Wrestling Bears: Celtic Myths of Men and Their Passions

Most conscious people will resist a comment that begins, “Gays (blacks, Chinese, engineers, whathaveyous) all of them are (fill in the blank.) However, it’s rare to hear a challenge to gender-based global statements such as “Women are intuitive” or “Men fix things” or any variant on the noxious polemic that “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” More

We are all from Earth. We share needs for protection, instruction, validation and comfort from cradle to grave. We bleed. We weep in loneliness. We laugh. We fear. We aspire. We violate our potential and we fulfill it. There is no exclusivity in emotion and no monopoly in thinking for either gender. We are defined by our choices.
We are shaped by our genes and influenced by culture and family. We long for the transcendent and fear the abyss. Our bodies speak in the complex language of sensation and retain our life experience in cellular memory. These human traits we share.
Our bodies differ, fundamentally, individual to individual, gender to gender, youth to age. It is here the misunderstandings start. There are sensory things that defy communication: the taste of licorice, where the itch is exactly, what you mean by “blue,” how sweetly-touched skin feels. Strength and stamina vary.
Primal reproductive drives must be recognized and honored, their manifestation governed by more than impulse. The devil’s in the details and culture creates the details, stereotypes and distortions which we have all acted out.
The terrible schism many feel between Self and the Other Gender is born of fear and, too often, confirming negative experience. We must honor our own experience, else there is no learning. When critical experience has been painful, we learn to pull away, reject, close off. What is needed is balancing experience. We may learn early that the stove burns: what a chilly life if we forever avoid approaching a stove again.

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