Art - Philosophy - Psychotherapy

Month: October 2023

Gender identity and the field of experience

What if gender only seems to be an identity? We co create self within our extant developmental field, a field which told us that gender was both important and part of our identity. But this field also told me that people with dyslexia are thick, that being gay was evil and they deserved AIDS, that being disabled made you in-valid. If we can remove these introjected norms and see them for what they are, they quickly fall away. So, what happens if we remove gender identity from the field and see it separate from its binary narrative? If we allow this removal to take place we can clearly see, our identity has nothing to do with gender. And, gender itself ceases to require the binary polarity we have been sold. It can assume its dynamic complexity of which it was stripped; The need to assign gender ceases to be a requirement for identity. Self then is free to develop as it naturally would, without the constraints of this introjected norm. This in turn gives us the opportunity to see the self as not fixed but rather, renewed or recreated every day by our awareness and exploration of the phenomenological field we exist within. From this perspective we can understand all things are impermanent.

Perhaps self only feels like it exists because of the illusion of permanence.

intimacy

It is impossible to be intimate with another, until you have become intimate with yourself.

In many ways Mindful awareness is key to this intimacy. To spend time absorbed in your own experience, to watch your thoughts come and go, to see your feelings come and watch them fall away, to experience your reactions to all these, and to be with your mental process, to see it clearly. Learning all this is impermanent, transitory, this is the key to true intimacy with the self. And from here we can meet others with mindful awareness, and intimacy between us can truly develop, without the veil of expectations. Just the ever present awareness of what is rather than what we think should be.

Shedding our own should’s, the expectations of others and for others is at the heart of meeting, one authentic self to another. After all, if you live your life by another’s should, you will live no life at all.

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