Enneagram & Relationships

Start acting more like a woman!

This was told to me many times from different people no particular gender. Someone once said to me "Start acting more like a woman. I may start . . . respecting you. Stop acting like a man". This blog sounds like regular feminist fighting to be a woman but truly I'm taking you on a journey to dissolve all these concepts and create absolutely. What is "acting more like a woman?" I always wondered, this concept of behaving in a certain manner I don't get. Are we not from the same base of biology with both X and Y chromosome having both male and female hormones? What am I doing wrong according to people that make me less of a woman? I'm a beautiful woman with long beautiful hair and also have enough yummy yumms to attract someone, I am soft and caring, very caring! I'm vulnerable yet strong, I'm emotional yet independent, so how do I precisely tell what are the characteristics that belong to a woman and what to a man? I thought for the longest time it has to do with culture and traditions I belong to, but as I was exposed to different cultures and traditions I learnt it is universal. So what makes the difference, why am I so taken back with that sentence? A constant battle from being the true essence of who I am and who I am expected to be like. I've been on this self-discovery for years now and it is beautiful how my journey has become more and more interesting as I proceed. With a simple question, it began when I was in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India at a monastery in the mountains living with the monks in silence to meditate on this one question, "Who am I"? It was a strange experience being in silence, I could literally hear my thoughts aloud like an empty vessel making so much noise. I'll get to how I learnt to quiet my mind in a different post. Otherwise, I'll be writing a book here. Anyway since then, the answers have been changing. It begins with I'm a woman, daughter, sister, wife, mother, daughter-in-law and so on, these are just still labels. Like the layers of an onion peeling off one after the other. Mind you this just didn't happen in a day or two its taken years. It's been 5 long years since I started this journey and I know I have a long way to go. So coming back to "start acting like a woman" being with monks wanted me to be more like them, staying in silence for 10 days was more blissful than I expected it to be. No technology and no distraction just me and my thoughts. I understood that I'm more like a river, who liked to flow and get into all the rough edges, some places I'm harsh and flow down hard and could drown you and some places I'm so still and clam that you could see what's beneath so clearly. I'm providing and also dangerously destructive. How do I classify my self a man 'Purusha' or a woman 'Prakurthi'? How do I peel these layers? How do I allow these labels to not affect me? Honestly until recently, when someone said these words to me repeatedly after each conflict I hadn't come back to this concept. I thought something is wrong with me, my way of responding to certain actions. From my understanding, I realised that I'm so free-flowing and in my path and tune, I don't categorise myself to a specific category and I could intimidate a person and that would lead to confusions. This narrows down to one thing in my journey of self-discovery of who I truly am. We are never one thing we are a mixture of different traits. We may have a dominant quality of a concept, but truly never just one concept. To understand how much of what we are in the journey. In NLP they say we don't truly see the things the way they are because we are always filtering and processing information and labels which could make more sense to some than not having. Hence they categories me to behave in a certain way to fulfil a certain role. So to act more women-like is a concept that is alien to me because I don't have labels to categorise people. So I don't recognise that and since I don't recognise it, that doesn't affect me any more- "if I'm more women-like or not".