This past week I handed my teenager off to one of my dearest friends. She lives in NYC. My son is going to be a nanny to her 6-year-old.
The night before my first-time trip, as a young teen, without my parents, my Mom sat down on my bed and sang a song. It was an upbeat tune about a young woman who goes off to a foreign land and comes back ‘smoking Turkish tobacco.’ It’s all about how she has changed her customs and adopted ones from another culture.
The places we go, the environments, cultures, and people we are around influence us. Sometimes we pick something up from another culture and try to bring it back into our lives, but most of the time we are blindly acting out of our cultural habits.
A Brazilian friend of mine used to talk about how violent it was in Philadelphia, where we lived at that time. I know the US is violent, but he was from Rio! I had read about crime in Rio – it was far from peaceful there. When I asked him what he meant, he said ‘It is a feeling I have here. It is in the way people move. They have their heads down.” I took him at his word, but I didn’t really understand.
A year later, while staying with his family in Brazil, I watched as people made their way down the street – moving a bit more side to side with their spine and hips, making eye contact with one another. Grown men would greet one another and hold hands as they said hello and kissed each cheek. At the beach groups would congregate in circles all facing one another. It all felt a softer and welcoming.
In comparison, in the US, we walk straight ahead, body poised for forward momentum. I can’t recall ever seeing grown heterosexual men holding hands when talking. At the beach, we set up our blankets and chairs side by side, all facing the ocean, rarely facing one another. We are individuals after all;-)
I started to understand what my friend was saying. The way we move and interact with one another says something about us, and about what our culture values.
In the US we have a very individualistic culture. We pride ourselves on independence. In Brazil they have a collectivist culture that emphasizes connection and solidarity more.
But what do we do when we don’t want to embody the customs or values our culture teaches?
The fish is the last to realize she’s in water. Our culture and environment influences our self-image – who we think ourselves to be, and the values we hold. Our self-image is hard to get distance from. It is the water we are in.
We can ask a trusted friend about their experience of some aspect of our behavior. We can meditate and learn to observe our habitual thoughts. Or we can participate in a process that allows us to both build our self-awareness and experience new possibilities for a self-image at the same time.
Think of self-awareness as the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do/don’t align with the values you hold dear or aspire to.
The movement and sensation of your body is one of the easiest concrete things to track. As we organize ourselves to move – we have a snapshot of insight into an intersection of thought, and emotion too.
After being in Brazil I could clearly see how I didn’t prioritize expressing ease and gentleness to the people around me. I could see that even though this is something I long for – connection, kindness, ease and trust – I wasn’t moving in a way that allowed for that. I was guarded. The way I moved, told the people around me something. More importantly – it created an experience.
We cannot always change the cultures we are born into or the values that are cherished. We can however, get to know the inconsistencies between what we personally long for and value and what we have internalized from our cultures. Self-awareness begins to give us a choice. We no longer have to carry our cultural biases in our bodies blindly.
Sometimes after I do awareness through movement lessons, I feel potent and strong. At other times, after a lesson, I feel soft and at ease. Each and every one of these experiences allows me to know myself in a new way – a way that my culture or family might not have shown me. I get to feel from the inside a new way of being and to try it out in the world.
Maybe this is how we begin to influence and create our own small scale culture – one that is in alignment with what we value and aspire to create in the world? It is in becoming aware of what we blindly embodied, and then adding to our repertoire to reflect the world we want to create.
