Masculine and Feminine

Within each man and each woman, there are masculine qualities, and there are feminine qualities. In my (dare I say, well-informed?) opinion, these two aspects must be in balance within an individual for maximum health, happiness, and actualization to be possible. This idea may sound most like the concept of Yin and Yang to you, but I have actually come to this perspective through study of work by Carl Jung and his 'mythopoetic' followers, including Marion Woodman, Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

Here is my, fully inexpert, list of masculine qualities and feminine qualities:

Masculine

• Active Energy
• Control/Order,  Domination
• Rationality & Linear Thinking
• Hierarchal Relating
• Self-orientation
• Protective
• Calm, clear-headed
• Direct, concrete
• Mathematical/Scientific
• Innovative, particularly with tools/technology

Feminine

• Receptive Energy
• Cooperation, Acquiescence
• Intuitive (subconscious) & Cyclical Awareness 
• Egalitarian Relating
• Other-orientation
• Nurturing
• Emotional
• Abstract
• Social
• Artistic/Creative Expression

I want to emphasize that this is not about being manly, or womanly. The strongest, healthiest, happiest, most attractive men are high on both masculine and feminine traits. (Intuitive men are particularly successful in the business world, as they integrate their rational knowing with their 'gut' sense of how to proceed). The same is absolutely true for women.

Yes, these lists are both incomplete and inevitably biased, but I hope the exercise illustrates how many important traits are on each list. A man lacking any feminine traits will be isolated and lonely without the skills to relate to others, though possibly successful in his career. A woman deficient in masculine traits lacks grounding, is illogical and over-emotional, and lacks appropriate boundaries between herself and the outside world. And we all know a woman can lose her intuition, softness, and likability if she upholds the masculine at the expense of the feminine.

Each of us should be aware of our own masculine and feminine traits and work to strengthen them. I believe that American culture overvalues masculine traits while devaluing feminine traits, so many of us, both men and women, are skewed toward the masculine. But how can democracy, community, and high art survive if this is what we pass on to our children? Are not corruption, narrow hierarchies, dog-eat-dog perspectives, and lonely, depressed, anxious citizens the natural outcome if we scorn all that is feminine? Ancient peoples understood the value of both the masculine and the feminine, and reaped the rewards abundantly.

On Modern Motherhood

At the risk of sounding whiny, it's tough being a modern mother. Whether she works outside the home or not, the modern mother is overworked, underpaid, and under-appreciated (too whiny!? sorry!).  She is judged by the cleanliness of her home, the quality of the food she feeds her family, the politeness and achievements of her children, the amount of volunteer work she manages or her success as a career woman, and her ability to look attractive while accomplishing these miracles. But even if she wasn't held to such ridiculous standards, a big problem for the modern mother* is the amount of responsibility she bears for raising happy, successful human beings. Even if a child has an exemplary mother and father, I feel certain the more loving, safe relationships they have with adults, the better. That is, the more the responsibility for rearing a specific child is spread among many good people, the happier, the healthier, the more generous in future, the child will be.

*(Or any individual, grandmother or single father, etc, who bears the majority of child rearing responsibilities.)

For instance, let's assume I'm a good mother, fortunate to have lots of tools available to me that have shaped me as such (like having had a good parenting role model as a child, so its easier to replicate; or having access to lots of good parenting information and advice).  Still, I'm human, so I make mistakes. Well, let's imagine I'm a prehistoric mother, with the same ability to nurture, but the same flaws. My prehistoric children would be surrounded by 30-50 other maternal figures, all willing to listen to my child's stories, watch as he demonstrated a new skill, or share a hug after a tumble. It is likely that prehistoric women breastfed infants not their own, as necessary...these women were committed to mothering all the tribe's children! So whatever my flaws, my child's experience of them would be minimized by her constant exposure to so many other caring women (with their own, different, flaws, and their own, different, strengths).

Similarly, prehistoric children likely did not perceive one man as their father, but instead viewed all the men of the tribe as paternal figures. The best hunter would teach my son how to hunt, the best tracker, how to track, etc. All the men provided food, shelter and protection to all the children.

How can this not be a boon for a child? I am so grateful to have caring teachers in my children's lives, who have skills and perspectives that I do not.  I moved 2,500 miles so my kids could live near their grandparents, and rejoice in their unique parenting styles--I don't want them to just be a replica of me! I cherish the relationships my children are cultivating with their friends' parents and with my own friends. Yes, these men and women do things differently than I do... that's the great part! The belief system behind the "how dare you tell me how to raise my kid" or "how dare you correct my child's behavior" thinking seems to me more about not wanting one's own child to be exposed to different perspectives or styles. (I know this makes me sound like I go around bossing other parents or children around, which couldn't be farther from the truth!) It's just that I can work to cultivate, for my own children, exposure to lots of caring adults, but I dream about every child having access to a tribe of loving elders, and that requires a large scale cultural change.

Interdependence

Four walls and a roof protect me from cold, wet, or the scorching sun. But single family homes also create a powerful illusion of separateness...from neighbors, passersby, or 'nature*.'  The mortgage crisis illuminated our profound interdependence on those around us: our neighbor's and countrymen's choices impact our lives in big ways.  If you have children, you know the decisions of the parents of your child's schoolmates absolutely influence your child. As a community, a nation, a species, we are connected through a web of interdependence. What empowers, educates, uplifts another benefits us all.

But interdependence is a wide, deep, rushing river. It not only inescapably ties our lives to those of our fellow humans, but to that of all other living creatures and to planet earth itself.

I lived three years in windward Oahu.  360 days of the year, the (copious) louvered windows were open, letting in the breezes, the sounds of the insects and children playing, the scents of the flowers and the rain-drenched soil. Geckos lived in every room in the house, and I'd watch the babies crawl along my ceiling as I drifted to sleep. There was also a thumb-sized frog perpetually living in the master bathroom. There were walls, but they seemed porous, and I learned my interrelatedness at a fundamental level in that house. How much more must our ancestors have grasped their dependence on 'nature' when the trees were their shelter, the flora and fauna their art, their companions, their sustenance?

If we all really understood our interdependence, we'd find the strength to make the behavior changes that 'nature' requires to continue to support us. Decisions about recycling, consuming less, eating locally, composting, safeguarding green spaces, lowering carbon footprints, banning toxic chemicals, or protecting endangered species, when re-framed with the understanding of how entirely we depend on 'nature' for our the survival, become easier. And don't forget, 'nature' will go on chugging away in new forms, even if we continue to choose to endanger our own species.



*This idea of human separateness from nature is challenged eloquently in the forward of Jane Jacobs' The Nature of Economies:  "The theme running throughout this exposition--indeed the basic premise on which this book is constructed--is that human beings exist wholly within nature as a part of natural order in every respect. To accept this unity seems to be difficult for those ecologists who assume--as many do, in understandable anger and despair--that the human species is an interloper in the natural order of things. Neither is this unity easily accepted by economists, industrialists or politicians, and others who assume--as many do, taking understandable pride in human achievements--that reason, knowledge, and determination make it possible to circumvent and outdo the natural order. Readers unwilling or unable to breach a barrier that they imagine separates humankind and its works from the rest of nature will be unable to hear what this book is saying." As she points out later in the book, ant colonies live in huge, complex societies and build impressive, complicated housing and transportation structures yet we have no problem seeing ants as part of 'nature,' or understanding that changes in their ecosystem affect their chances of survival.

Vitality and Weight Loss

As I've mentioned before, I am a Nutrition Therapist. I spend a lot of time with people who want to lose weight, and I've seen individuals do a lot of really drastic things toward that aim. When working with clients with eating disorders, the approach back to a healthy relationship with food and weight is complex, multifaceted, and careful.  If I had to sum up my perspective on weight loss for the rest of us, though, and this is a paradigm built on years of experience, I'd say achieving and maintaining a healthy weight has a pretty simple formula.  It has nothing to do with counting calories or avoiding sugar, but with prioritizing vitality, pleasure, and self-expression.

Here are the questions I'd recommend asking yourself if you're trying to lose weight:

1) What experiences make me feel vital? When do I feel alive, joyous, engaged, connected, passionate, understood, energized? Ok, now go do more of that. Seriously. Arrange your life so you get some of that, every day.  You may have to give up some stuff that's not fulfilling to you, and you may have to put your needs ahead of others' sometimes, but it's worth it. You will do less boredom snacking and emotional eating if you are prioritizing your happiness.  Wherever possible, minimize activities that are boring, stifling, or upsetting, and see a therapist if you're struggling with daily experiences causing anger or anxiety.

2) How do I feel during and after eating various foods? Notice which foods bring you the most pleasure to eat, and savor every bite of them. As much as possible, avoid foods that don't really please you. Each food affects your postprandial energy level, physical comfort, mood, and satisfaction differently. This is very specific to your body, so you're going to have to really tune in to begin to understand which foods increase your sense of vitality. If there are foods you believe you like, but you realize that even after a large quantity of it, you're still left wanting (store-bought cookies or potato chips do this to me) then why bother? If eating a burger and fries (or whatever) leaves you feeling like you have a rock in your stomach, don't do that to yourself! You deserve to feel good in your own skin...go out and eat based on what is pleasurable both during and after the eating experience.

3) How can I increase my activity level in a pleasurable way? I don't exercise.  Who wants to waste their finite time in this life doing something that feels burdensome or painful? But I do move. I walk, a lot (in fact, I'm walking right now...I have a 'treaddesk', so all my computer time is spent walking).  I dance. I enjoy kickboxing, because some days it feels so fucking good to kick the shit out of that bag. I run around the park after my kids. I make love. I move. I think it might be impossible to feel vital sitting all day. But I absolutely forbid you to go out and exercise... you must find some wonderful, delicious way to move and do not for one moment think about how many calories you are burning while doing so.

That's it. That's my advice. Don't go on a diet! Even if you lose weight, you'll gain it back (a heartbreaking 95% of dieters do). But do fill yourself up in so many other ways that food goes back to being simply...food.

Corruption & Happiness

A few years back, while listening to a researcher describe his recent iteration of the "happiest countries on earth" list, I was struck by the comment that government corruption has a very strong negative impact on individual happiness.  That statement came back to me on Friday as I listened to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson talk about their new book, Winner-Take-All Politics on the new Moyers & Company.   It's not just competing visions of utopia between the two parties standing in the way of good government policy, as I have told myself in the past. It's an intentional decision on the part of our nation's politicians, from both sides of the aisle, to knowingly promote public policies that are not in the best interest of the public, because those politicians can get paid to do so. In other words: corruption, big time.

The corruption doesn't only make us vulnerable to 'great recessions,' giant oil spills or contaminated food, though. Living in an environment in which it is unsafe to trust...that is a terrible burden for our psyche to carry. Given social trust, loyalty, cooperation and mutual protection were foundational to our success as a species for the first 190,000 years, we are wired to thrive under those auspices. It's a tricky balancing act to remain connected to the vital energy of socializing, trusting and aiding those around us--without which connection we can end up going through the motions of life without passion, joy, vitality--when barraged with news of the untrustworthy around us, particularly those with positional power. So while we work towards punishing the corrupt and rewarding the honorable within our political establishment, we must also work to build, in our own lives, the kind of social networks that our prehistoric brothers and sisters depended on: those founded on reciprocity, intimacy, loyalty, and the knowledge that the most fun and pleasure to be found in human life rests in our interactions with those around us.

The Call of The Wild

Suddenly a fixation with my own status as a domesticated human has gripped me.  I've understood, for years, that humans are wild animals that self-domesticated around the time of agriculture, while we were domesticating everything else we could get our hands on.  But that's been a cerebral understanding. This week,  the knowledge has hit me in the gut.

For this moment, domestication is feeling a bit like a leash or a fenced enclosure.  The more I read about prehistory, the more evidence I stumble upon that wild humans were peace-loving, cooperative, friendly, relaxed, and well-fed, the safer it feels to hear and respond to an inner call of the wild.

The call I hear has nothing to do with flying to a remote destination and joining a primitive tribe. It doesn't really even have to do with never doing laundry or changing another diaper again. No, my psyche whispers to start that business my partner and I have been dreaming of and cautiously planning for, even though it's a giant risk. To write what I want and say what I need to say, even if others may judge me for it. To dance to the beat of my own drum, to color outside the lines of society's strictures. 

It calls me to trust in my own instincts, to believe in my own value as a friend, mother, lover, partner, daughter, sister, writer, leader, even when I'm not self-censoring. That's a key difference between the wild and the domesticated: a wild animal trusts her instincts implicitly,  a domesticated animal has been trained to curb her instincts in exchange for a reward someone else selected. No wonder there's been such a thorough and enthusiastic campaign over millennia to paint the life of wild humans as violent, impoverished and miserable. If we believe our natural instincts are terribly flawed, we can judge our every desire to push societal norms as "base" and our self-control as "civilized." I'll probably never be ready to give up the comforts of domestic life (airplanes and heaters come to mind immediately as things-I-don't-ever-want-to-live-without) but I'm not above trying to have my cake and eat it too. So here's to honoring wild instincts within a domesticated environment... I'll let you know how it goes.

On Patriarchy

There are a lot of people who believe patriarchy is the natural human instinct and the most instinctual human social structure. Many people, even those who have no doubt that homo sapiens have walked the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, look at human 'history' (i.e. human written history) and find all the proof they need that hierarchy, dominance and aggression are coded right into human (male) DNA.  Some may feel we can rise above an inferior past, others may use the assumption to explain or condone dominating behavior among today's humans. Either way, if you choose not to exclude the primary 190,000 years in your review of what it means to be human, the case for instinctual patriarchy falls to pieces.

It's important to have a clear understanding of what patriarchy is. Although the term is used most often within the feminist movement, patriarchy is NOT about the men in a culture ruling the women of that culture. It's not even about the men in a culture ruling the women of that culture and the men and women of another culture. Patriarchy is about a few men (maybe the top 1%?) ruling the rest of the men and women in the culture, and often those of other 'dominated' cultures as well.  Too often the rightful attacks against patriarchy by feminists create the illusion in a man's mind that patriarchy is to all men's advantage. This could not be further from the truth.

Patriarchy is a small group of men at the top of a hierarchy using the rest of the humans they can dominate for their own purposes. One might make a case that the small group of men has sincere intentions (saving our souls from eternal damnation?) but even if you believed they are mostly well-intentioned (which I find hard to swallow) the fact remains that the rest of us will be subject to immense pressure to follow their dictates. 

Patriarchy is founded on top-down control. If it is useful for those at the top that the rest of us believe that our worth as humans is dependent on how hard we work and how far we climb up a corporate latter, then that is the way they will frame the culture. (And we can agree even reaching the top of said corporate latter is still miles away from the top of the hierarchy, right?) If it is useful for them that we believe we can't lead successful, secure, abundant lives without submitting to 40(++) hours of mind-numbing drudgery or without minimizing their tax rates (we must protect those job creators!) or otherwise putting their desires before our own, then you can bet your last dime they are committing their considerable wealth and power to convincing us of those facts.

It's easy to wonder why we'd ever be taken in by such a ploy as hierarchy, why we'd docilely go along with a plan so contradictory to our own happiness. We're not all brainless ingenues...in fact, I doubt those at the top are as intelligent as the brightest among us.  However,  human DNA has evolved in a way that we are naturally inclined to accept and honor cultural norms & social pressure (recall that our cooperative and tight-knit social networks formed the literal foundation of prehistorical human success). Further, the penalties imposed on those who step outside the rules defined by the top are uncomfortable at best, deadly at worst. Women can be sentenced to flogging for driving a car in Saudi Arabia, young gay men are subject to humiliation or violence in America's schools, and peaceful demonstrators around the world have been attacked and killed for calling for democracy. It takes a lot of guts and a crystal clear understanding of what you stand to gain to take a stand against the patriarchal powers that be.

My absolute favorite book on the subject of patriarchy is The Chalice & The Blade by Riane Eisler. Eisler cites countless evidence from prehistory and ancient civilizations to illuminate the fact that not only are we egalitarian and cooperative by nature, but also that the majority of great human inventions, like complex language, writing, cities, modern plumbing and yes, even agriculture, were incubated and nurtured under the auspices of cooperative, egalitarian, matrilineal cultures.

But it's a quote from another book I'll leave you with, one you know I've been reading and that I also heartily recommend: Sex At Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. "Remember this when some loudmouth at the bar declares that 'patriarchy is universal, and always has been!'  It's not, and it hasn't. But rather than feel threatened, we'd recommend that our male readers ponder this: Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." And that's something we can all appreciate!

Trusting Abundance

The women in my family have a certain myth they pass along to each new generation. (Myth as in: "a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.") When recalling memories of her life, my maternal grandmother was fond of concluding that she didn't know why, "but everything always turns out wonderfully for our family."

My mother has a deep belief in her own direct access to all she could ever want or need.  She literally believes all she has to do is ask, and the universe will provide. Lest you think these optimists never knew hardship, there was an alcoholic husband/father, my mother's debilitating chronic disease which began in childhood, and the death of my mother's fiancé in a military accident during the Vietnam War. These are certainly woman who could have found evidence that life doesn't really meet their needs abundantly, but the myth, the story they tell themselves, shapes the way they interpret events.

I believe there may have been an abundance myth held ubiquitously among prehistoric humanity. With a 190,000 year history of "simple" foraging societies (recall these do not store or process the food they collect) it seems likely these men and women held an unwavering belief that there was enough to go around. They were right of course; population levels were so low there was literally an abundance of new land to explore, new bounty ripe for the taking by our perceptive species. Foraging life is neither labor- nor time-intensive relative to agriculture (or the modern American workweek), so prehistoric peoples enjoyed ample leisure and socializing,  too. Add to that their abundant and guilt-free sexuality and the egalitarian safety net provided by the tribe (resources are distributed evenly among all) and you can imagine the absolute faith they would have in abundance.

Approaching from a different perspective, one could find evidence that in fact prehistoric peoples lived in great poverty and that modern humans enjoy much more abundance than primitive humans ever did.  But while trust in abundance was a foundational lifeview for preagricultural man, despite our copious luxuries "modern" man seems to operate based on an assumption of shortage.

Trust in abundance is transformational, lubricating generosity, playfulness, present-moment focus, hedonism, and joyfulness. Believing in scarcity is transformational, too, making selfishness, fear, hording and even violence rational choices. If you review your personal history, you can find evidence for either belief.  Your life, your happiness, your impact...all hinge on what you chose to find.

Using knowledge for good

The way I see it, last week's post on "The Gatherer-Hunter Diet" leaves a huge question looming. Even if one agrees with my two basic assumptions (1: that there is in fact a "gatherer-hunter" diet pattern that is internally coherent & sufficiently unique from agricultural diet patterns; and 2: that the scientific data showing rapidly deteriorating health status after agriculture are painting an accurate picture & are related to the changes in diet vs. other factors) we are still left with what I consider a big dilemma:

What on earth do we do about that knowledge? We no longer live in small, nomadic tribes, with the skills and knowledge necessary to gather and hunt, and the vastness of human population on earth (7 billion instead of averaging 100,000) means we could never go back to hunting & gathering on any meaningful scale.

Worse, what if 7 billion people decided to mimic the "optimal diet" seen in gatherer-hunters? According to the EPA, "Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually, accounting for about 28% of global methane emissions from human-related activities."  And all industrially-produced animal products have additional ethical concerns, including animal cruelty and antibiotic overuse.  If we continue to look to industry to provide our animal protein, the impact of 7 billion people drastically reducing their grain consumption would have a large and terrible impact indeed.

I was surprised to find Amazon.com has a large selection of "Paleo" cookbooks, which I have no interest in purchasing myself so I can't be sure what meats they feature. If for some reason they're telling you to go to the grocery store and pick up a shrink-wrapped package of ribeye but skip the dinner roll, it would seem a devastatingly misguided, if well-intentioned, plan to regain our primal well-being. (If anyone with experience with these cookbooks wants to tell me if I'm way off on my packaged-supermarket-meat assumption, please do!)

In my opinion, the more we learn about the lifestyle humans thrived under for hundreds of thousands of years, the more questions we must ask ourselves about how to use that knowledge for good. We will undoubtedly need to eat more grain than was eaten our first 100,000 years, because grains are a cornerstone of feeding dense populations, but we can balance whole grains with other foods, instead of making them the foundation of our "pyramid." For ethical protein, maybe the more adventurous among us will try insects (healthy & environmentally friendly!).  Some may find that raising rabbits and chickens in their backyard feels right. For others it may be a low-grain flexitarianism that focuses on nuts and beans plus the occasional humanely-raised meat/eggs for protein. Seafood seems a sustainability minefield, but with careful research and a willingness to tread off the beaten path, there are options that are healthy and green, too. And we can all stand to learn enough locally-specific botany that we could safely forage for wild edibles in addition to supporting local pesticide-free farmers. What might work for you?