Underneath your culturally adapted personality you are still just as lovable as the day you were born!
This page is about recognising and breaking painful cultural patterns.
Cultural adaption is also known as conformity. This is when you suppress parts of your own
natural individuality in favour of role-play, according to cultural ideals and beliefs, in order to fit in.
When healing the painful aspects of your own cultural adaption, you are also helping to
heal the culture that you are a part of. When breaking your own painful cultural patterns,
you inspire others to do the same.
Most cases of self-hatred or self-contempt are a direct consequence of cultural adaption.
None of us are born hating ourselves.
The collective insanity that led us to kill more than 100 million of our fellow human beings
in the last century alone is also a cultural thing.
It is not in our nature to commit systematic genocide and slaughter each other by the millions.
The way that we are destroying the planet is a reflection of the way that we are destroying ourselves.
None of us are born in a state of self-destruction.
Humanity has been controlled by fear for thousands of years.
The average adult is best understood and described by fear.
A baby child is best understood and described by love.
The difference is a consequence of cultural adaption.
Fear as such is natural, but the intensity and magnitude of human fear is cultural.
Inner state at birth.
You were born with a high degree of self acceptance. Your head was not filled with cultural beliefs
on how you should be in order to be good enough. You fully accepted your own individuality.
You were not born with the fear of not being good enough!
You were born with a natural inner sense of security. You could probably sleep anywhere at any time.
Your sense of security made you mild and gentle. It made you open, receptive and sensitive.
It made you curious and adventurous.
You were born with the courage needed to live. With this courage you were prepared
for a life in constant learning, constant evolution, and constant change.
All these qualities are an expression of the love that you were born with.
If you have retained only a fraction of these qualities as an adult, it is because
you have only retained a fraction of the love that you were born with.
Your heart is not as open as it once was – but you can turn all of this around.
Heart vs. Culture.
Sometimes your culture will tell you one thing, but your heart will tell you something very different.
Many cultures have an unwritten law that forbids you to believe in yourself.
Such a culture will tell you that you are not good enough, you are not OK,
you know nothing, you are capable of nothing, you are nothing.
Your heart will tell you exactly the opposite.
If you choose to adapt to such a culture, you must tell your heart to shut up.
Culture expects you to play one of two gender-roles depending on your physical configuration at birth.
The gender-role requires you to divide your natural individual qualities into two groups,
one deemed as male, and the other deemed as female.
Culture will tell you what is male and what is female.
You are then expected to suppress one group of qualities and emphasize the other.
In your heart you wish to remain a complete human being and not suppress your own
natural individuality in any way. You do not wish to be split in two and polarized.
Culture will tell you that your body is shameful, and that you should feel
guilty when feeling any kind of desire.
Your heart will tell you that your body is natural, beautiful, sensual,
and that desire is part of all the joy that you are capable of experiencing.
Culture will tell you that you must suffer in order to learn, and that pain makes you worthy – “no pain no gain”.
Your heart will tell you that most learning processes are joyful, and that joy is your strongest motivation for
wanting to learn anything at all.
Culture will tell you that love hurts, and that the truth is ugly.
Your heart will tell you that love and truth go hand in hand, and together they are
the strongest healing force that you have. All beauty comes from this combination.
More on the love/truth connection can be found here.
For each time you tell your heart to shut up, it will shut itself more and more.
If you choose to adapt to all the cultural beliefs mentioned above, in order to fit in,
you will be very far from having the open heart that you were born with.
Fear will move in where love has moved out.
This process will be reversed as soon as you start listening to your heart.
A visualization of this process can be found here.
If you find it difficult to love and accept yourself, it is your culturally
adapted personality that you are having difficulty in loving and accepting.
Underneath your cultural adaption you are still just as lovable as the day you were born.
Rulers and the ruled.
Imagine two baby toddlers in each of their homes being cared for on table tops.
Both have their feet in the air and are curiously playing with their toes while making cosy sounds.
They do not mind if the parent disappears out of sight for a moment, and both can sleep anywhere at any time.
The self-love that they are both born with is the source of their obvious inner sense of security.
As adults one of them has turned into a victim, while the other has turned into a tyrant.
The victim lets him- or herself be dominated, controlled and manipulated, while the tyrant has developed
an urge to dominate, control and manipulate others. Both have lost most of their self-love when adapting
to the culture into which they were born, but they have very different ways of managing the fear that now
resides where their love used to be.
Neither the tyrant or the victim should be judged for having lost so much of their self-love!
Ruler or ruled or both, by having the courage to look closely at your cultural adaption, and to
question the beliefs that your community is based upon, you can take full responsibility for
your own contribution to the cultural insanity that has caused so much suffering.
The courage needed to do this is great however, as you risk being condemned
and expelled from the community on which you have become dependent.
It takes just one generation to break a cultural pattern.
Acceptance.
Your acceptance of your own individuality decides to what degree you are capable of accepting other
peoples individuality. If you have given in to cultural pressure, and you are living with a high degree of
self-suppression, you are very likely to react negatively to people who have much more self-acceptance.
If you react outwardly, you are putting pressure on these people to suppress their own individuality.
A whole society can keep itself down this way.
Conformity is driven by fear.
Acceptance comes from the heart.
A culture based on conformity has very little acceptance to give.
A culture based on love and acceptance does not demand conformity.
When seeking acceptance from a community based on conformity you are asking for
something that is not theirs to give. The best that you can hope for is to be tolerated.
It is comparable to trying to make yourself worthy of the love of your parents,
only to discover after many years that the love you seek is not theirs to give.
Love is unconditional. You were born worthy of both love and acceptance.
Guilt and Shame.
Guilt and shame are held in place by fear of condemnation. Guilt and shame also serves to give
a more rigid structure to the fear that controls the culture, making the fear more self-sustained.
Fear combined with guilt and shame is a far more effective instrument of suppression than fear alone.
When people are confronted with their guilt and shame, they are also confronted with their fear,
which is why their reactions can be very strong.
Most young children have great difficulty understanding why they should be ashamed of their
natural physical humanity, and why they should feel guilty when feeling any kind of desire.
Children will not conform to a culture based on guilt and shame until they have adopted
the fear that maintains it.
Sedation.
If life hurts, and you find a sedative that works, you can quickly become dependent on that sedative.
There are so many ways to hurt, and so many ways to sedate yourself, that most adults go through life
in a state of partial sedation. Being fully sensitive can be very intense (and enjoyable).
Living entirely in your mind and managing everything by mental control is a very common way
of desensitising yourself.
Looking at your use of sedation will force you to look at the cultural reality that you are
sedating yourself away from.
A man can use his ejaculation as a sedative. With sedation as his main motive, he is physically relieved of
some tension, but emotionally he enters a state of indifference. He is temporarily relieved of his worries
simply because he doesn´t care. Showing love and affection for his partner is difficult in this state.
A suitable partner for such a man is a woman who places her body at his disposal as an instrument of
masturbation, hoping to receive something else in return.
He sedates himself, she prostitutes herself, and the beauty of love-making is lost to an old cultural pattern.
Gender.
The two basic genders are so closely connected, that you can not affect one without also affecting the other.
If culture creates a painful pattern in one of the genders, an equally painful pattern will arise in the other
gender. The pain is just expressed differently due to the gender roles that they play.
Women´s cultural suffering has received a lot of attention lately, and for good reason.
Men´s cultural suffering is equal in magnitude and is obvious to anyone who is willing to see it.
