Friday, November 29, 2013

Who owns my body?

As Indian women (or is it women in general?), we’ve been taught that taking care of others’ feelings is our job. This includes listening to unwanted advice, shape-shifting our own behaviour to fit other people’s beliefs, and complying with norms so we don’t offend. But who are we truly responsible for? Only ourselves? Ourselves and a little bit of others? Ourselves and others equally? Others, at the cost of our self? 

As I get tangled up in these questions, I get a little bit of relief when I read Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s “Boundaries.” In this book, the authors talk about what personal boundaries are. Just as a fence around a physical property demarcates its boundaries and tells us who the property belongs to, our being also needs boundaries. “Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership.” The authors say that when we know what exactly we own and are responsible for, we are free to make choices about our “property.” And if we don’t know our boundaries, then we don’t fully own our lives. The only options available are what others let us have. 

As I read on, I have a heretical thought. Do I own my body? Do I own the right to do with it what I want? To have or not have children? The answer seems obvious, and yet not so obvious. I think my body is my own, but my womb seems to be a collective entity. From strangers to far-flung aunties, everyone has an opinion, a stake in it. And is my brain mine? Can I think these thoughts that many others are not thinking? 

I think some more, with the brain that I hopefully own, and read on. I come to a place where the authors say: “We are responsible to others and for ourselves.” What this seems to mean is that we are responsible for helping others when they are in need, but we are not responsible for the normal burdens that each of us has to carry. And then later on, they go on to describe all the things that do fall within our boundaries and that we are really responsible for. These include our feelings, our thoughts, our beliefs, our choices and our values. Which, in turn, means that other people’s feelings, thoughts, beliefs, choices and values are theirs and distinct from our own. 

So, if I am contained within, and my body is my own, and my thoughts are my own, and my choices are my own, then I also have the freedom to direct my life in the way I think is best for me. Isn’t responsibility really our ability to respond, which means we can choose. What I really need to take responsibility for is changing the belief that causes me to internalize the external pressure to have a baby. I need to truly believe in my right to maintain the integrity of all that I own – my thoughts, my values, my actions. This is my internal struggle. 

But there is an external, societal aspect as well. We are judged at all the major intersections of our lives – whether we get married or not, whether we have kids or not, even whether we have a second kid or not. Somewhere behind all this, is the nebulous position of a culture that operates from the belief that women – their bodies and their being – are property, owned first by their families, and then by the larger society.

When we question norms, and assert our right to think for ourselves, we risk being looked upon as deviant. But without taking that risk, we can’t move beyond being considered “belongings,” defined only in terms of our roles instead of the thinking, feeling people that we are in ourselves. And who have the right to say - It is my body and what I do with it is none of your business. 

Friday, November 22, 2013

Feeling deeply, Thinking clearly

Have you ever thought about people who fall on either side of two extremes – the over-thinkers and over-feelers of the world? And drawn the conclusion that the reason the over-thinkers cannot feel is because they think too much. And the over-feelers cannot think because they feel too much. But is this always true? Are feeling and thoughts as antagonistic to each other as we’ve been taught to believe? 

In his wonderful book, Honoring the Self, Nathaniel Branden delves deep into our psyches to answer these questions. What he emerges with are insights that give us a new understanding of how our thoughts and feelings interact with each other. Branden starts by saying: “Feelings are often the first form in which we become aware that something is wrong with our life. We need thought in order to know what to do, but feelings often alert us to the existence of a problem.” If our response to these uncomfortable feelings is to suppress or ignore them, then we effectively cut ourselves off from awareness. This disowning of our feelings muddies our thinking. Since we are unable to integrate the knowledge that our feelings contain, our only option is to keep on living in a pre-programmed, automatic way. Branden says: “In the area of our personal life, if we cannot feel deeply, it is very difficult to think clearly. This is contrary to the notion that thinking and feeling are opposed functions and that each entails the denial of the other.”

Naming and owning our feelings, instead of banishing them to our unconscious, is an act of courage and honesty. To describe our feelings correctly, to say “I am angry or sad or hopeless at this moment” is not self-pity. What is self-pity is when we make a statement like: “I am in a hopeless situation.” In the first case, we own the truth about what we feel. In the second, we are making, what Branden says is, “a statement of alleged fact.” Most of us have never been taught to make this important distinction. While self-pity is destructive, owning our feelings means that we accept our painful experiences. When we can acknowledge them, we also have the option of working to confront and resolve them. Branden says: “We cannot liberate ourselves from that which we have never experienced; we cannot leave a place that we have never been.” 

So, how do we access blocked feelings? While this is a unique process for each of us, if our wounds are deep and ancient, it often requires professional help. The first part of this process, however, is simple and profound. Branden says: “Opening the breathing is generally the first step to opening the feelings.” Deepening and being aware of our breath creates a stillness in which we stop running away from our emotions. In this space, our emotions can actually register in our conscious experience. This is one of the reasons why meditation is such a powerful practice – it can help release buried feelings. But Branden gives us advance warning - in the beginning, because of its emphasis on breathing and being still, a meditative practice can cause emotional outbursts that we can perceive as highly threatening. The sludge is being brought to the surface. It is often only at later stages that meditation leads to calm. This means that a meditation teacher who can guide us through this process is invaluable – we need a guide who can help us navigate the hills and valleys of our emotional experience.     

Once we’ve made our way through, we come to a place of greater freedom. We’ve courageously owned parts of ourselves that we’d abandoned. We’ve mourned losses that were buried deep in our psyches. We’ve confronted uncomfortable feelings like anger and released them in healthy ways. It is only through releasing feelings stuck deep in the body, can we ever hope to transcend them. As feelings are experiences and released, the shadows that they cast on the mind are also cleared. We no longer deny parts of ourselves. We can acknowledge the truth of our experience. And when we can do that, we can see our experience more objectively. Basically, we think more clearly. Then, finally, we are in a place where we are free to choose our actions – where we can act in conscious, autonomous ways instead of the mechanical, conditioned ways we’ve been taught.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Giving Birth

"Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-groomed, and unaggressive." 

This quote by Leslie M. McIntyre appears as a sidebar in the pages of Julia Cameron's wonderful "The Artiste's Way." In the book, Cameron shares several insights on how blocked artistes - writers, painters, dreamers - can access and recover their creative selves. 

She talks about our tendency to be self destructive and what that really means. "The question "Are you self destructive?" is asked so frequently that we seldom hear it accurately. What it means is Are you destructive of your self? And what that really asks us is Are you destructive of your true nature?" Are you?        

Am I? At this point, these questions resonate with me deeply. They bring to the fore issues I have been struggling with - the fact that I want to grow as a writer and a creative person while feeling that my biological clock is ticking. I know what having a baby here in the U.S. means - it means hard work and the fact that that will be my main job for at least a few years. Could I still bring forth my creative babies while tending to a human baby? Would the stories inside me remain still-born and never come to term? These questions create ripples of discomfort inside me. 

And then there is the other dimension - of other people's expectations. "When are you planning to have a baby?" Haven't many of us heard this? Sometimes, when I hear such questions, I wonder why they don't ask me - "What are your plans for giving birth to yourself?" Like countless women, I am inching closer to that moment when I need to make a decision about having children. Growing up, that was always a part of my dream. It still is, but there is also the growing sense that without fully being and becoming who I am, it'll be very hard to be a great mother.

Motherhood is not, of course, the idealized state we see in Hindi movies or see glorified in Indian culture. The real truth isn't mentioned very often. That each of us has a being that needs expression as well as relationship to find fulfillment. And which curdles inside when it doesn't find an outlet. One of my earliest memories of a strong woman is the mother of a friend of mine. She was intelligent, resourceful and ambitious (isn't that a bad, almost dirty word for a woman to be associated with). I remember her pacing up and down the corridor of her swanky NepeanSea Road home in what was then called Bombay, straining to breathe inside the confines of a traditional homemaker's role. Her children didn't always make her happy.    

I am afraid that if I am not ready for them, my children won't make me happy either. And yet, I have so much love to give. As I wallow in these doubts, I come back again to the beginning and ask myself: Am I self-destructive?

Monday, November 11, 2013

Thoughts on washing dishes

Moving to a different country and culture puts us in a context and space completely different from all that we've known. This shift in perspective gives us a new way of seeing - we can see how our self has been shaped by cultural beliefs. We become aware of the fact that these beliefs are, in fact, not who we are in essence. But if we are not them, then who are we? 



This is the point where we have the chance to delve deep.

One of the basic lifestyle differences between India and the States is the fact that household work needs to be done on your own. Unlike India, there is no help, or, more factually, very expensive help available. For the first time in my life, I have been washing dishes - washing big pots and pans by hand so they are ready for the next use, loading and unloading the dishwasher and sometimes, washing dishes by hand. How does that stack up as opposed to having a maid do all the work?

On the positive side, it removes the nagging guilt that I used to feel at the thought of hired help doing my work, for a very insignificant salary. Still, that was what I was used to, so that guilt usually lay dormant when I was in Delhi. Also, in India, the cultural message attached to so-called menial work was that it was "less than." As an H4 wife in the States, there were times in the beginning when I had to struggle to disconnect with that message. In my head, I believed that all work has value. In my emotional reactions, that didn't seem to be true.  

What also happened was that playing the role of a housewife showed me how invisible women's work really is. And I felt this, in spite of the fact that I have a lovely, progressive man as a husband. In my head, I was carrying an image, a projection of how being nurturing - cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry - should be part of my DNA as a woman. That it should feel natural, something I took to like fish to water. Only it didn't. I felt like I was the support staff and I didn't like it. My husband didn't ask me to do all this. It was me operating from a script. When I realized this difference between who I thought I was and who I really am, I felt angry about all the crazy things my culture had taught me to believe. And I felt a strange kinship with all the women who have gone before me - working inside the home,discounting that work as "not real work." 

And when I looked at some of the Indian families around me, I was disturbed by how some people adapt to life here in the States only to the extent that it takes them to succeed. So, while there is a lot of outer change, there is no real internal change. Even if the woman works, she still does all the household work. In fact, she seems to do a lot worse than she would in India, where there is help available. And it's not just Indians. It's pretty much everyone - Asians, Latinos, Americans. Gender roles are still very much in place in today's America.       

So, where does this leave me? Pulling back my attention to myself, I find that I am a little bit easier in the space I occupy. I don't hold myself to as high a standard of household perfection as I did in the first year and a half of my married life. As a friend told me recently, a clean house is the sign of a wasted life. I believe wholeheartedly in the essence of that message. Especially here in America, where labor is expensive, it is extremely important to internalize this belief. Household work needs to get done in a way that facilitates our lives. It shouldn't be the cross we carry as women - where our homes are barometers of who we are as people, where specks of dust carry shame-ridden messages. 

As someone in transition, I still like to have a clean, orderly home. It makes me feel in control of my environment and, in turn, a little more in control of my life. But I am working to put household chores in their proper place, disengaging from the psychic space they occupy, and the roles that women are supposed to play. I may choose to perform those functions, but I refuse to perform a role.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Anger - A Call to Action

What's the best use of my time? What do you bring to the table? Is this person saying "we" when they really mean "me"? As a recovering nice girl and people pleaser, these are questions that I have started asking recently. These questions have uncovered a lot of anger. Anger that threatens to consume and spill out, but also anger that prods me into saying No to what I don't want and helps me align with my values.   

As it sometimes happens when we most need it, I've just come across some writing that helps me understand this process better. In her book, Walking in This World, Julia Cameron says: "When we are angry at being overlooked, it is not arrogance and grandiosity. It is a signal that we have changed sizes and must now act larger." She goes on: "When we cannot sleep, when we are "eaten alive" by an inequity or slight, the monster that is eating us is our anger over our own displaced power. We are very powerful. That personal power is what we are feeling as a "towering rage," and that artificially externalized wall of rage can make us feel small and puny until we figure out that it is a power within ourselves and not the sheer wall of the "odds" stacked against us. The odds are against us until we are "for" ourselves."

And later: "Anger signals us that we are being called to step forward and speak out. We hate this and so we fantasize retreating instead. Rage at a bully or at a bullying situation is actually a wonderful sign. Once we own it, it is our rage at allowing ourselves and others to be bullied. If it is our own, we can use it. Yes, this rage feels murderous and distorting, but it is actually a needed corrective. If our rage is that large, so are we."

Our anger feels threatening because of the power it contains - exploding with it can cause damage, repressing or denying it mutates it into depression.The challenge becomes to channel our anger into actions that create change in our lives, so that it speaks up for who we are and who we want to become.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Is there a right prayer?

               Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha Deva
                     Maata Jaaki Parvati, Pita Mahadeva

Day before yesterday was my second Diwali here in California. Diwali, for those of you who don't know, is a festival that celebrates the triumph of good over evil and which is as significant to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians. In the evening pooja (prayer), my husband and I sang the Ganesha aarti. The prayer had been floating in my consciousness for days before. Well, not the prayer exactly, which praises Lord Ganesha, but rather a specific line in it that has been getting under my skin. While talking about the various miracles that Lord Ganesha can bring about, it says "Baanjhan Ko Putra Det," which means that Ganesha can bestow the gift of a son to a barren woman. When I was a child, this line seemed to confuse my very being. Everyone sang it like it was normal.

This time, when I was singing the aarti, I tried to convince myself that it said "putra" or son instead of "putri" or daughter just because it rhymed better. Maybe it was speaking just of a woman who desired and wanted to have a child - surely, that's a natural desire? Was I being too rigid? Didn't I want to stay in touch with my culture by singing the aartis the right way? Didn't the aarti also bring back that sense of home, that feeling of connectedness and even devotion?   
 
Stuck in the middle of these questions and doubts, I sang the line but with a certain feeling of hopelessness. I got hooked into a space where I felt that nothing I did was the correct solution, that I was caught between remaining connected with my culture or remaining connected with my truth. The little girl I was would not have gotten confused. She felt her feelings keenly and when she was negated, the feelings bled right into her. She knew it was unfair and wrong, even if she couldn't understand why God thought that only a son was a gift or a woman was valuable only if she had children.

But I do. I understand. When I allow myself to get out from that little space where I've cornered myself. Does staying connected with my culture mean that I start believing things that I actually stand against ? I don't think a true God would ever create a sterile, barren human being. I don't think a true God creates women for the sole purpose of having children - although that could be part of their bigger dream. I don't think sons are gifts, and daughters are not. And I think God thinks the same way I do. And our prayers reflect only who we are as a society. They don't reflect the true nature of God. Only a patriarchal system discriminates, not God.  When I truly think of my doubts and questions about staying connected to India here in the U.S, I know that I don't want to follow dogma. I want to pray with my whole heart, something I've not done for years. But that prayer has to be mine. And not couched in thinking that my very being protests against.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Show Yourself

In the Milpitas library, I meet Jennifer every Thursday and Friday and we go through our English lessons. I have been teaching her for more than a year now as part of the library's volunteer tutor program. This time, we've picked up a book on inter-cultural communication and the chapter talks about the importance of self-disclosure when you talk to a person of a different culture.That strikes me as important. Here, in the Bay area, cultures collide and sometimes interact in wonderful ways. Talking directly about what you think and revealing who you are becomes important because people can have preconceived notions based on your ethnic identity. 

I get to practice this when I meet someone at a photography class I am taking. I tell her that I have had an arranged marriage. I ask her what she thinks an arranged marriage means. I clarify that my arranged marriage in not the same as a "forced" arranged marriage. That I could have said Yes or No to marrying my now husband. That it was just like a date at first, only arranged by my family. This self-revelation causes her to answer likewise. She tells me about an Indian friend who grew up here in the U.S, who had a "real" arranged marriage with a man who is ten years older than her. She tells me about her friend's husband - how he is very controlling - as well as the fact that her friend works and maintains a separate bank account and tries to live her life as well as she can. She also talks about her own Mexican heritage and the way men treat women in their culture. At the end of the conversation, I feel positive about the fact that I helped her see who I am, even if just a little bit. Talking with her also shows me our similarities, and that makes me feel less alone. 

Loneliness is something that creeps in assiduously every now and then. I've had an attack of it recently because I've missed a cousin's wedding that happened in India and have been imagining all the future events I will potentially miss. In transition, I am finding that it's important to focus on the right things - connections you can make in the here and now, things that you can do to stay connected with family back at home, and also forming a deeper connection with yourself. Without these anchors, it's easy to feel disconnected and lose your footing.          

Friday, November 1, 2013

If you don't get paid for it, is it not work ?

In her insightful book, "When Work Doesn't Work Anymore - Women, Work and Identity," Elizabeth Perle McKenna talks about how we, as women, don't assign the same value to "free" time as we do to "waged" time - hours traded for money. "Wendy felt bad about asking her husband to take her son for a few hours on Saturday mornings after she'd been home all week so she could go to exercise class. "He works all week. I feel guilty about doing something for myself." I ask her if she hired a baby-sitter, would that person be working? "Yes," she replied. "Then aren't you working too?" I wondered. "I never thought of it that way," she replied. "It doesn't feel like work because I'm not getting paid."

Isn't that how most of us think ? Even when our partners might be liberal men who want an equal relationship, like in my case, we are held back by this baggage of cultural conditioning that devalues what's traditionally been women's work. When I hear stories about Indian men here in America who won't pick up their own baby because they think taking care of kids is the woman's job, it makes me realize how you can move across the world without shifting anything internally. 

It makes me really angry but since I can't do anything about them, I think of all that I or we can do, as women, to live our values in our own lives. On a basic level, it means not attaching the word "just" before the word "housewife" or "homemaker." It means owning everything we do at home and realizing that we are bringing something valuable to the table. It also means not taking on the burden of conforming to a societal role - it's not your job alone to keep the house clean. And it definitely isn't your job to pick up after family members. By valuing our own work at home and by expecting others to do their share, we can equalize the imbalance in how work outside and inside the house is seen and valued.The personal really is political.