the casual extremism of our times

and no nuance nellies

There are many fond, beautiful memories I have of an all women’s trip I went on sometime last year. There’s one moment I remember more like a prickly, itchy sense of ick. Seated at a dimly lit table in a backyard, drinks and gorgeous local food, and feminine banter about work and life.

Somebody starts talking about her journey of balancing work and pleasure in life, and how she likes to check-in with herself about her level of fulfilment with the same. I love when women start talking about this stuff - about our pleasure, our rest, our play, our replenishment. About how we weave that into our work and our responsibilities.

At some point in this discussion where every woman shared how she likes to measure her balance between work and play, we begin another thread about type A and type B personalities, and how these women found resonance and opportunities for self-reflection within those definitions. Someone asked me what I think of this, and I mentioned how my version of this approach is to look at things from the lens of feminine and masculine energy, and how the polarities are in union and harmony within me.

For some reason, this really shakes up a woman present there. Someone who identifies as type A, has a very hardass corporate job and a subtle aggression to her that is very normal, understandable and common among all the women in her world - because they have to fight so hard, everyday, to prove that they can be the same as men. She asks me how my theory works.

I offered a very, very short explanation, barely the tip of the iceberg, about the qualities that these energies are associated with and how they are accessed within us all. My succinctness came from the fact that I didn’t want to go deep into unpacking how this work is a part of my life. It’s far too long a conversation to go into, and it is only to be had with those who are truly receptive to and ready to absorb this. Sometimes, the intuition tells you not to reveal too much. It’s not a subject of casual conversation, it’s life-changing energy work for me. It’s tender, sensitive, vulnerable, our Achilles heel as women. Whether or not we feel safe to be feminine in this life pokes at our deepest heart’s truth and desires. It’s a raw, sore spot, laid bare. So, I mention to her in brief how feminine energy is often associated with flow, intuition, receptivity, creativity, nurture, and the masculine energy with control, action, direction, leadership, structure, order, protection. And while all of this is barely the tip of an iceberg and certainly not the whole picture, nor is it strict, rigid or limited to these associations, it’s an entry point. I know a lot of people make an almost gross oversimplification of these associations, going so far as to make them rigid demarcations, and while we must be conscious of steering clear from such a tendency, we cannot be so fragile, so afraid of even beginning to discuss the masculine and the feminine in this way.

In barely 0.1 seconds of my completing my sentence, I am met with an instant, literal finger-pointing retort, “Why can’t the feminine control?”

Hmm. Love that that is the first place your mind went. Love how you immediately assume and distort my words to make it like I even said someone “can’t” do something. It’s quite fascinating to witness a burnt out, perpetually exhausted, rigid mind with it’s quintessential extreme reactivity in the wild, I know their flavours so intimately because perhaps I was once just like them.

I do not like to engage when someone acts in a manner that tries to put me into a defensive, justifying and explaining corner, but I have already had some whiskey, so I go on to once again explain as calmly and gracefully as I can - This isn’t about men and women, or about their capabilities, at all. It’s about energy and duality. Animus and Anima. I mention how ancient systems offer an understanding of the polarity within human beings (and the Universe itself) through contexts and archetypes such as Shiva and Shakti or Yin and Yang.

Another retort, once again at a lightning speed that only an addiction to reactivity over response can offer, “That’s just sexism and misogyny. Who said women can’t do leadership or take action?”

Who said women can’t do leadership or take action? Seriously, who said it? Are they in the room with us right now?

Behaviour like this gives me the ick so bad, I feel turned off to speak about what feels true to my experience anymore. I physically feel my own aura shrivel away from it and withdraw myself from the conversation. It deeply turns me off to even engage, more often than not. Sometimes, yes, I love a healthy debate. But in the face of hostility like this, I simply drop the topic. At so many tables, I just drop the topic. I feel emotionally and spiritually safer when I shut up, instead of speaking about these charged subjects. Whenever you bring up men or the masculine among women, it’s never not a charged subject.

The lady proceeds to provide examples of how her work life has been this very aggressive, male-dominated corporate experience in a huge company, and how every story and example of her work life so far has been about proving how she as a woman can do everything men can, or about facing inferior treatment for being a woman in this workplace. My heart breaks for how difficult it must be to be her. I realise how all of her unpleasant, hostile reactions were coming from an unhealed, unexamined wound within her that’s very easy to trigger. I’ve been in woman-dominated spheres and social circles my entire life, and her world is far away from mine. I remember how I am so very privileged not only to get to be self-employed, but to have met too many wonderful men in my life. The kind who genuinely love women, the kind who become the wind beneath women’s wings just by being the men that they are, not the kind who try to compete with you. Of course, like every woman, I’ve met my share of bad eggs. But, they’re irrelevant. They cannot define my entire experience of the masculine.

There are some people in this world who are excellent at standing at the gates of a subject and handholding beginners into it, managing all of their wrestling, squirming and triggered tantrums, all the way into the folds of a new way of thinking. They have a skill for softening, mollycoddling, fluffing the edge out of every message so as to make every newcomer who’s alien to a concept feel warm and included. They have a gift with being able to convince everyone to be open minded. Such people become great coaches, mentors of spiritual modalities, yoga teachers, and so on.

I, a Scorpio ruled woman, am not such people, at all. As much as I would have liked to try, I simply can’t be sweet enough to help a new, triggering message land softly, and comfort someone into receiving it. You cannot switch off the Plutonic tremor that infuses your presence. More often than not, everything I speak seems to land with blunter force than I’d have expected it to, and it takes a Herculean mental effort for me to manage the way I speak so as to manage people’s triggers. Sometimes, I wonder why I do it at all. Sometimes, I wonder if cultivating all this restraint is highly overrated.

I can engage beautifully and have hours of conversation with open minded people, curious people, people who already have a history of engaging with myth, spirituality, the realms of Venus and mystical concepts. People who show grace in conflicting, contrarian exchanges of opinions. People who understand the art of listening, and elegantly conducting disagreements. People who can self-regulate, who don’t hold you entirely responsible for them getting triggered because of their own projections onto your words. People who have the grace to ask before they assume. I once had a man in my life who taught me that so fucking beautifully. He inspired a transformation within me with his calm example of emotional leadership, with how he held himself in softness, grace and power even in the most heated conversations between us. He once asked me, in his ever gentle manner in conflict, “Did you ask before you assumed?” and I still think of that till date. I remember this moment in almost every conversation I have with everyone, ever since.

Unfortunately, more and more people of my generation are too burnt out, brain fried, under-rested, under-nourished, perpetually reactive, deadened by hustle culture, compromised with addictions and short attention spans. It’s increasingly rare to meet people with the devotion and willingness to cultivate any of the above. Assuming and projecting the worst possible, catastrophic conclusion to almost anything anyone says is normal. The addiction to self-victimising is unnerving. Weaving outrage, victimhood and ‘someone to blame’ into every story is the most common way to look at anything that confronts. The casual extremism of our times and how most people engage when presented with a concept that is foreign to them is both worrisome and fascinating. Everything has to be black and white, everyone is somehow always a victim and always outraged. We should all be scared and angry about every damn thing.

Why does one need to have a hard, fixed, certain and fast opinion about everything? Why does one have to have to touch upon such a harsh, combative state whenever introducing different perspectives?

Why are we all so rigid, where is the suppleness, softness and bone-deep wisdom of, I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion just yet, so let me stay quiet and listen more first? I shudder to think that people in real life behave like people in Instagram comments sections now.

I can’t remember the last time I was at a table where everybody mostly got to complete their sentences, where everyone wasn’t jostling to insert their take by performing an energy that is loud, harsh, definitive and performing superiority by the false virtue of appearing 'certain.’

Maybe it’s my heavily Piscean nature, but I do not like conversations with harsh people and harsh energy, I do not like having to be in an energy where I must prove everything I say, or make it an egoic wrestle with the reactive assumptions and projections of the (poor) listener.

It honestly frightens me to see just how often conversations at many, many dinners I’ve been to take that turn. I end up very quickly going into the shell that is the gift of Pisceans - we can have fun with almost anyone because we have a gift for talking endlessly about the things that they want to talk about. We have a supernatural, always-on instinct about exactly what not to bring up. We’re talking to people, and observing the dance of the conversation from a zoomed out self hovering above the table, all the time. Every subtle emotional shift, energetic wave, change of tone or micro-expression made even internally, the Pisces of the gathering is feeling it and adapting to it. Scorpionic energy is very capable of this too, but every Scorpio Sun in my life is far too sexy to care. They’re anchored in being in their own power and their personal energetic forcefield. People who spend long hours of one to one conversation with a Piscean often go back home feeling like they’ve experienced such a deep connection, or that they felt so seen and heard, they’re shocked about how much they confided. The whole time, we just know how to listen, in a world where that is increasingly rare. We absorb emotional energy like sponges and very quickly adapt our aura to ‘fit’ with theirs. We’re being the natural mirrors, rivers and seers we are with everyone. There is a certain chameleon-like energy to those with prominent Pisces in their chart, which is not sinister, it is simply soft and sensitive.

Of course, the particular situation I spoke of is one of triggers and defensiveness. But even in the world at large, outside of this example, do we really need to immediately, instantaneously have ‘our take’ on everything, one that is a rigid, certain and fixed opinion, all the time?

I am far too accustomed to having a very specific kind of circle of women around me all my life - the alt, weirdo, witchy, holistic, spiritual, law of attraction, tantra, yoga and esoteric kind, and both of my parents are like that too. I grew up in a holistic, alternative lifestyle at home that is very, very different from the ‘Normal’ Indian home that most people in my country grow up in. I call us ‘weirdos’ with love and a tongue in cheek, the people I am referring to and associating with here. We tend to live in a very different internal world from the mainstream way of life and it’s aspirations. I don’t mean this in an echo chamber way. I am not a universally agreeable or well-liked person, and absolutely nobody I know is, and I think that makes us very sexy.

I sometimes forget to behave normal at Normie gatherings, and I let things slip that are way too much, that trigger and call forth unpleasant shadows within people who don’t belong to my usual circles and aren’t accustomed to things that are paradoxical and spiral, instead of logical and linear.

My very tiny slip of my personal journey with polarity work did exactly that. Trigger. It’s insanely triggering for so many people to even hear the words “masculine and feminine” nowadays, and it makes me so sad how hatred for the masculine goes that deep. It makes me so sad how everything has to be turned into a men vs women thing. It makes me so sad how everyone is frothing at the mouth to assume you’re saying ‘women can’t and men can’ whenever you speak about being a woman, as a woman.

Although, of course, even hatred for the feminine is just as real and I am sure exists in several other circles of this world. I am someone who has almost zero platonic male friends that I frequently meet, I rarely if ever hang out with a lot of men except my family, I haven’t been romantically involved with a man in over a year now, and both professionally and personally, I have almost always been surrounded by women and only women. So I can speak better of what I observe in feminine spaces.

The lack of manners that is so common now still shocks and upsets me. I am not one to aggressively wrestle someone down (energetically) to make them see my viewpoint (at least not all the time, especially not when I can focus on fish, whiskey and candlelight instead).

Imagine being faced with someone sharing a new way of looking at life that you’ve never heard of before, and immediately shutting it down without even an inclination to learn about any depth, nuance or perspective about it. To not only assume but say to their face that they’re just being sexist.

Polarity and working with the energies of divine union is ancient, it is a way of life and philosophy that goes centuries behind this new behaviour of blanket labelling anything we don’t understand — anything that has light, shadow, depth, nuance, metaphor, complexity and grey areas — as ‘problematic.’

Dismissing someone like that is unhealthy, imbalanced, hyper-aggressive masculine energy, btw. To nobody’s surprise.

In the modern world, “equality” between men and women is wrongly taken to mean developing an inhuman, neutered, spayed, sterilized, boring, stagnant, stinking sameness between the sexes, women are encouraged to abandon their delicious womanliness and go against biology in order to become everything that men are. The ‘normal’ world glorifies masculinity and exiles femininity.

I, for one, would never have the confidence to just immediately AND vocally dismiss someone sharing a journey about something that they believe in, just because it triggers me or inspires in me some surface-level assumptions that might have little to do with the truth of what they are describing. I don’t believe in being unpleasant and rude to anybody without cause, unless they do that to me first or I see them do that to someone else unjustly and my protective instinct rises.

I find it really strange how we absolutely must interpret everything in extremes and fixed certainties, in a nanosecond of hearing somebody speak. How we have to react to everything, but rarely do we pause and respond. How we love to listen to reply, not listen to listen. How we fill in the blanks of everything somebody says with our own wounded projections and our no-nuance assumptions, and then charge at them with pitchforks for saying something they didn’t even say.

Moments like this also make me feel so, so deeply grateful for the life that I lead, for the majority of women that surround me. We never agree with each other about everything, that would be utterly boring. But at least, we can talk about it. We can heal and soften just enough to bear to talk about things with grace, openness and an ability to hold paradox, differences, subtleties, nuances and subjectivity. We can heal and soften enough to have personalities beyond struggle, hardness, crispy burnt fragile exoskeletons and we’re not walking around with huge metaphoric phalluses out at all times, in spite of all the bullshit in this world that pushes us, as women, into that. We can heal and soften just enough to spend more time enjoying everything that men and the masculine bring to us, instead of hating them and competing with them, because we know we could never be them anyway. Nor could they be us. I love this about the women in my life, the ones that I spend most of my time with.

I so deeply love, respect, admire and aspire to the grace of well rested women. I learn so much from them, and I am so uplifted by their plentiful presence in my life, it’s not even funny. The lovers. Radiant women. Healing women. Feminine women. Women who keep their hearts soft. Women who hold space, nuance, subtlety, the unseen and the intangible. Women who are in touch with the essence that they are portals between spirit and matter. Women whose life has been fucking hard, who have been through a lot, who still do very difficult things on the regular, and yet they never let the softness within them die. They never let their rose scented, blooming, irreplaceable, beautiful feminine essence evaporate. Women who journey through Maide, Mother and Crone just gorgeously, in cycles, as we are designed to. Women who let other women be women, and themselves too.

I am so grateful for the women I get to have around me, for real.