When did you first realize that women are supposed to be nice?
Let some memories come in,
Some thoughts come in.
But it does not feel true.
Women are trained in our culture,
They're trained to be nice,
To be agreeable.
And of course we all like it when people are easy to get along with.
This is more specifically gender conditioning.
And how did it show up?
Was it something like,
Put a smile on your face?
Was it something like,
Good girls don't get mad?
Notice your body if there are sensations or energy coming in you might want to focus on that There's a sensation you could just let everything else go for a minute.
Come right into the sensation.
Where do you feel it in your body?
What are the qualities?
Is it still?
Is it moving?
What's the location?
We drop in these questions and then we see what is the response in our body.
Sitting with sensation,
We might also have memories coming in of different times we were rewarded for being agreeable.
And that might have been in words.
It might have been at school more than it was at home.
Most likely many of us had a combination.
We could let memories come up and just kind of look at them for a moment.
And then move our attention to another one.
What are some of the components of this pressure,
This conditioning to be agreeable or nice in a gender-focused way?
If there's a difference between you and male siblings,
For instance.
As your brother or brothers,
What were they encouraged to do compared to you?
There's so many components of this.
Some of it is,
Was I ever encouraged to really think about what do I wanna do with my life,
With my career?
Or was it more,
Well,
Of course you're gonna get married,
So that doesn't really matter.
Women can do this,
They can't do that.
And how are you punished if you went outside the lines of that or encouraged to follow along with what was expected?
You might have something really big that's come up and you could really pause there and just look at that.
Where is it in your body?
How does it feel?
Does it feel okay to stay with it?
If you need to back away from it a bit,
It's really helpful often to open your eyes.
Remind yourself that you're here in this moment,
Not in the past.
Take a few breaths,
Move your body a little bit.
If there are particular images,
You could put them on the wall on the other side of the room,
Put them in a frame.
Notice that we're looking at thought,
We're looking at something that's coming up.
And some of us might have been,
No one is going to make me be nice.
Others might be more,
I don't respect myself very much because I always was trying to be nice and didn't really get me anywhere.
Wherever we are in that continuum,
What was your response to that pressure,
To that training and conditioning?
And how do you feel about that now?
And we bring ourselves into our heart.
What are some of the ways that I was conditioned to be agreeable as a person in a woman's body?
How did I go along with that?
How did I fight back about that?
And all through our whole life,
You know,
A lot of our training happens when we're a child.
But through our work life too,
There might be examples that come forward.
In our relationships as adults.
How did those patterns flow through into my adult relationships?
You might also notice,
Did anything come up that was a bit surprising?
That happens often.
This is the water we swim in.
When we stop and kind of look at it like that,
It's like,
Wow,
You know,
I hadn't thought about that for such a long time.
And realize how that shaped my life.
