This isn’t a post about whether gender is a matter of conditioning.  Or whether it exists at all.  This is a post about the old-fashioned issue of our societal conditioning as women.  And how that conditioning, like all conditioning, becomes a perceptual filter.

Yes, it becomes psychology and behavior and culture too.  But at it’s root, it is a series of beliefs, which create a perceptual filter.  And that filter lives and breathes in each individual.

I find it useful to be aware of the filter, how it operates in my psyche and, in turn, my life.  But I am cautious:  it is double-edged and I know it.   It acts subtly to increase my sense of separation and, ironically, instead of freeing my mind, intensifies the feeling of being a victim, of being less-than.

When I am perceiving and maybe acting out of society’s ideas or mandates about how to be a “good female,” it helps me to be aware of those tensions, so I can make different choices.  But I focus on the other ingredients mixing around in the mindset.  Things like: “I am woman, I am this, you treat me like that, you are that, you have always treated me like this, look what you did, it will always be this way.”  No. I do not welcome that. That is a prison.  I let it go.

Use the filter.  Do not be used by it.