The one thing women (especially) should avoid || Acharya Prashant, at St. Xavier's, Mumbai (2022)

Acharya Prashant

~~~~~  Video Information: 19.10.2022, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai   Context: ~ What is real feminism? ~ When should we express our emotions? ~ What is the worst enemy of women? ~ When should one talk back to their parents?  Music Credits: Milind Date  ~~~~~  #acharyaprashant #feminism #womenempowerment

Transcript

00:00 Thank you.

00:27 Hi sir, my name is Vaishnavi Gaikwad and I am an FYBSA student.

00:52 I would like to ask, like when sometimes I do some things and my parents don't like it,

00:58 of course they will scold me.

01:00 So sometimes the matter goes too far and they hurt me.

01:07 And then I don't talk back to them.

01:11 I have never done that till yet.

01:12 So I feel like if I talk back now, it will hurt them.

01:16 So what should I do?

01:17 Like if I talk back and if I don't talk back, it's like bottling up my feelings.

01:28 You must talk back, but not from an emotional center.

01:34 Right?

01:36 You must be 18, 20, 22 something, an adult now.

01:40 You have all the rights to engage anybody in a conversation.

01:47 But engaging in a conversation is not the same as reacting emotionally.

01:55 The chances are that because they hurt you, so you will react.

02:03 Now don't do that.

02:06 It's very difficult to say which of these is worse.

02:13 The two options that we usually exercise are, one, we suppress our feelings, we block our

02:20 expression.

02:22 That's the option very frequently chosen.

02:24 And that's also the one you seem to be choosing.

02:29 And following this particular option, there is the other one in which there is an explosion

02:35 due to continued suppression.

02:38 When you suppress your feelings and your instincts for too long, one day they will explode.

02:47 And when that explosion comes, you know how the sight of an explosion looks.

02:55 You only have debris all around.

02:59 Things shattered and scattered.

03:03 Sometimes not all the scattered things are visible to the eyes.

03:07 They are all within the mind.

03:09 And there is so much tooth-toot.

03:12 What has happened?

03:14 Look at the faces.

03:16 And you can know just by looking at the faces of the members of the family.

03:22 There has been a civil war just an hour back.

03:29 So we all must, you all must rather, as young people, learn to engage your parents and your

03:39 seniors and your teachers.

03:43 In India somehow the culture has been of authority and silence.

03:53 Authority from the senior side and silence from the junior side.

03:58 And the direct blowback has been that a lot of the current generation is now becoming

04:06 extremely disrespectful and disregardful.

04:10 Precisely because they have not been engaged, instead been asked to just shut up.

04:17 And you cannot have a person shut up till eternity.

04:23 So now you have people look at the kind of manners and etiquette that they display.

04:30 And then the parents are horrified.

04:32 So are the teachers.

04:34 The kids of this generation, they just know no respect.

04:40 Look at how they misbehave with their elders.

04:43 But then it was the responsibility of the elders to teach their kids or their students

04:50 where behavior must come from.

04:55 Not how they should behave, but from where they should behave.

05:01 So I started my response by saying that you should not behave from your reactive emotional

05:07 center.

05:09 If you feel strongly like bursting out in a particular moment, that is just not the

05:18 moment to open your mouth, withdraw.

05:22 Equally you cannot stay withdrawn forever.

05:26 When you know that it's the right time, then speak up.

05:36 At a time and place of your choice, respond.

05:42 That's what they say in the military.

05:45 When somebody attacks you, obviously he would be attacking you at a time and at a place

05:50 where you are weak.

05:52 That is not the time to engage the enemy.

05:54 Of course I am not saying that parents or teachers are enemies.

05:57 Just raising a very broad and loose analogy.

06:06 So you do not just react then and there, though you will be feeling very angry.

06:12 An army truck was going and it has been ambushed.

06:15 But hey, this is not the point to engage them.

06:18 Engage them as little as possible and just save your response for a better time.

06:27 Because at that moment you will be afraid, you will be angry, you will be hurt from your

06:33 feeling of being offended.

06:35 Very hurtful words will arise.

06:39 And the mind is a strange thing.

06:42 It remembers all the nonsense.

06:47 Two hours of a hurtful conversation will be remembered over two decades of a relationship.

06:59 That's how the ego operates.

07:01 Two decades of mother-daughter relationship, the ego will choose to just keep aside.

07:09 And it will repeat, repeat, repeat to itself those two hours, not even two hours, it does

07:15 not last that long usually, twenty minutes.

07:19 Those twenty minutes of bombardment and every single word, hurt, abuse will be not only

07:30 remembered but magnified.

07:33 Your mother said something in two words, the memory will remember it as two sentences.

07:42 Even casual glances will be remembered as weapons in sarcasm.

07:48 You know, she was not just looking at me.

07:52 She was using her eyes as weapons.

07:55 There was so much sarcasm and taunt in the way she glanced at me.

08:00 And that's all the work of the ego.

08:05 So do engage your parents.

08:09 Figure out what is really happening and then talk to them.

08:13 It's an art.

08:15 When you read the old wisdom stories belonging to the sages or the gurus or the Buddha, often

08:25 you come across something very curious.

08:31 The student comes up and asks a question and the teacher does not respond at all.

08:40 Sometimes the teacher responds after an entire year.

08:43 He waits for the right conditions to develop.

08:47 He knows that any explanation at this moment will be futile.

08:53 And then after one year he says, now this is the answer to the question you had then

08:57 asked.

09:00 The teacher is hardly ever seen in a hurry to provide explanations because if you are

09:08 a real teacher, a teacher of life, it is not your job merely to give explanations.

09:13 You want to take the student to a solution, not merely explain it but actually solve it.

09:21 And that requires the right time and the right conditions.

09:25 The student must be ready to listen.

09:29 If the listening is closed, what's the point in speaking so much?

09:33 And when two people are engaged in heated arguments, a de facto quarreling, believe

09:41 me neither of them is listening.

09:44 And if that fellow is not listening, why are you speaking so much to him?

09:48 You are speaking so much, you are speaking beyond what is needed to be spoken.

09:53 And not a word is reaching that fellow and even if something is reaching that fellow,

09:59 his receptors are totally distorting it.

10:05 Because he is receiving it through his internal filters.

10:09 And the memory is selectively magnifying and selectively deleting the chosen parts.

10:16 Some part is blown up and some part is chosen not to be remembered at all.

10:22 I'll give you an example.

10:24 I would have spoken here for 15-20 minutes now.

10:28 If all of us are asked to pull out a sheet of paper and write down what I have just spoken,

10:35 just the salient points let's say, sum up what has been said in 10 points, 10 points

10:42 each, everyone, you will find quite a lot of divergence.

10:50 Your 10 points will be at a significant variance from what she writes or from what he writes.

10:57 How is it possible?

10:59 The speaker is one.

11:01 He has not said 10 different things to 10 different people and yet we have heard the

11:06 speaker differently, all of us.

11:09 There would be obviously some overlap but also a lot of variance.

11:15 That's how we are.

11:17 So wait for the other person to be in the right frame of mind before you can say something.

11:30 These two things if you can get rid of and that applies to everybody.

11:38 Not just to you as a person.

11:39 I am not, it's a general answer.

11:45 Reactiveness and emotionality and I am stressing more on that seeing that I am speaking to

11:52 a girl, to a woman.

11:56 The way prakriti, physical nature has made the two genders and then later on the way

12:05 we are conditioned by the society and the education and the various influences, girls

12:13 turn out to be more emotional and more reactive and that's a serious handicap they face in

12:21 life.

12:25 The problem that I face when I address this issue is that many women take their emotionality

12:31 as their strength whereas it is not.

12:36 It is something very untamed that arises from the body, the physicality, the chemicals,

12:43 the hormones and one ought to understand it and stay at a safe distance from it.

12:49 I am not saying you must suppress your emotions.

12:51 I am saying you must understand your emotions and to understand your emotions there has

12:55 to be a certain detachment.

12:57 You must be able to see where your thoughts, your emotions and your reactions are coming

13:01 from.

13:03 If you will not be able to see that, in spite of all the liberalism and all feminism, life

13:10 can still be very hard on one particular gender.

13:19 Unfortunately we have come far from days of open and socially accepted oppression but

13:33 still the scales are not even.

13:40 They are tilted in favour of one gender and against one particular gender.

13:47 I do not want girls to suffer and the one who causes them to suffer is both outside

13:58 of them and inside them.

14:01 Outside of them are the blind forces of patriarchy and body identification and materialism and

14:09 all that.

14:11 And inside of the woman, the forces of her physicality, they are the ones that cause

14:19 her to suffer.

14:22 Those forces are present within men as well.

14:24 When I speak to men, I address that.

14:29 But right now since I am speaking to a woman, it becomes very important.

14:34 Do not locate your enemy just outside of yourself.

14:39 Actually a bigger enemy is lurking within and that enemy is your own emotions, your

14:48 own tendency to quickly react and a lot of that has to do with insecurity as well.

14:55 Because we do not educate and raise our girls well and wisely enough, so they are left feeling

15:04 helpless, powerless and therefore insecure.

15:09 And when you are insecure, then you will be even more emotional and even aggressive.

15:18 When you are afraid within, then you become violent in many ways, explicit and implicit.

15:24 Do not let all that happen to you.

15:26 Life is too valuable to be wasted away in periods of emotional trauma and neurosis and

15:41 fragmented mind.

15:43 Something is saying this is right, one part is saying I love my parents, one part is saying

15:47 no, they offend me, I have to do something about it.

15:50 One part is saying family is important, the other one says career is important and all

15:55 that is quite a lot of torture to handle.

15:59 Do not let that happen.

16:01 That's the reason why wisdom literature is essential and more important for women than

16:07 for men.

16:10 Because they are the ones who stand to lose more, who are more often than not the targets

16:21 of aggression.

16:24 So they are the ones who must have more centered minds.

16:30 Make sure you do not get lost in the material and consumerist forces and that you pay adequate

16:37 attention to setting you might write.

16:44 Point it out and keep it centered.

16:56 [Music]

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