CHAPTER 4
Empowerment is everyone’s conscious as well as subconscious desire. Since childhood, this idea of ‘empowerment’ is ingrained in our thought-process. It is also something, all battles are fought for! Especially the most original and primeval battle of gender...!
To be strong, powerful and rootedly endowed is something which most women feel so emphatically about; more than men as since ages, it is being made out that women are not getting and offered the ‘rightful’ quantum of empowerment, which they deserve. However, this is not a question of gender. Everyone, be it a man or woman, should experience and live-up empowerment! Moreover, as man and woman have evolved to be complementary to each other and live in symbiosis for preservation and perpetuation of human race, each have to ensure the empowerment of other as it shall finally benefit both.
Somehow, like most good qualities about life-living experiences, empowerment too has become a very abstract idealism and therefore has become associated with such stupid and impractical external elements, which make such a cherished idea of ‘empowerment’ the most precariously ‘over-celebrated’ idealism with least substance and out-of-place externalities.
It seems, this is happening more to women as ‘empowerment’ is something, being ‘marketed and supplied’ to women in the garb of many masqueraded matters, sans the idealism. Naturally, when the ‘customer’ is not well-informed, uncertain and even zealously and reactionarily into a ‘buying-spree’; spurious and ‘mimicked’ utilities and worths tend to flood the market place. Then, even an informed customer has trouble buying the ‘genuine’ product...!
So, what is ‘empowerment’? Especially, from the perspective of women! Let us list the elements, which most experts believe constitute empowerment for women –
- Fitness/Health – Globally, all empowerment of any kind is first associated with body-mind fitness. Healthy and poised body-mind is primary empowerment. Women need to invest most and hugely on fitness, health and poise. Exercise, enough sleep and leisure, positivity, de-stressing and most importantly, a receptive and in-ward looking consciousness, which facilitates constant ‘self-dialogue’, without falling prey to populist exhortations. Sadly, in most women, even in modern well-off women, across all cultures, this empowerment is the most neglected!
- Self-Defence/Self-Security – Being women is a package deal! A woman has best of endowments but a poor protective mechanism. The best way for a woman to feel empowered is to have deep confident feeling that she can, without the help of men in their lives (dad/brother/friend/husband) defend and secure herself. Self-defence skill development and safety-training are primary empowerment need for all women, especially young. Not only that, security and safety is essentially a mindset which needs to be ingrained deeply in the subconscious, so that women feel at their confident best in any milieu they move in. Global surveys however show that massive majority of women do very little for their self-defence and are hugely crippled by their ‘security/safety’ concerns. They also at many times, casually drop their natural guard against troubles in their daily lives.
- Think Positive/Drop Negation/Embrace Neutrality – Women all over the world are considered a ‘complaining tribe’, infested with the syndrome of negativity and negation. No doubt, things are very tough for women in all milieus and cultures. Negativity is more in the milieu than in women’s collective psyche. Still, when it comes to empowerment, a woman has to nurture and inculcate the consciousness of positivity and poise. The idea is – Accept that as nobody else may stand as your support, you are your own best cheerleader! Empowerment is in celebrating positivity and neutralizing negativity and negation. Globally, it is a primary accusation on modern women that most of their life-living priorities are energized by reactionary and negative priorities. Empowerment is all within, comes with consciousness, not what we accept externally. Positivity facilitates the journey of consciousness within...
- Self-Respect/Self-Acceptance/Self-Worth – There are populist cultural benchmarks for women about beauty, looks, body, dressing, attitudes, etc. A woman’s vacillations, conflicts, confusion and dualism are very crippling propositions for true empowerment. Empowerment means standing tall and strong to yourself and your own pluses and minuses. Nobody is born perfect but rigidity and over-insistence about perfection itself is negativity. Empowerment means acceptance of one’s strengths as well as weaknesses. Nobody is born with a Zero! Everyone has some pluses and some minuses. Working your own ‘mathematics’ right with acceptance is empowerment. This is some area, where most women waste huge amount of time, energy and money, chasing something and wishing for such ‘attainments & endowments’, which actually are ‘mimicked’ empowerment.
- Setting High Standards/Benchmarks – Empowerment does not come smooth. You set standards for self, say no to mediocrity and be assertive about quality in all life-living choices. Nothing casual should be entertained. Never be comfortable with populist and chic practicality. Setting high benchmarks for who you shall date, what high-valued people you shall be seen with, what lifestyle choices you say an emphatic NO, etc. Most women, even when they are well empowered, do not care about what elements their personality and consciousness is being associated with and identified with. That is why, often, their own body language and personality positioning exhibit ‘wrong signals’ to many around them. Labeling and judging starts pouring in and it is tough to remain ‘cool’ to such intrusions...
- Unlearning/Deculturing – Being a woman, it is a natural awareness that a woman’s instincts and cultured action/behavior have so many histogenetic factors, ingrained since ages of wrong and skewed socialization. An empowered woman has a long list of attitudes, instincts, orientations and so-called ‘soul-voices’ to unlearn, as many of them are vestiges of past, with little veracity and utility in contemporary milieus. Science has now facilitated the learning of how men and women differ because of the brain structures and how many brain structures are subconsciously ‘scripted’ because of wrong and unequal cultural factors. A new-age woman needs to ‘unlearn’ a huge portion of ‘archaic and cultured’ mind consciousness. This pruning is very crucial to empowerment.
- Symmetry Of Success – Much of the contemporary and populist benchmarks of successes are man-made and man-favored. The world is not truly a women-centric realism. Women hold the potential and prospect for future because they are different and can see the world and all contemporary benchmarks uniquely. Men have unleashed enough stupidities on earth since ages. Women need not subscribe to them and add more to them. They have to redesign and reshape their own novel and unique successes, as they see and wish. An empowered woman ‘redesigns’ all utilities and worth of life and living with the poised and symmetrical sensitivities, which are truly and uniquely women-centric. The mad-rush to out-race and outstrip men in the zeal for ‘equality’ is bad agenda. New agenda is the sanity and sensitivity of empowered women. This aspect seems to be hugely missing.
However, when we weed the gender element out of the above idea of empowerment, we all can clearly see that there is nothing man or woman about it. An empowerment is essentially gender-neutral. All goodness and idealisms are gender-neutral. All good men and women are the same – brimming with love, compassion, equanimity, positivity and purpose. Everyone needs to be empowered. In fact, ideal it is that men should strive more to make women empowered and women should look to make men empowered too.
Why should we have a world where ‘empowerment’ is not in balance and equanimity? What better picture of a future earth where everyone is empowered – woman or man, it is never asked...! No need anyway...
As the wise say – The Human intelligence is a sure process towards complexities. Don’t align your life energies with complexities. To align all your energies with peace-harmony and self-poise, we all have to align with our personal and internal Innocence. We all have to accept – Only that Intelligence is true and right, which empowers and aligns us to Innocence. True empowerment is in aligning with your own individualistic Innocence, never the Intelligence. Rather, if possible, use all your intelligence to empower and enhance your own Innocence...!
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