What I read in your essay has a precise philosophical antecedent that rarely gets cited unfortunately. Jung called it “enantiodromia” = the principle that anything pushed to its extreme converts into its opposite. A culture that relentlessly exteriorises masculine energy and buries the feminine in its men produces brittleness. And brittleness, when threatened, becomes cruelty obviously.
The violence problem is, at its root, an integration problem.
Your horse-stable education is more instructive than most gender theory syllabi because horses operate on the nervous system directly. They respond to incongruence. You cannot project confidence while feeling fear; they know. That involuntary calibration between inner state and outer expression is precisely what gets educated out of both boys and girls through gendered socialisation. Boys learn to perform dominance they don’t feel; girls learn to perform softness they don’t always want. The performance is there. The gap between the performance and the actual life force widens. And the gap, I’d argue, is where violence breeds.
I noticed your observation that you “did not move like girl victim”, and this is a quality of presence that communicates full inhabitation of one’s own body. It sounds like completeness to me.
Predatory behaviour is, in many documented cases, precisely calibrated to find incompleteness, the dissociation, the trained deference, the over-managed affect. Which means the conversation about safety cannot be reduced to legal frameworks or even cultural norms alone. It has to go into the body.
The deepest thing you’ve written here is almost a throwaway line: “the source is one”. So poetic. I love it! It’s the thing that both the gender warriors and their opponents keep missing. The binary describes a wound we collectively decided to call a social structure.
The generation you’re writing for will need this as practice.
I am honoured you read me, Karin! I also have to learn a lot from you. Thank you!
First of all- I am so honoured and appreciate so much that you read me, and that you even took the time to write such a fine, sharp and thoughtful comment, Tamara!
I indeed never heard of that word, “enantiodromia” though I am a bit familiar with Jung and admire him. When reading your explanation what it means two pictures come to mind. One is Yin and Yang, where at its extreme one holds the seed of the other or collapses into the other. It has a reason why those are embedded- or integrated- in a circle holding both.They aren’t separate. The other is the simple physics of a wave, no matter how high it builts it must inevitably break and is following itself into a low. All that happens- in the ocean. It is what Thich Nhat Hanh pointed to: One ( I intentionally use it…but could replace with I or you) is neither the crest nor the trough- but the ocean. So I absolutely agree: Violence is an integration problem in one and the same person. On an embodied level.
And surely the education through horses is direct and on point as they operate from their body and nervous system, from senses not from a seperate self. I truly believe that it is impossible to learn that through books, or only on an intellectual plain, because what is needed is to literally dive down from a mind where some strange puppet called body hangs onto like some decoration… into an alive, pre-verbal intelligent body which has additionally a mind. And that happened in my kickboxing time too by moving, feeling the body and realising- in my case as a girl- how much power there is. That too was not really conscious at that time, but maybe exactly that “not thinking it through” but learning to inhabit directly was the key. And yes, I am quite sure that makes a different how a women especially moves through the world. It is like having a different scent for predatory persons. Later- and I didn’t mention that in the article- I found martial arts which were in that way more refined and taught, as they made clear that you need both the soft and the powerful, the receptive and active, the relaxation and contraction. Such as with horses funnily. I remembered talking to a friend who did a Systema-Workshop (Russian Martial Art) and said that the trainer insisted to must know and being able to allow full relaxation, softness, to execute precise action. I saw a video, it was stunning. Same goes for Krav Maga I think and too in KungFu where also meditation and contemplation and soft fluid movement (Qi Gong) are as important as rough training.
Well I hope that the importance of embodiment- to realise it is one source and integration of the various expressions is helpful- before any gender socialisation more and more find the people. Especially parents with the huge task to not keep the current pattern upright as well as adults who say “better later than never”.
Thank you so much Tamara, we learn from each other and it is a great pleasure!
The Yin-Yang image is perfect, and I think it does something your essay is doing too in a subtle way. It refuses the framework of opposition while still honouring genuine difference. That’s a harder position to hold than either “we’re all the same” or “vive la différence,” and most people collapse into one or the other.
Your point about the pre-verbal body is the crux of everything. Systema is a perfect example… what strikes people about it is precisely that it looks like nothing, almost like falling. The power is available without being performed. Krav Maga operates on a related principle: the goal is to return the nervous system to a functional state under conditions designed to fragment it. Both are really teaching the same thing your horses were teaching, that presence is not a mental achievement.
There’s a reason contemplative traditions from Qi Gong to Zen archery insist on softness as the precondition for precision. Force without receptivity is nothing. The martial arts understood what gender socialisation forgot: relaxation and power enable each other.
“Better late than never” is generous. But I’d go further…. it’s never too late because the body isn’t keeping a calendar but score of something else entirely, and it responds the moment you start listening.
Yes, it is truly long in the making. The clearest sign that it must have been different I found in a book of Harari and is based on what Evolutiontheory suggests: That when we were still living as hunter-collectors, in very small groups, each individual was( and needed to be) equipped and trained, body, senses, mind to survive in nature. I didn’t read that there was such a differentiation between women and men. That developed with that what we call culture, and as Tamara stated (distrorted, disintegrated) gender socialisation from early age on. I agree absolutely that there is a significant distortion of our true nature. Thank you for your presence, comment, sharing and the link, dear Kim!
Thank you maximilian 🙏🏼 I like to give examples, because often- even if written very good- a text which remains entirely abstract isn't as tangible. At least I feel that way at times.
What I read in your essay has a precise philosophical antecedent that rarely gets cited unfortunately. Jung called it “enantiodromia” = the principle that anything pushed to its extreme converts into its opposite. A culture that relentlessly exteriorises masculine energy and buries the feminine in its men produces brittleness. And brittleness, when threatened, becomes cruelty obviously.
The violence problem is, at its root, an integration problem.
Your horse-stable education is more instructive than most gender theory syllabi because horses operate on the nervous system directly. They respond to incongruence. You cannot project confidence while feeling fear; they know. That involuntary calibration between inner state and outer expression is precisely what gets educated out of both boys and girls through gendered socialisation. Boys learn to perform dominance they don’t feel; girls learn to perform softness they don’t always want. The performance is there. The gap between the performance and the actual life force widens. And the gap, I’d argue, is where violence breeds.
I noticed your observation that you “did not move like girl victim”, and this is a quality of presence that communicates full inhabitation of one’s own body. It sounds like completeness to me.
Predatory behaviour is, in many documented cases, precisely calibrated to find incompleteness, the dissociation, the trained deference, the over-managed affect. Which means the conversation about safety cannot be reduced to legal frameworks or even cultural norms alone. It has to go into the body.
The deepest thing you’ve written here is almost a throwaway line: “the source is one”. So poetic. I love it! It’s the thing that both the gender warriors and their opponents keep missing. The binary describes a wound we collectively decided to call a social structure.
The generation you’re writing for will need this as practice.
I am honoured you read me, Karin! I also have to learn a lot from you. Thank you!
First of all- I am so honoured and appreciate so much that you read me, and that you even took the time to write such a fine, sharp and thoughtful comment, Tamara!
I indeed never heard of that word, “enantiodromia” though I am a bit familiar with Jung and admire him. When reading your explanation what it means two pictures come to mind. One is Yin and Yang, where at its extreme one holds the seed of the other or collapses into the other. It has a reason why those are embedded- or integrated- in a circle holding both.They aren’t separate. The other is the simple physics of a wave, no matter how high it builts it must inevitably break and is following itself into a low. All that happens- in the ocean. It is what Thich Nhat Hanh pointed to: One ( I intentionally use it…but could replace with I or you) is neither the crest nor the trough- but the ocean. So I absolutely agree: Violence is an integration problem in one and the same person. On an embodied level.
And surely the education through horses is direct and on point as they operate from their body and nervous system, from senses not from a seperate self. I truly believe that it is impossible to learn that through books, or only on an intellectual plain, because what is needed is to literally dive down from a mind where some strange puppet called body hangs onto like some decoration… into an alive, pre-verbal intelligent body which has additionally a mind. And that happened in my kickboxing time too by moving, feeling the body and realising- in my case as a girl- how much power there is. That too was not really conscious at that time, but maybe exactly that “not thinking it through” but learning to inhabit directly was the key. And yes, I am quite sure that makes a different how a women especially moves through the world. It is like having a different scent for predatory persons. Later- and I didn’t mention that in the article- I found martial arts which were in that way more refined and taught, as they made clear that you need both the soft and the powerful, the receptive and active, the relaxation and contraction. Such as with horses funnily. I remembered talking to a friend who did a Systema-Workshop (Russian Martial Art) and said that the trainer insisted to must know and being able to allow full relaxation, softness, to execute precise action. I saw a video, it was stunning. Same goes for Krav Maga I think and too in KungFu where also meditation and contemplation and soft fluid movement (Qi Gong) are as important as rough training.
Well I hope that the importance of embodiment- to realise it is one source and integration of the various expressions is helpful- before any gender socialisation more and more find the people. Especially parents with the huge task to not keep the current pattern upright as well as adults who say “better later than never”.
Thank you so much Tamara, we learn from each other and it is a great pleasure!
The Yin-Yang image is perfect, and I think it does something your essay is doing too in a subtle way. It refuses the framework of opposition while still honouring genuine difference. That’s a harder position to hold than either “we’re all the same” or “vive la différence,” and most people collapse into one or the other.
Your point about the pre-verbal body is the crux of everything. Systema is a perfect example… what strikes people about it is precisely that it looks like nothing, almost like falling. The power is available without being performed. Krav Maga operates on a related principle: the goal is to return the nervous system to a functional state under conditions designed to fragment it. Both are really teaching the same thing your horses were teaching, that presence is not a mental achievement.
There’s a reason contemplative traditions from Qi Gong to Zen archery insist on softness as the precondition for precision. Force without receptivity is nothing. The martial arts understood what gender socialisation forgot: relaxation and power enable each other.
“Better late than never” is generous. But I’d go further…. it’s never too late because the body isn’t keeping a calendar but score of something else entirely, and it responds the moment you start listening.
This was a delight!
Much of my thoughts have already been said here in the comments. I'll share two things: 1. This is an issue long in the making. It is a significant distortion of our true nature. 2. Here is an excellent article that I think overlays some of your points beautifully: https://leftbrainmystic.substack.com/p/the-most-harmful-spiritual-myth-gendered?r=3ghjr&utm_medium=ios
Yes, it is truly long in the making. The clearest sign that it must have been different I found in a book of Harari and is based on what Evolutiontheory suggests: That when we were still living as hunter-collectors, in very small groups, each individual was( and needed to be) equipped and trained, body, senses, mind to survive in nature. I didn’t read that there was such a differentiation between women and men. That developed with that what we call culture, and as Tamara stated (distrorted, disintegrated) gender socialisation from early age on. I agree absolutely that there is a significant distortion of our true nature. Thank you for your presence, comment, sharing and the link, dear Kim!
Admire and respect your honesty and the examples you provided are respected and get the message across loud and clearly. Peace
Thank you maximilian 🙏🏼 I like to give examples, because often- even if written very good- a text which remains entirely abstract isn't as tangible. At least I feel that way at times.
I dig your raw honesty tone and feel. Your journey and words do connect