What Women Should Watch Out For || Acharya Prashant, at St. Xavier's, Mumbai (2022)

Acharya Prashant

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Transcript

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

00:07 I would like to ask like when sometimes I do some things and my parents don't like it,

00:13 of course they will scold me.

00:15 So sometimes the matter goes too far and they hurt me.

00:22 And then I don't talk back to them.

00:26 I have never done that till yet so I feel like if I talk back now it will hurt them.

00:31 So what should I do?

00:33 If I talk back and if I don't talk back it's like bottling up my feelings.

00:43 You must talk back but not from an emotional center.

00:51 You must be 18, 20, 22 something, an adult now.

00:55 You have all the rights to engage anybody in a conversation.

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

01:10 The chances are that because they hurt you, so you will react.

01:19 Now don't do that.

01:21 It's very difficult to say which of these is worse.

01:28 The two options that we usually exercise are one, we suppress our feelings, we block our

01:35 expression.

01:37 That's the option very frequently chosen and that's also the one you seem to be choosing.

01:44 And following this particular option there is the other one in which there is an explosion

01:50 due to continued suppression.

01:53 When you suppress your feelings and your instincts for too long, one day they will explode.

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

02:10 You only have debris all around.

02:14 Things shattered and scattered.

02:18 Sometimes not all the scattered things are visible to the eyes.

02:22 They are all within the mind and there is so much toot-toot.

02:27 What has happened?

02:29 Look at the faces and you can know just by looking at the faces of the members of the

02:36 family.

02:37 There has been a civil war just an hour back.

02:43 So we all must, you all must rather, as young people, learn to engage your parents and your

02:54 seniors and your teachers.

02:58 In India somehow the culture has been of authority and silence.

03:08 Authority from the senior side and silence from the junior side.

03:13 And the direct blowback has been that a lot of the current generation is now becoming

03:21 extremely disrespectful and disregardful.

03:25 Precisely because they have not been engaged, instead been asked to just shut up.

03:32 And you cannot have a person shut up till eternity.

03:38 So now you have people look at the kind of manners and etiquette that they display and

03:45 then the parents are horrified.

03:47 So are the teachers.

03:49 The kids of this generation, they just know no respect.

03:54 Look at how they misbehave with their elders.

03:58 But then it was the responsibility of the elders to teach their kids or their students

04:05 where behavior must come from.

04:10 Not how they should behave, but from where they should behave.

04:16 So I started my response by saying that you should not behave from your reactive emotional

04:22 center.

04:24 If you feel strongly like bursting out in a particular moment, that is just not the

04:33 moment to open your mouth, withdraw.

04:37 Equally you cannot stay withdrawn forever.

04:41 When you know that it's the right time, then speak up.

04:51 At a time and place of your choice, respond.

04:57 That's what they say in the military.

05:00 When somebody attacks you, obviously he would be attacking you at a time and at a place

05:05 where you are weak.

05:07 That is not the time to engage the enemy.

05:09 Of course I am not saying that parents or teachers are enemies.

05:12 Just raising a very broad and loose analogy.

05:21 So you do not just react then and there, though you will be feeling very angry.

05:27 An army truck was going and it has been ambushed.

05:30 But hey, this is not the point to engage them.

05:33 Engage them as little as possible and just save your response for a better time.

05:42 Because at that moment you will be afraid, you will be angry, you will be hurt from your

05:48 feeling of being offended.

05:50 Very hurtful words will arise.

05:53 And the mind is a strange thing.

05:56 It remembers all the nonsense.

06:02 Two hours of a hurtful conversation will be remembered over two decades of a relationship.

06:14 That's how the ego operates.

06:16 Two decades of mother-daughter relationship, the ego will choose to just keep aside.

06:24 And it will repeat, repeat, repeat to itself those two hours, not even two hours, it does

06:30 not last that long usually, twenty minutes.

06:34 Those twenty minutes of bombardment and every single word, hurt, abuse will be not only

06:45 remembered but magnified.

06:48 Your mother said something in two words, the memory will remember it as two sentences.

06:57 Even casual glances will be remembered as weapons in sarcasm.

07:03 You know, she was not just looking at me.

07:07 She was using her eyes as weapons.

07:10 There was so much sarcasm and taunt in the way she glanced at me.

07:15 And that's all the work of the ego.

07:20 So do engage your parents.

07:23 Figure out what is really happening and then talk to them.

07:28 It's an art.

07:30 When you read the old wisdom stories belonging to the sages or the gurus or the Buddha, often

07:40 you come across something very curious.

07:46 The student comes up and asks a question and the teacher does not respond at all.

07:55 Sometimes the teacher responds after an entire year.

07:58 He waits for the right conditions to develop.

08:02 He knows that any explanation at this moment will be futile.

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

08:12 asked.

08:14 The teacher is hardly ever seen in a hurry to provide explanations because if you are

08:23 a real teacher, a teacher of life, it is not your job merely to give explanations.

08:27 You want to take the student to a solution, not merely explain it but actually solve it.

08:36 And that requires the right time and the right conditions.

08:40 The student must be ready to listen.

08:44 If the listening is closed, what's the point in speaking so much?

08:48 And when two people are engaged in heated arguments, a de facto quarreling, believe

08:56 me neither of them is listening.

08:59 And if that fellow is not listening, why are you speaking so much to him?

09:03 You are speaking so much, you are speaking beyond what is needed to be spoken.

09:08 And not a word is reaching that fellow and even if something is reaching that fellow,

09:14 his receptors are totally distorting it.

09:20 Because he is receiving it through his internal filters.

09:24 And the memory is selectively magnifying and selectively deleting the chosen parts.

09:31 Some part is blown up and some part is chosen not to be remembered at all.

09:36 I'll give you an example.

09:39 I would have spoken here for 15-20 minutes now.

09:43 If all of us are asked to pull out a sheet of paper and write down what I have just spoken,

09:50 just the salient points let's say, sum up what has been said in 10 points, 10 points

09:57 each, everyone, you will find quite a lot of divergence.

10:05 Your 10 points will be at a significant variance from what she writes or from what he writes.

10:12 How is it possible?

10:14 The speaker is one.

10:16 He has not said 10 different things to 10 different people and yet we have heard the

10:21 speaker differently, all of us.

10:24 There would be obviously some overlap but also a lot of variance.

10:30 That's how we are.

10:32 So wait for the other person to be in the right frame of mind before you can say something.

10:45 These two things if you can get rid of and that applies to everybody.

10:53 Not just to you as a person.

10:54 I am not, it's a general answer.

11:00 Reactiveness and emotionality and I am stressing more on that seeing that I am speaking to

11:07 a girl, to a woman.

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

11:19 we are conditioned by the society and the education and the various influences, girls

11:28 turn out to be more emotional and more reactive and that's a serious handicap they face in

11:36 life.

11:40 The problem that I face when I address this issue is that many women take their emotionality

11:46 as their strength whereas it is not.

11:51 It is something very untamed that arises from the body, the physicality, the chemicals,

11:57 the hormones and one ought to understand it and stay at a safe distance from it.

12:04 I am not saying you must suppress your emotions.

12:06 I am saying you must understand your emotions and to understand your emotions there has

12:10 to be a certain detachment.

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

12:16 from.

12:18 If you will not be able to see that, in spite of all the liberalism and all feminism, life

12:25 can still be very hard on one particular gender.

12:34 Unfortunately we have come far from days of open and socially accepted oppression but

12:48 still the scales are not even.

12:55 They are tilted in favour of one gender and against one particular gender.

13:02 I do not want girls to suffer and the one who causes them to suffer is both outside

13:13 of them and inside them.

13:16 Outside of them are the blind forces of patriarchy and body identification and materialism and

13:24 all that.

13:26 And inside of the woman, the forces of her physicality, they are the ones that cause

13:34 her to suffer.

13:37 Those forces are present within men as well.

13:39 When I speak to men, I address that.

13:44 But right now since I am speaking to a woman, it becomes very important.

13:49 Do not locate your enemy just outside of yourself.

13:53 Actually a bigger enemy is lurking within and that enemy is your own emotions, your

14:02 own tendency to quickly react and a lot of that has to do with insecurity as well.

14:10 Because we do not educate and raise our girls well and wisely enough, so they are left feeling

14:19 helpless, powerless and therefore insecure.

14:24 And when you are insecure, then you will be even more emotional and even aggressive.

14:33 When you are afraid within, then you become violent in many ways, explicit and implicit.

14:38 Do not let all that happen to you.

14:41 Life is too valuable to be wasted away in periods of emotional trauma and neurosis and

14:56 fragmented mind.

14:58 Something is saying this is right, one part is saying I love my parents, one part is saying

15:02 no, they offend me, I have to do something about it.

15:05 One part is saying family is important, the other one says career is important and all

15:10 that is quite a lot of torture to handle.

15:14 Do not let that happen.

15:16 That is the reason why wisdom literature is essential and more important for women than

15:22 for men.

15:25 Because they are the ones who stand to lose more, who are more often than not the targets

15:36 of aggression.

15:39 So they are the ones who must have more centered minds.

15:44 Make sure you do not get lost in the material and consumerist forces and that you pay adequate

15:52 attention to setting you might write.

15:59 Point it out and keep it centered.

16:17 [Music]

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