By Zantui
Rose <zantui@juno.com>
Fifteen years of providing therapy service to hundreds of people,
with a variety of presenting issues including gender, has convinced
me that answers for the concerns of the physical world can only
be found in a deep experience of Spirit. This truth is crucial for
people who are doing gender expansion work. To explore one’s
gender questions without looking deeply into one’s spiritual
path is to have tap shoes on without knowing how to tap dance. Simply
owning the shoes does not deliver a performance.
The matter of Spirit is sorely lacking in the transgender community
as in the culture at large. Most often when someone enters into
a therapeutic relationship for any issue (questions of gender being
one of them) they are looking to solve their problems in a tangible
concrete fashion that can be measured. They want answers, skills,
ways of reasoning and a body of knowledge that will give them the
illusion that they are in control of the happenings of their lives.
They want order in a chaotic and toxic environment. At a foundational
level, this exploration is important. However, if one stops here
in their process, they will revisit their confusion.
If a gender-variant person bases therapy on questions and answers
about hormones, bi-polar gender choices, surgery, living full time
and coming out to the world, they are acquiring only the shoes.
One still does not know how to dance. Learning, teaching, talking
about and accepting gender expansion as part of our Spiritual awakening
is to begin the dance. This, I believe, is the heart of the work
of the caregiver who is administering to the transgendered person.
However, a large percentage of gender explorers are not interested
in opening themselves to the work of awakening Spirit. What they
want is to know they are not “sick” and, most important,
they want their referral letter moving them along the tracks of
gender duality shifting. Stopping the train long enough to look
at the bigger picture is time consuming. I believe the bigger concern
is that Spiritual awakening just might derail the train, causing
them to question their direction entirely.
Therapeutic work about transcending gender, is the work of a Spiritual
movement. It is learning to live in a rainbow of personal expression,
a continuum that holds no division lines, a movement of personal
energy that expresses itself in many directions. It is coming to
an energetic vibration that has the freedom to go anywhere, to swing,
to twist, and turn creatively. It invites us to let go of the restrictive
notion of the divisive male-female polarity, which is merely based
on conditions constructed by the present-day science of our system.
I’m not talking about androgyny or homogeny. I’m talking
about movement - now here, now there... all, some, none –
a spiral of continuance of expression. Nothing is closed, and nothing
is out of bounds, because there are no boundaries to trespass.
When we question the separation of humanity into two genders, we
challenge the primary tenet of a fear-based system that teaches
us to divide and conquer. Learning to judge racial, cultural and
class variations divides us further. Authorities to which our fear-based
mentalities have given power – medical practitioners, psychologists,
politicians, religious leaders – have insisted on the present-day
separation of women and men because these dynamics are part of the
scaffolding of the system that sustains their authority. The division
of humanity into two genders is the most
long standing and rigidly enforced of all stereotypes, and it persists
in the therapist’s office. We are obsessed with gender division,
as it has become our cultural glue. The entire perception of this
illusion must be challenged and eventually transcended. We must
commit ourselves to the dismantling of gender in order to move further
toward Spiritual Truth, which should be the work of the caregiver.
When any one of us unplugs from even one aspect of the conditioned
illusion, in this case gender duality, it pulls out one piece of
the energy that has helped to create it. Eventually, there is no
longer enough energy to keep creating the illusion, and it dissipates.
In this moment of dissipation, we have an opening, an opportunity
to find Spiritual Truth.
In the world of pure Spirit energy, sublime relationships exist
and there are no static opposites. All is one, and everything progresses
from one to the other in a never-ending circle. Can we evolve from
a species that created the concept of gross relationships of gender
opposites, to having the wisdom of sublime relationships –
all of us parts of the same whole – a continuum of the immutable
Truth? Aren’t we all, each of us, a piece of the Divine Creation?
When one steps into the greater world of pure energy, this package
we call our “individual energy frequency” takes on a
new wholesome perspective.
Life in form, is Spirit’s giant sandbox and we are here to
play. To play is to be spontaneous. Play helps us observe and accept
that life is about change, process, growth. If we think of ourselves
as a gender, we become an “end result”, we become a
stagnant “product”. The body has been given to us as
a gift to experience all the gifts around us. Bi-polar gender has
given us rules to live by that restrict our breath, restrict our
play, restrict our Spirit.
There is an ache in all of us to actualize our Full Self. Some
are more conscious of this ache than others. We feel there is something
missing, we feel the void, the hole, the loneliness of the lost
Self. This hole is deeper than gender, and to let go of the belief
that your thoughts, your body- form, and your assigned gender are
the total substance of you, is to touch fear. It is the fear of
being truly whole that keeps us stuck in gender duality.
I believe it is the caregiver’s job to invite a vision of
no gender, a world without gender, to imagine everyone around you
free to play, to express, to freely adorn themself, to love whomever,
to create over and over, every moment – a new expression of
Spirit in form. Everyone must give themself the permission to shapeshift
into ALL the possibilities. This is what life in form was meant
to be - a creation with no boundaries, with no end to the creation.
If we can come to the game of gender with a consciousness of the
play, it opens up a whole new field of expression. It allows us
to finally completely face the void, to realize the loneliness of
shutting away part of oneself, and to bring to the experience of
life all of oneself - to create ourselves as the Creator intended.
There are no gender rules here, not in the Spirit’s playground.
What an honor it is to have the privilege of helping people to
wake up on their evolutionary gender path. To stretch beyond gender
is to have fun. Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet, wrote: “I
view gender as a beautiful animal that people often take out for
a walk on a leash and might enter in some odd contest to try to
win strange prizes.”
If a 14th century poet can view gender this freely, isn’t
it time we wake up? If, when involved in the therapeutic relationship
people are not pursuing the deeper matter of Spirit that their gender
expansion is pointing to, they are only buying the shoes, and I
will miss them on the dance floor. |
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