity for fierce love.
It is about empowering yourself to move from a place where you know what matters most deeply in life and are willing to do what it takes to stand up for that in the world. At its core it is about deep care and respect for yourself and others and the courage to face the truth.
It’s about feeling an embodied sense of love rather than thinking nice thoughts and being a good boy or girl.
It comes from connecting with the emotional truth of what you find inside of yourself. First opening the door to feeling some of this often comes from feeling some heart-break, grief or anger that is acting as the dam that this more whole-hearted love is being held behind.
Here is a list of how I experience, define and teach the heart states:
Friendliness – How can I stay open-minded to receiving the truth of the situation? How can I feel into this in an open and relaxed way, even if it’s really hard or dark?
Inclusion – What information is important to recognise here? What information am I oppressing or ignoring and how can I open to including and accepting it?
Joy – What is something here that I can connect to in a joyful way? Is there something dark or absurd about the situation that I can find joy in?
Embodied Compassion – What do I care about in this situation? Do I need to set a boundary to ensure that people are safe and my own needs are being met? What is the courageous thing to do or say here?
I would also add gratitude and forgiveness to this list:
Gratitude – Some luxuries in life to be grateful for if you have them…
- People believing you when you tell the truth
- Having a comfort zone to go out of in the first place
- Having the space, resource and support to think your own thoughts
- Having the space, resource and support to feel your own feelings
- Being allowed to be scared
- Being allowed to be vulnerable
Forgiveness – What feelings do I need to feel in order to process this, so that I can let go of surface-level blame and see and feel the situation clearly?
Conclusion
As far as I am concerned spirituality is ultimately about freedom, beauty, truth and love.
We cannot be cultivating these things in the world when half the population is systemically abused and oppressed because of their gender, and the other half are not allowed to be vulnerable.
Thinking more loving thoughts alone isn’t going to change this dynamic.
Spirituality needs to give people the tools to face this truth and find loving ways to create more freedom and beauty in the world by integrating their darkness, rather than turning away from it.
The first step of this is recognising how disempowering some of the ways that spirituality is taught can be and consider how instead it can be used to create more space for the realness of these issues.