The patriarchy doesn’t have to do anything to enact its system of control over us, we do it for them. What’s most insidious about the patriarchy’s control of the female body is that women have internalized its system and become its most powerful enforcers, perpetrating its methods of imprisonment upon ourselves.

We’ve grown up in this cultural paradigm and internalized its ideology. Consequently, we also believe that our bodies cannot be trusted and are unsafe to inhabit. If we want to be successful in this society, we understand that our bodies need to be policed and managed, and used as instruments for the greater goal of being what’s wanted and desirable. With this as our core belief, we depart our own homes and give up our bodies as our primary residences. We stop living from inside our bodies and learn to relate to ourselves from the outside, as if third-person characters in our own lives. It is the ultimate paradox: we abandon ourselves to take care of ourselves.

Women feel trapped, pressured to play by the rules and jump through the hoops set up for us by our patriarchal system. If we don’t, play the game, we face rejection and aloneness. We behave obediently within a system that fundamentally doesn’t work for us, even when we know it’s sucking the life out of us. We conform and perform dutifully even when we know that it is the system for which we’re conforming and performing that keeps us imprisoned. It’s the dance that’s killing us and yet we keep dancing.

But I’m not here to cast blame, or make another case for why it’s our fault that we feel powerless and trapped. In truth, there’s little chance for a woman raised in this culture to feel safe listening to her own experience, or living inside her body, for that matter. The pressures to disconnect from ourselves and our bodies are strong and real. Simultaneously, the payoffs for participating in the system as it is are also strong and real. But so, too, are the consequences. In the end, such a system: abandoning ourselves and turning against our own bodies, leaving home in order to be safe and ensure we have a home with others, can only generate the most fragile kind of safety or self-esteem. Ultimately, playing by the rules is a recipe for feeling powerless and trapped.

In order for women to awaken our inner voices, trust that we can speak and live from what we really think and feel; for women to feel safe being who we are, even when that may not fit into the patriarchal ideal, women need to go even further than knowing, speaking or even acting on their own needs.

We need to return to our own bodies, to re-enter and live from inside our own physical experience. To invite ourselves, not just our thoughts and feelings, but our senses, our bodies, back into the conversation and into the experience of living. What’s needed now is a paradigm shift away from the patriarchal system that has us relating to and at our bodies, from outside of them, with our bodies as objects for patriarchal review and judgment—and towards a new system of our own making, one in which we relate—from and through our bodies, with our bodies as our guides, inseparable from ourselves.

As women, we want to feel more than just not exhausted. We want to feel authentic, empowered, and free to live the full expression of who we are, to be ourselves even if we don’t know who she is just yet. We cannot actualize ourselves or claim our full power while simultaneously ignoring, rejecting, and vigilantly controlling our richest source of self-ness and power—our bodies. The path back home to ourselves demands that we take up residence in our original home, precisely the place we were told we needed to vacate, to trust the very place we were taught to distrust. In order to do this, we must radically shift our whole conception of our bodies—from being shameful and rejected “objects” that need to be policed and adorned for the pleasure of others, to being the trusted “subjects” of our lives and a place we can and want to inhabit.

Our work is to reunite the fundamental split—from ourselves—the one we believed we had to perpetrate on ourselves. To unlock the source of our deepest power and wisdom, we must re-establish residence within our most vital source—our own bodies.

The post Why Women Chase Perfection, Even Though It’s Killing Us appeared first on Nancy Colier.

These people are not isolated examples or peculiar in any way. Many people hold grudges, deep ones, that can last a lifetime. Many are unable to let go of the anger they feel towards those who “wronged” them in the past, even though they may have a strong desire and put in a concerted effort to do so.

Often we hold onto our grudges unwillingly, while wishing we could drop them and live freshly in the present, without the injustices of the past occupying so much psychic space.

Why do we hold grudges when they are in fact quite painful to maintain, and often seem to work against what we really want? Why do we keep wounds open and active, living in past experiences of pain which prevent new experiences from being able to happen? What keeps us stuck when we want to move on and let go? Most important, how can we let go?

To begin with, grudges come with an identity. With our grudge intact, we know who we are—a person who was “wronged.”  As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and purpose. We have definition and a grievance that carries weight. To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one, and whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity. We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves, one we don’t know yet, that allows the present moment to determine who we are, not past injustice.

But what are we really trying to get at, get to, or just get by holding onto a grudge and strengthening our identity as the one who was “wronged”? In truth, our grudge, and the identity that accompanies it, is an attempt to get the comfort and compassion we didn’t get in the past, the empathy for what happened to us at the hands of this “other,” the experience that our suffering matters  As a somebody who was victimized, we are announcing that we are deserving of extra kindness and special treatment. Our indignation and anger is a cry to be cared about and treated differently—because of what we have endured.

The problem with grudges, besides the fact that they are a drag to carry around (like a bag of sedimentized toxic waste that keeps us stuck in anger) is that they don’t serve the purpose that they are there to serve. They don’t make us feel better or heal our hurt. At the end of the day, we end up as proud owners of our grudges but still without the experience of comfort that we ultimately crave, that we have craved since the original wounding. We turn our grudge into an object and hold it out at arm’s length—proof of what we have suffered, a badge of honor, a way to remind others and ourselves of our pain and deserving-ness. But in fact our grudge is disconnected from our own heart; while born out of our pain, it becomes a construction of the mind, a story of what happened to us. Our grudge morphs into a boulder that blocks the light of kindness from reaching our heart, and thus is an obstacle to true healing. Sadly, in its effort to garner us empathy, our grudge ends up depriving us of the very empathy that we need to release it.

The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the “other” (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge, the pain that was caused by this “other,” is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the elixir for our pain.

To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.

In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it. We can then let go of the identity of the one who was “wronged,” because it no longer serves us and because our own presence is now righting that wrong. Without the need for our grudge, it often simply drops away without our knowing how. What becomes clear is that we are where we need to be, in our own heart’s company.

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier

The post Why We Hold Grudges and How to Let Them Go: It’s Not About the Person Who Wronged You, It’s About Who You Want to Be appeared first on Nancy Colier.

What was clear was that Kate was not only living the experience of fullness that day, but also the experience of what that fullness meant about who she was as a person. It was in that secondary experience, the story about herself, that the unbearable suffering was housed. It wasn’t the Moo goo gai pan in her belly that kept her from being able to be in the present moment, but rather the “me” story her mind had crafted out of the previous evening’s experience, which in fact made her present moment intolerable.

In a similar event, while out walking together, my friend stubbed her toe. I could see from her reaction that she was in real physical pain. But as I soon also witnessed, the suffering that the stubbing caused was not in her toe or foot—the real suffering was in her mind—in the story that she told herself about herself, as a result of what had happened to her toe. In the minutes that followed the stubbing, I watched as my friend transitioned from a happy, confident, and calm woman to a clumsy, inattentive and anxious little girl, the person that her father had berated and in whom he had been chronically and un-correctably disappointed. I watched as she re-dressed herself in an old identity, which included being a person who was perpetually distracted and to blame for not being able to improve her life. The pathways that connected the pain in her toe to the suffering in her mind moved with lighting-speed and were mighty powerful.

Back in my office with Kate, I asked if she could, just for a moment, experience the physical phenomenon that made up what she was calling her fatness and her disgustingness. Quite simply, what it felt like in her body at that exact moment, twelve hours after having eaten the last bite of food. At first she reported a series of emotions; she felt icky, leaky, fleshy, gross, a mess, and more. But all of her descriptions related to how she felt about herself, about who she was. Her body’s experience was nowhere in her description or awareness. I could only hear her mind raging on about how it felt about her, what it had decided about her worth and value—as a result of what she had eaten. When I brought Kate’s attention to this distinction, she immediately switched to a new chapter in the story about herself, specifically, her own psychological problems. At that point, a host of interpretations about herself and why she had eaten the food came tumbling out of her mouth; ideas about her parents, her psychological trauma, and her need to escape the moment into the anesthesia of food. Her body had still not been invited into the dialogue.

It took many attempts, but when Kate was finally able to drop out of her mind and down into her body, this is what she found: a tightness or presence at the waistband in her pants, a kind of achiness in her knees and pelvis, and a mild sense of fuzziness in her head. When the body’s present moment was allowed, such was the extent of her actual experience of the Moo goo gai pan and the whole event. A bit of tightness at the waistband, an achiness in knees and pelvis, and mild head fuzziness. When Kate was able to experience the moment directly, having untethered it from what it said about her and her identity, she felt profound relief. She even started to laugh, and suddenly she was entirely present in the room, the very same room she was going to have to leave just minutes before.

In that moment, stripped of its “me” story, the bloatedness (as she called it) in her body could just be what it was, a set of mild, completely bearable sensations. She realized that the problem, the suffering, had never been the sensations or the food in her belly. In fact, the sensations themselves had never even been experienced, never made it past the mind’s gate and into awareness. At last her experience could simply be what it was, which amazingly, was virtually nothing. Lightness entered the room, and the day once again belonged to Kate. Having unhitched her me-story from the present moment, disrobed her experience into its sensorial nakedness, Kate was delivered back into her life.

In the Advaita tradition (a part of Hinduism) there is a remarkable expression. It says this: you are not experiencing suffering, you are suffering your experience. Experience arises but how we want to be in relationship with that experience is up to us. An experience always appears as sensation in the body; it may be unpleasant or not, but either way it need not become an experience of profound suffering. Our experience becomes suffering when we give it to our mind to run with, and to use as material in its narrative about who we are and how we’re doing in our life.

As an experiment, try unhitching your experience from what the experience says about you. Try experiencing the present moment directly, as sensation. Try refraining from using the moments of your life as material with which to construct your “me” story. Try experiencing your life instead of using your life to define yourself. It turns out, not taking your life so personally can bring great relief and even give you back your life!

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