Shi:

Alright, we are back at it here talking about the role of society and some other contextual things that help us understand who we are as people on our quest to build our best characters that we possibly can and today we want to address that you’re more than you may think.

Kay:

Now you’re more than you may think because you likely have a construction of inner beliefs and thoughts and things that you kind of ascribe to. But what you might not know is that society and where you came from, your parents and their beliefs about who you are as a woman or who you are as a man or who you are as a business owner, or who you are as fill in the blank, has a lot of expectations that come along with it and that can shape who you are too.

Shi:

Right, and when we say you’re more than you may think, we’re not talking about the spiritual teaching and perspective of that. You are a soul having a human experience and living in this human body, which we love that, and you’ve heard us talk about that here before. But we’re really talking about that construction of your identity based on your environment and your society and the culture that you grow up in. When humans are born, they are blank subconscious states open to receive whatever it is they will receive and whatever it is that they receive on a repeated basis is what will shape who they become. Now, you’ve heard a lot of stories through the years of probably people coming from horrible circumstances and turning out completely different, but they still learned from that environment what they wanted.

Now, they learned how not to act or how not to be, or who they didn’t want to be, but it was still learning from that environment. What blinds most people is realizing some shocking statistics like if whatever political party affiliation your parents had, 90% plus of people will have the same political affiliation. Whatever your parents or primary group, whoever it was that raised you, whatever their views were on some of the major issues or whatever their cultural customs were that’s what you’re going to see is right and that’s what you’re going to perpetuate into your adulthood and that’s what you’re basing who you are on as. You may like all of those pieces, but if you don’t like some of them, I think there’s a lot of power in realizing that you got programmed that way and that you can change it.

Kay:

But you might think that a lot of people get into their adult life and say, “Oh, I never thought that I would, but I turned out just like my mother” or “I never thought that I would, but I’m just like my dad,” or you say something, and it comes out of your mouth and you’re like, “Wow, I hear my parents talking here.” So, the patterns that come into play when you’re in that zero- to the five-year-old stage are so important. But when you are a little kid like that, a toddler, tiny under the age of five, you are a wide, open book to the whole wide Universe and your brain is literally forming its neural pathways in order to create the personality and the person that you then become. In fact, many traumas that we have later in life, whether they are repeated cycles from things that happened to us in that zero- to five-year-old age. So, understanding that we’ve got this preset of programming but that didn’t necessarily come to you by choice gives you the opportunity to maybe choose something different if it’s not constructive for your life.

Shi:

I love when you see the light bulb turn on for people and realize that they do have that choice, how powerful that can be, and what else is powerful is the way that we as humans within our societies and our communities reinforce these ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s popular, what’s not. There are all kinds of what we call social norms at play that dictate how you’re going to behave and think about how you behave differently in front of different people. Your coworkers versus your friends versus your intimate family versus somebody you’re sitting next to on an airplane. You act differently in different situations. Those are all reflections of the fact that you live and function inside of a society that has rules and expectations on everything from how you act based on your biological sex to how you act in a power dynamic, like a student and a teacher, or a boss and an employee. So, so many interesting things to examine here as we kind of look at that macro level that shapes who you are individually.

Kay:

I do want to just put a quick microscope in on something Shila just mentioned, which are those predetermined rules around the gender that you were born with, and just think that this is a really good example of this kind of society’s roles at play. If you think about a boy wearing a dress, not a boy cross-dressing or a boy who is trans, who is a drag queen but just a regular boy with a boy’s haircut and boy’s shoes wearing a dress that might rub up against something inside of you that says, “That’s not right.” Well, back in the 1700s men actually wore dresses more so than women and it was just a part of the fashion. So, is that fashion or is that something society says, pants equal boy, dress equals girl? Even down to the bathroom symbols being the triangle for the girl indicating that they’re wearing a dress, and the two legs for the boy indicating that pants are being worn. So, when we think about that, I think it helps to shine a light on the point that we’re making here that you may be more than you think.

Shi:

Alright, we’re going to have a quick commercial break and we’ll be right back.