I remember once when the sangha was at an Indian restaurant celebrating someone’s birthday. We’d had a big feast as usual, family style. There was one samosa left on one of the shared dishes, and a gal asked, “Would anyone like the last one?” One of the guys in the sangha replied, “Yeah, I’ll take it!”, scooped it up, and popped it into his mouth.
It was such a simple moment, and yet so much was layered into it.
The gift of a teacher is that they can stop us in our tracks, to bring insight and awareness to a moment that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Sunyata explained to the guy that the gal was asking to be polite, that she actually wanted the last samosa. She talked to the table about how this small moment reflects the conditioning of men and women in this world. Men are often conditioned to take up space, to be comfortable in themselves and what they want, sometimes without much consideration for others. Women, on the other hand, are often conditioned to be polite and accommodating, to be insecure, to make themselves smaller so as not to jostle anyone around them. I remember Sunyata saying that us gals had been conditioned to apologize for taking up space.
This same lesson has come up many times over the years. What I’ve learned is how deeply gender can shape the way we see ourselves and interpret the world from a very young age. The world tells us that boys wear blue, boys are tough, little boys jump off the monkey bars and proclaim their prowess to the world. Girls wear pink, girls are sweet, they give hugs and cuddle dolls. The gendered conditioning can be so intense that it’s often hard to see when it’s at play. I’ve found that it can underpin what I value, how I interpret things, and what seems possible. And because it’s at the root of my conditioning, it can feel like it’s simply who I am, rather than something I was taught.
At another time, one of the gals in the sangha was sharing something about what she was bringing forward in her life, in some interaction with a guy. The exact details are fuzzy - I only remember Sunyata shouting out “Own it bitch!” Her intensity and language made it hilarious. It was enough to pop all of us out of our bubbles for a moment and into peals of laughter. But underneath the laughter was the same invitation: to notice the places where we were making ourselves smaller, where we were waiting for permission, where we had learned to doubt ourselves or soften ourselves so as not to take up too much space.
I remember Sunyata telling us once about a study they did on male and female students in a computer science class. When the guys couldn’t get a problem, they’d say, “This problem is dumb.” When the gals couldn’t get it, they’d say, “I’m dumb.” As she shared that, I felt my own tendencies towards imposter syndrome, of feeling incapable despite my long history of achievements. It struck me how quickly things can move from something we are taught externally into something we say to ourselves internally. At some point, it’s no longer someone else telling us we don’t belong, or that we shouldn’t take up too much space. We start doing it to ourselves.
In my experience, a teacher may bring up the same thing a million and one times over the years, in different situations, in different ways. Sometimes it took me years of hearing the same thing about conditioning, or trusting life, or not believing my thoughts, before the moment came where something clicked and it actually became real for me. And that moment of clicking doesn’t mean the conditioning magically goes away. Much like Sunyata prompting us towards the same thing in many different ways over the years, moving through aspects of my conditioning is a constant process of bringing mindfulness to the moments of my life. It’s a process of inwardly saying, “Wait a minute!” and looking with clarity and awareness at a moment that might come up, rather than simply believing the reaction that arises.
I recently had a moment at work where, after interviewing someone, I came to a conclusion about whether we should hire them. My conclusion was based on how they performed in the interview, their problem-solving skills, and plenty of other things I’d observed that conveyed specific things about the candidate. And yet, I felt oddly insecure. I was worried that people would challenge me in the debrief, or ask me pointed follow-up questions. After spinning in that reaction for a bit, I stopped and said, “Wait - how would I be feeling right now if I were a guy?” I would feel certain in my own judgment, my skill as an interviewer, and I’d share my feedback with the debrief team with confidence and nonchalance. So I did just that, and the debrief went well. And the point isn’t that confidence belongs only to men, or that all men would feel the way I imagined. The question was simply a way to challenge the authority of my thoughts and recognize that my anxiety might be coming from the insecurity I’d been conditioned into as a woman. There was nothing about the actual situation that required me to feel less certain. I had simply been caught in an old way of seeing myself.
I recently drove from LA to San Francisco, and stopped at a gas station on the way. As I rounded an aisle in the store to pick up some chips, a gal rounded the same aisle. We were nowhere near colliding; we just happened to be near each other. She stepped back and quickly said, “Sorry!” I felt in that moment gratitude for my teacher and for the process of the path, because that habit of apologizing for taking up space isn’t there anymore. Something in me has changed through years of seeing the conditioning, questioning it, and bringing awareness to the moments when it shows up. It’s a powerful thing to be learning to look at the habitual reactions and self-judgments with awareness, and to be able to question where they come from and whether I want to live there. And then, to come to my meditation practice and let the stillness of my meditations loosen and wash those old structures away.
Sometimes the conditioning is so familiar that we don’t even notice it. Sometimes we need someone to shout, “Own it bitch!” And sometimes, after years of hearing the same lesson in a hundred different ways, we simply find ourselves standing in a gas station aisle, watching an old habit that used to live inside us play out in someone else, and realizing that it’s no longer ours.
Here’s to eating the last samosa, and enjoying every bite.