In this podcast, Upchara speaks to Bhavi from Kannagara Journeys about the Women’s Liberation Process.
How can I actually make friends with this incredible powerful energy that rage is. It is a life force. You know, we always hear: ‘You are not supposed to express it.’ So, if I put it down, I am actually putting down my life force.
Welcome to Kannagara Journeys Podcast: Deep thinking and conversations that matter. Welcome Upchara to this podcast episode.
I am very glad to be here with you. I want to go straight into the pain of the conditioning that we are in. What is this for women? It is realizing that we have voices inside of us that are constantly condemning us: ‘You are not enough this, you are too much of that.’ They come from our family, they come also from the lineage of the women in our family who were obviously slaves of that conditioning, unknowingly, and passed it on to us.
But it also comes from the men in our family. You know, a girl is born… she is supposed to be this and this, and that. Plus, add to that the pain, for many of us, that as we were born as girls, we were not celebrated in the family as if we had been born as boys. That’s to all of this. As much as your parents might try to be… let’s say ‘politically correct’.
I will give you an example. I was born, and then later my sister. We were two girls. And our parents, because they were politically correct, kept repeating ‘Oh, we are so happy that we have two girls. We really wanted two girls.’
But – can you believe it? – they gave me and my sister boys’ names. In French I am called Stephane. Okay, it’s a mixed name that can go for boys and girls. But mainly it’s a male name. So what was the message I was getting? You know, here you are, you are a girl, and they call you with a name that is mostly that of a boy! So much so that when I would go for my exams in school, they would always call, ‘Sir so and so.’ They assumed I was a boy.
What I want to say is, the pain is that nobody welcomed us from day one for who we were. They had plans. Mother had plans. Father had plans. We’re coming from their very very deep, ancient conditioning. And in our case today, let’s say… we were to be the sweet loving little beings who were going to get married, etc. But at the same time we had to be intelligent, be good in school, because nowadays a women has to be emancipated. So even that conditioning around emancipation was something very painful for us.
They were telling us all the time that we had to become something. Not ‘who you are’ is okay, but ‘you have to become’. And the main suffering is that even as we grow and meditate, and we go through a certain type of enquiry about our lives, in our unconscious mind we are constantly condemned. The parents are not there to say it, but this ‘inner judge’ continues to say, ‘You are not okay. As a woman you are not okay.’
So, we are – as women – under very heavy centuries of this ‘You are not okay.’
Is there a denial that this is the case? Because even coming to that there is an unfairness. Sometimes we find ourselves arguing our point of view that there is an injustice. It can be met with denial.
There is denial in society today. If my parents were still alive they would say, ‘Oh, but we brought you up without those conditionings. You are totally free.’ This is not so. They themselves were oblivious of what they were passing on. It’s so unconscious.
And now, of course, somebody will say, ‘Oh, but you can go to university and you can get diplomas; and you can work just like a man.’ There is an absolute denial in all countries when they study [equality in jobs], how much a woman earns compared to a man in the same position. It’s clear that there is discrimination, that women are not paid the same.
Plus, nowadays we know that some women don’t get into certain positions because there is a fear in the employer that, ‘Oh, then she is going to have children. And then she is going to take time off. And then when the children are sick she won’t be there.’ Today there is – as you said – denial about this discrimination, for sure.
And when we, as women, face this kind of discrimination, this level of injustice that we are facing, it obviously causes rage or anger inside. Can you share a little bit more about that?
Yes. That happens in all of us, and since at least… I am going back to puberty… There is a sense – because maybe when we are very small we don’t realize it – but there is this deep sense of injustice that I am not related to as equal to the brother or the boys in the family, and then outside in society.
This sense of injustice, how could it not provoke inside of you incredible anger? I mean rage. It’s a difficult one because we do feel… another thing connected to rage is when we feel impotent. We don’t know which way to go to get out of that feeling of being in a box or in a kind of a jail, that ‘My life seems determined by the fact that I am born a girl.’ How does that not bring an incredible feeling of impotence and a feeling of rage?
Add to that, that obviously in our societies, since eons, rage is not a nice thing for a girl to have. A boy can be angry. A boy can express. Actually it’s even, you know, a good thing for a male to have this anger and this strength, but not for a women.
So we are caught by what we have inside. And then the rage has to do not only with society but also – in our lives, in our relationships – we do feel entrapped between all these ‘should be, should be, should be, should be.’ This is something we have seen in the process; how can I actually make friends with this incredible powerful energy that rage is?
It is a life force.
We always hear you are not supposed to express it. So, if I put it down I am actually putting down my life force. If I pretend it’s not there, and some of us have done that: being, you know, the nice little girl for the parents and the nice woman for her man and pretending that the anger is not there. What it does to me is that eventually it brings me to depression. Because if I don’t give it space I will feel depressed, because my life force is pushed down.
The other side of it is, if I push it down, and push it down, and push it down, it becomes like a volcano. There will be a moment when it will erupt. And when it erupts, let’s say the truth: we become dangerous, because there is so much that is compressed.
So the question is finding ways (and this is part of the process) to discover that I have much more space than I know energetically, that I can contain and feel this fire, passionate, rebellious energy. And I can find ways of expressing it without smashing somebody else with it. That’s a whole process. But we cannot deny that anger and rage is there.
Actually, that’s interesting, because one of the questions we got asked was, ‘How do I channel my rage in a healthy way rather than sit on it and let fester?’
We are all in that… in a way festering. It’s cleaning out that wound by practising exercises together, by giving voice to that rage, by even feeling how the body wants to move. There are small exercises that we can do even at home later on, when we need to give it space.
She is right when she asked the question about when it becomes poisonous – because it does! We have seen it! I’ll just say that we have seen it in our mothers or in people in our family. Women, because of this unexpressed rage, can kill a man with just one sentence. It’s called [being] ‘passive aggressive’.
I will tell you an example. A terrible one, that I saw, I heard. This was not a mother. This was actually a girlfriend. Her boyfriend came back from a very intensive group where so much happened for him. He came back to the meditation center that he was leading. The place was his place. Because of the intensity of the process, he had changed even his physical appearance. He had cut his hair and he had a rather small beard grow. Just very gentle. He looked smashing. Really good. Before that he used to look like a priest.
So, he came back looking gorgeous. He comes into his center – I was with him – his girlfriend was there and also all the other people. And you know what she said to him? ‘Ah!’ she said, ‘Great! Now the only thing soft left in you is your prick.’ I mean, in front of everybody! So, castrating him in the place that hurts the most for a man. That was so shocking!
That’s an example of when we do not express our anger in the way we need to – when we give it space. It also says something about when we do not speak out when we need to. That’s another one. Because that keeps the anger growing.
If I need to say something to my husband/boyfriend and I don’t say it because all the conditionings say, ‘Oh, no, don’t say this. Maybe he will leave you,’ you keep it down. You keep it down. You keep it down. You keep it down. That turns into poison.
We need to learn – that’s another part – to say in a centered way to the man we are with what we need to say even if he gets angry.
That’s interesting.
Again this fear that we have of conflict. In the process we look at that. If I am unconsciously so totally afraid that if he leaves me I will never get up again, I’ll be smashed to pieces, I will avoid even small conversations out of that unconscious fear. What I actually need most of all – and this is the deepest thing in the group – is: I need to find a place of solidity in myself. I need to have a place, which is what we obviously also do when we mediate, but it takes practice to find a place.
Usually it’s down, very deep in the hara, the belly, where I feel ‘I exist, I am.’ It doesn’t matter to know who I am, but just to feel ‘Okay. I am.’ And from there – and it’s something I need to practise – feel my deepest connection with my authentic self. I will have more… I was going to say ‘more daringness’ maybe, to speak my truth. Who am I going to be loyal to – to my authentic self or not? And maybe out of five times, only twice I will go there. But that’s already magnificent.
This daringness that you speak of, speaking our voices, has caused women to be burnt at the stake. There is such a big risk, isn’t there, to really come out with our voice.
Yes. That has been registered very deeply in our unconscious for sure. And there are situations where it’s wiser [not to speak]. I am talking about social situations more than individual relationships.
There are situations where my inner being will say, ‘It’s wiser right now to shut up.’ And that’s something very deep. When in our daily practice, in the group and then later, I have access to what some have called ‘inner guidance’, which is my ‘true voice’ – it will guide me.
Sometimes we take unnecessary risks. We are lucky if we come out of it.
I’ll just give you an example. I used to be very challenging with any injustice. And this was not specifically male/female. I was in India and I happened to be in a place where the owner of the house had sent some thugs, paid some thugs, to go and empty somebody’s flat, because he didn’t want him there anymore.
I knew the guy and he wasn’t there. But I happened to be there. Now these thugs arrived with their truck and started emptying the flat. In that moment I didn’t listen to any inner guide and just started shouting. I was alone as a women, and started pulling from the truck, down onto the ground, the mattress, the stuff they had taken away.
Now, this is many many years ago. I don’t know if I would do this today in India because India today is very different than… this was, you know, in the 1980’s. What saved me actually, funny enough, was the conditioning that these men had in those days. If I had been a man they would have smashed me, but because I was a women I managed to pull down the stuff and they left.
I am just saying, you have to measure. Because India is very different today, and men are very different with women today, I don’t think I would do that. Sometimes you have to refrain from unnecessary risks. That’s just an example.
In the Women’s Liberation we talk about looking at wounds made by men, fathers, ex-partners, brothers. But we also look at wounds made by mothers, sisters and women. And that can often be more painful than the wounds [inflicted] by men.
I am quite fortunate to have great female friends, but there are instances where there’s been a fallout with a female. And that is so painful, especially when the women in society are also patriarchal.
Is there anything you would like to share about that?
This is something we look at in the second part of the [workshop]. A lot is dedicated this.
First of all we realize that the women in our family and around us, especially if they have not worked on themselves the way we are talking about now, carry that patriarchal conditioning and value scale.
I remember now, in a discourse where Osho said – he was talking to women – he said, ‘Watch who you side with.’ If you hear the story of a couple, ‘And he did this, and she did that.’ He was pointing at the women saying, ‘Who do you side with?’ You start defending the man and attacking the woman saying, ‘Yes, what a bitch she is!’ and all that… He was saying that you are contributing to the enslavement of women by dividing yourselves among each other.
Why?
Yeah, why do we do that? – Because it comes back again, as does the competition between women. It’s all somewhere inside, based on: ‘It’s more important for me to have a man, or to have a man by my side as a friend, than [to have] a woman’. In the old days the belief was that the only one that can protect me, blah, blah, blah, is a man. We still carry that inside.
We are competing with other women. When a women comes into the room at a party or whatever, and she is absolutely gorgeous, do we celebrate that? That’s where we see that we are part of this division between women, always giving the bigger status to men.
Yeah. And receiving that also is so painful.
Very painful.
What is a woman to do on the receiving end?
It is not so much ‘what do I do.’ It’s, firstly, a little bit like what I was saying about anger and rage. We need to go through this healing process with all the women in the group. And everybody being as sincere as possible – because we don’t do this in life.
When I start sharing the pain I have lived with being betrayed by friends, and other women do the same, we start realizing that there is this collective painful wound, the feeling of pain in our hearts, in our bodies, that brings a different type of awareness. So it’s not something that happens in half an hour.
I just remember what the woman, who contributed with Osho to create this process, said to us: ‘What is a wise woman? It is a woman that rejoices when other woman flower.’ So that’s where we are going. You know, it touches you… I don’t have children in this lifetime but it’s what made me a mother in a way. It’s like, in a way, you are here, you are not afraid anymore; you are not afraid that the flowering of a woman will take something away from you. And this is parallel to you daring to show yourself in your light and knowing that if some woman in the audience still cannot take it, it’s sad for her, not for you.
It’s something to do again with coming back to your center. There are things that used to hurt us. After you go through the process, they can make you smile and [you can] even feel some compassion for the women who are still prisoners of this. Need for a man… to find the most this and the most that.
I think, one of the most beautiful things about this process that I loved was just being with women, only women, for this period of ten days. It’s such an exquisite opportunity to explore, to play, to find that sisterhood again and create those friendships. It’s so wonderful.
Feeling so close to women who apparently are so different in age and experience, in life, and yet you feel there’s not one of them that you don’t love at the end of the process. You might sit at the beginning and look around and think, ‘Hmm’ – because we all start like that. We start divided.
Great. Now to the questions. This is interesting: How do you live and find peace in a country that is stripping away women’s rights. And how do you raise girls in such a place?
The question gives me the shivers and brings tears to my eyes. I would say that, about outer circumstances, it’s very difficult – the outer ones.
Now, when this mother can have enough love for herself, it doesn’t mean she is going to be able to free herself from what’s happening in her society, but she would be able to transmit it to her daughter. You see, the whole thing is, if I can really love myself inside, half of the healing is done.
In that case I will probably have to transmit that, unfortunately, we are living in this society. ‘It is not okay, but I don’t want you to be in danger. We cannot do things on the outer that would put you or me in danger, but inside we can keep our freedom. You can keep your freedom to feel what you feel, to discover what beauty is to you, to share with the closer people, especially women in your family.‘
In a way it is recognizing that the depth of the source is not outside; it’s inside. You see, because I wouldn’t [go outside]. I am just going to take a terrible case right now: Afghanistan. I admire the women who dare go into the streets and rebel. If I was a mother I don’t think I would send my daughter to rebel because I don’t think it’s going to work. It has to be a different transmission in the intimacy of the home – from woman to woman.
We have to remember, there were times in history when women were aware of the danger in society outside, but they would meet, in those days, in the woods at night, make a little fire and share songs and dances. And they kept something alive without risking their lives.
We live in times that are definitely dramatic. They are dramatic! They are not better. This idea that we are always going towards something. (I used to have that idea but I don’t anymore.) I think human beings are still quite un-evolved. […]
Why is a process like Osho Women’s Liberation important? Why is this work for women important? And what needs does it address?
It is a totally different process than any of the others that exist for women today. There are many other forms. This one I find very profound because it doesn’t put on us any ideal about how we should be at the end of the process. It’s not that you are going to come out being the most delightful, wonderful, loving woman on the planet, that you are going to have to change completely the way you relate with men and women.
In a way, this process creates a space in each one of us to be more of who we are. This group is not going be theoretic. We are not going to be learning new ideas. We are going to be living, I have to say, in our very body – not only our heart and mind… We are going to be living, first of all the pain of the conditioning we are in, going through it, sometimes getting very angry with it, expressing the anger we have. We are also going to free the space for discovering more. To relax everybody.
I don’t know if you remember, but we ask women to not take any major decision for at least 15 days after the group. So it’s like: you go back, you take no big decision, you just give yourself the time to digest and shield yourself and your life. If some decisions are taken, it will come from the space you would be in – but not immediately after. We can say, ‘Don’t expect to take a big decision the day after, because you are not allowed to.’ […]
Transcription edited for space and clarity
Upchara will be facilitating the workshop, Empowered: Osho Women’s Liberation on 5-15 September 2022 on Aegina Island near Athens, Greece. It’s a ten-day complete process, although you can choose to participate for the first five days only or the full ten days. It’s residential. Info: jivansitara@gmail.com +30 6973 32 8332 – subscribepage.com – facebook.com – instagram.com
And on 25 October – 6 November 2022 in Pucón, Chile – elpoderdelfemenino.com
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- Man and woman exist in a kind of interdependence – Q: Why do I allow women to hold power over me, to accept or reject me? This old rut makes nonsense at heart. I want to get out.
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