All genders all over the world have been wounded by gender imbalance.
Join host Martha Williams as she talks with the founders of Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI) about the importance of healing the gender divide and understanding the cultural context for why this work matters, men, women and the entire gender spectrum.
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Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters, I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Thank you for joining us at the Culture Shift podcast where we work to shift the conversation to inspire a more balanced, peaceful, compassionate and collaborative world. We believe culture shifts come from a profound change in how we relate to self, others and our planet. This is why we're so excited to welcome the founders of Gender Equity and Reconciliation international and the Satyana Institute, Cynthia Brix, and Will Keepin.
Martha Williams:
The work of gender equity and reconciliation, which we will casually refer to as its acronym GERI, works with the profound wounds in the human family centered around cultural conditioning related to gender, sexuality, and relational intimacy. With that, we welcome Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin. Cynthia and Will thank you so much for being with us here today.
Cynthia Brix:
Yeah, so thank you Martha. It's a pleasure to be here first of all and so thank you both you and John for having us.
Will Keepin:
It's a great joy to be with you on this podcast. Thank you.
Martha Williams:
I'll just start by saying that my partner John, who is the co-producer on this show, and I had the pleasure of attending a GERI workshop recently and it was such a deeply transformational experience and we believe that this process is actually a linchpin in helping to curb gender violence and inequity for all genders. But you know, I think a lot of our listeners may be asking, you know, what is gender "reconciliation". Many of us have heard of the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa and the National Unity and Reconciliation commission in Rwanda. Reconciliation is a profound principle and healing and in these cases, healing countries torn apart by the horrors of apartheid and genocide. And you talk about how it's the collective alchemy that happens inside these forums that create the healing that we need.
Why such a profound process needed for gender?
Will Keepin:
This gender equity and reconciliation work that we do, began in the early nineties and I was very inspired by Desmond Tutu's truth and reconciliation commission and realized when that was happening, that that is exactly what we need in terms of gender. We need a truth and reconciliation commission process in our entire culture around gender injustice. So that's how we settled upon the term gender reconciliation. And yes, we followed closely those principles which were to create a forum in which the full truth can come out from both sides and essentially the full horror of what happens be exposed to the light of day confronted with love. So that really was the origin of our work. Hmm. And the alchemy part, you know, alchemy is of course the Western mystical tradition of the transformation of consciousness into spiritual realization. So it's typically understood in a Western and psycho-spiritual context for the individual going through the process of spiritual transformation from their ego really into their Christ or Buddha nature, if you will.
Will Keepin:
What we find is the same principles apply in groups and that's why we call it collective alchemy. And the basic idea there is that we go, we create a forum and we intentionally go into the pain and the darkness and the conversations that most people never want to have. We go right into that territory together. And what we find in there, it's very painful at times, and it takes a courage and a determination, but what's so surprising to people is in that, what happens is that the boundaries between us melt away. The doors of compassion are opened when people come to that level of authenticity and sincerity. And then what happens is we discover the light, the light of the soul begins to shine through, even in this most difficult of circumstances where we're finally telling the truth about our experience as women and men. And much of this has never been spoken before in any kind of public form, maybe in a therapeutic room here and there.
Will Keepin:
But to do it in a group and to find the systemic connections that we've all been betrayed in a similar way by this system of gender conditioning is astounding. And then what happens? He said, that light of the soul awakens, and then we begin to connect soul to soul. And what happens is a whole new birth begins in the gender relationship, which is the life giving power of discovering that communion of the beloved, if you will. And we'd come back into right relationship and neutral reference. So it's a journey. Almost into the underworld, if you will, where we go through the darkness and the pain that so many of us carry it privately and having a forum to bring that forward, to have it witnessed transmutes it. And so we are transmitted internally with the darkness and the pain that we're carrying as well as collectively when we see that others are carrying the same kind of pain I was carrying and I thought it was just me.
Will Keepin:
And then we go through that and we come through that together and we come into a communion of the beloved, which is the alchemical gold that we harvest. We feel like we've reclaimed right relationship between men and women and we see this routinely in our work. It's astounding. It's the power of the human spirit is not anything that we do. It's so powerful to witness it. And we've been privileged to witness process in 11 countries with thousands of people and it totally restores our total faith in the human spirit and the human heart to transmute these things, just create the environment and the context and skillfully facilitate it because this is something that is needed everywhere and yet exists almost nowhere today.
Martha Williams:
I just want to say with things like gay rights, #metoo, the controversy over gendered bathrooms and increasing awareness of trans people expressing many shades of gender, gender is very complex and potentially confusing for a lot of people.
So how do you define gender?
Will Keepin:
Well, let me just begin by saying that when we began this work, we really began because the women's movement had been there for five or six decades, longer really, but I mean in terms of got really going in the sixties, the early sixties, and then a few decades later came what was called the men's movement.
Will Keepin:
So we had these separate movements, but we, there was this realization that both men and women are afflicted by gender injustice and each needs the other for a true and complete healing. And that's really the premise on which the work began. And then it very soon after we began back in the early nineties by the mid nineties the AIDS crisis was full on particularly in the States. And so we began working with the lesbian and gay communities in particular. So what's happened over the last, you know, 25 30 years, is that the whole gender landscape, as you correctly noted, is shifting rapidly. And gender identity is obviously distinct from gender expression, both of which are distinct from sexual orientation.
Will Keepin:
And the whole rigid formulation of gender in the binary of masculine and feminine has been opened up dramatically. It's really still in flux. I mean, I think on Facebook there's 30 plus different gender identities. So there's a whole range of different identities, each of which relates to a particular group of human beings who have a particular experience or working through it particular relationship to their own gender identity and need to be heard and also have a legitimate voice. So the basic paradigm that we hold is that every human being has a legitimate voice in this conversation and that the degree of oppression and exploitation that has been taking place along the lines of gender has been largely hidden. The #metoo movement made that clear in terms of how much sexual exploitation, for example, it was still hidden and a vast amount of abuse and exploitation has been taking place and it's still taking place.
Martha Williams:
It's interesting because when you read newspapers, you hear about things like homelessness and poverty, climate change, pandemics, and then there's the #metoo movement and the exploration of gender and the gender binary, but gender is not a platform any politician is going to run on. I hear how important that is to you and it is to me as well, but why is it so important in your opinion?
Will Keepin:
You know, the writer, DH Lawrence summarizes it pretty well.
He says that the future of humanity will be determined by relations, not between nations, but relations between women and men.
And now we would include, expand that statement to include relationship between the different gender categories in the human family. Why is this so important? It is actually foundational at the level of the dysfunction of human civilization. It is a core wound in the human family. We see it in every society on earth.
Martha Williams:
So give me an example.
Cynthia Brix:
I'll give you an example – very current right now – all the things you just mentioned of poverty and just you know, the pandemic and everything. All this attention on the pandemic is so necessary, right? And yet we have pandemics on a gender level happening that don't get the same attention. We have people dying, women and girls in particular, but also the humanity of men who are out there that doesn't even get addressed. The men being trained to be tough it up, don't cry, go to war, lose your life. The suicide rate of men is higher than women, pretty much globally. Those are things that get pushed under the rug and kind of become normalized. So right now in the current situation of this Covid 19 pandemic is the escalation and the increase of domestic violence across the globe, we are seeing a rise in the domestic violence. In places like Malaysia and France have doubled in their domestic violence in the calls that they're receiving over the last two months since the pandemic has started. In the U S Portland, Oregon has 27% increase in domestic violence arrests in March of this year as compared to 2019. In Boston, it has jumped to 22% in assault and battery reports from this year compared to last year, Seattle has a 21% increase. All of a sudden there's no safe place to go. There's no place to make a phone call because it's 24, seven in house, in prison, in a place. So there's a whole pandemic happening on that social level that doesn't even get addressed.
Martha Williams:
So why are women being killed? Why are women being abused? Why are women targets of violence? What is it in our gender assumptions and ideas that create so much anger and so much tension between the genders.
Will Keepin:
In South Africa, a woman or girl is raped every 22 seconds. In the United States, a woman is raped every minute, that'd be 60 seconds. So that means, you know, here in the United States, since we started this interview, that'd be about 20 women. Now that rate has most likely gone up because of the increase in domestic violence, which is 200 to 300% increase in terms of the number of phone calls that rape crisis and domestic violence centers are receiving. And 40 to 60% of these sexual assaults are committed worldwide, are committed against girls 15 years of age or younger. So part of what that shows is that those who are the most vulnerable are, you know, more likely to be attacked. That's one reason that takes place. But it's also important to recognize that male violence,
80% of male violence is committed against other males.
Martha Williams:
Wow.
Will Keepin:
Yes. This is very important. So the vast majority of victims of male violence are other males. And that is part of the men's trauma, one of the several reasons that men commit suicide four times as often as women. So men are in a very significant degree of suffering from this whole patriarchal conditioning from being forced into what's called the man box. And that is the set of rules, what it is to be a man, which is to don't cry, be tough, never show any feelings except anger. So there are all these rules that confined men and boys and as Bell Hooks said so beautifully, what happens to a young boy as he grows up in our society is that he has to self mutilate the emotional parts of himself. And if he doesn't do that, his peers will do it for him. So there's a way in which men, very humanity is betrayed by the social, you know, conditioning and socialization of men.
Cynthia Brix:
Everything Will just said, is often surprising news for women in particular. Men hear about the, the violence against women. They know about it from the news. They may not even take it in anymore because it comes such constant barrage almost. Whereas women, when they start hearing about how men have been oppressed in the socialization and boxed in, and sometimes men start sharing their stories about the ways that they have been violated, often in partner abuse or from mothers or father abuse. That's an important piece because in our particular work, when we sit and listen to the other, whoever is sharing it starts to change us by just being able to take in the truth of their experience, the truth of their story. And we often say that women cannot remain the same women when they hear the story and the truth of men. And the same is true for men. When men really listen and hear the story of the woman sitting across from them they're transformed by the actual hearing of that story and they can't remain the same men.
Martha Williams:
Right. So you talk a lot in your book about how the work transcends philosophical and spiritual practice. And I just want you to speak to that, especially because I know you work with a lot of faith based organizations, which I find incredibly encouraging and exciting to hear
Cynthia Brix:
In the realm of spirituality, our work actually extends across all sectors.
I think that one of the best ways to share is through story. One man who came to one of our programs, it was a faith based program. It was an invitational, intentionally created and convened for religious leaders, lay leaders and people who come from different traditions. And this was a pastor in the Boston area. He says it was after the three days where we came together to create honoring ceremonies and we men got together and we created, you know, it was pretty complex. It was pretty, there were male, the male dynamics as we tried to figure out how to honor the women in this group and how to honor the feminine. And, and I think we did a pretty decent job for the women. But what really, really blew us away was when the women honored us and they came in, they let us in one by one and they had a bowl of dry leaves and they had us crumple the leaves in our hands and they said, this is your grief as men and we just honor the grief that you hold in your hearts as men.
Cynthia Brix:
And then they washed our hands and they said, we wash your hands to wash away your grief and the suffering you've had and as a sign of new life that we honor you in. And then we as men walked into the meeting room. And at the door, the meeting room, it said, welcome to Eden. After spending a few days really baring my soul and then uncovering my own brokenness and better understanding more pain of others and what they had experienced, seeing the sign made my heart leap with hope at what relationships between men and women were intended to be and can be in the context of communion. So all the men were lined up in the room, each standing face to face with the woman. And then the women said, we see you in your grief, we see you in your desire to protect. We see you in your love for women in your life.
Cynthia Brix:
We see you in your street, we see you in your fear. And they just continued on and on and to be seen at that level as a man with women standing before me and all the men just open my heart just burst my heart open like no other experience I've had with women before. What I want to say about this particular man. He's a pastor in a pretty traditional Christian Church. But here's a man who walked in, not thinking he had any gender issues or any need for this, but had an openness to walk through the doors that first day and really listen and he goes back into the leadership of his church now and is able to bring a whole new dimension of himself that's been transformed, bring it into his leadership in the church and not know it only in the head, but know it in his whole being now because he's been through this process that is the alchemy and that is how systems out in the world began to change, and that's what we're working on, on the systematic level. It is a beautiful workshop. It is a beautiful time in community, but what we're really working at is at the core level, the fundamental level of changing systems of oppression that are worldwide, that are global, that are across all cultures, religion, age, cast, you know, all these levels.
Martha Williams:
And what I'm really struck by, I just want to say real quickly is that these are seemingly external, but what you do is you get to the inside. So the hidden, and it seems to me from what you said, especially what you said earlier about going into the shadow, going inside that that's not an easy thing to get to. And so that's why I think this work is so important is because it takes you really inside in a safe, safe way and you're experts at creating a container for people to go deep in a safe way. So I want to just highlight that, that it is systematic, but it's not about changing policy, although we need that the work itself is really relational and lives inside the body. It lives inside of the hearts that are connected in the process.
Cynthia Brix:
Yes, and it lives ancestrally and lives in our historic family lineage. It lives in all dimensions.
Will Keepin:
One thing I want to say, it's that one of the deep learnings that happens for men in this work is that the greatest male privilege is not any of the social advantages that are afforded to men in our society because of the gender imbalance.
The greatest male privilege is to actively participate in deconstructing this whole unjust gender system itself.
Martha Williams:
So that's really powerful, Will. So you're saying that male privilege is that they can be partners in creating a balance. This is not something just women can do on their own. You're saying women need men and vice versa. Men need women.
Will Keepin:
They absolutely, we need each other. That's a foundational principle. I think the fact that women need men to get on board has been known for a long time, but that men need women, and in particular that men need more than they need their patriarchal conditioning and their male socialization, they need to actively participate in deconstructing that. That when they do that, they discover that is the greatest male privilege because then they are actually healing themselves, healing their relationships with their brothers and other men, and claiming that skillful, intimate, celebratory, joyful, collaborative relationship with women that they long for and have never had. So it is truly the greatest male privilege is to deconstruct this whole male socialization.
Martha Williams:
So you've talked a lot about the tremendous importance of healing for men. I think primarily like you said, Cynthia, we so often associate gender healing with women. That said, you mentioned you have a story to share about a woman from one of your workshops. We'd love to hear that.
Cynthia Brix:
So this one was a workshop where we changed the name of the woman to Elena and she came first time she had ever been to anything like this and she was so excited. Elena came fully out with her story and it was one of abuse in her family, domestic violence or intimate partner violence, where her husband was... He did many things, one was, e would hang the babies over the banister upstairs while Elena was downstairs ready to catch them – as threatening to do that – to drop them from the upper floor to the lower floor. At one point he moved his mistress into the household and made Elena and her children live in the toilet area while the mistress and him lived in Elena's bedroom. And this went on for years and years. Finally, her husband died. The mistress moved away. And her and her children kind of had a pack that they would not speak about the story. It was a family secret.
Cynthia Brix:
Well, she came to this workshop and she started feeling like, okay, this is a safe enough place. I trust these people. So she started bringing it out. This had been over 20 years of keeping the story secret that she started sharing and as she shared, everyone listened. The men listen deeply and like I said, the chains that were binding her started to loosen. We saw her about three days after the workshop and she came running up to us and she said, Cynthia and Will, I have to tell you, after the workshop I went to my husband's grave and we had been married, you know, about 25 years and I still had not forgiven him for all that he had done. But I sat at his grave and I was able to forgive him and then I knew where his mistress lived and I went, it had been over 20 years that I've seen her.
Cynthia Brix:
And I went and I knocked on her door and when she came, she was in a wheelchair and she said, Elena, I've been thinking about you all week long. Well, the workshop had been going on, you know, so the energy was there of just that knowing between them, they were connected woman to woman in an abusive way. But here she was showing up at her door. And the mistress invited Elena in and she said, Elena, I know that I'm in this wheelchair for all the horrific things that I did to you and your children. And that right there came out of one, three day process and Elena's life shifted. Her children's life shifted. The mistress's life shifted. They were able to forgive and it doesn't mean that it all became rosy. Those things really happen. The abuse happened, the betrayal happened, but they came in a place that they can actually meet.
Cynthia Brix:
And that is the reconciliation. Just the accountability to honestly say, I did that or that happened to me. And that's where the healing comes together. And I want to just say about myself. Then while I have had things happened to me by both men and women that have been betrayals, have been painful, have been abusive, I too have also hurt people. I have hurt men, I have been, you know, unconscious in relationship and when those things become conscious, what in my process has been important in my own healing and healing and relationship to men and women and all people is to say I too have done that. And that's really an important piece because we can often, as human creatures always project outwardly and say it's them, it's them, it's them, they're the problem. And that that is part of it but I too can be part of the problem and be acknowledging that honestly is a key part of, of the work.
Martha Williams:
You know, you talk about love and forgiveness as really essential to the alchemy that you experience from doing reconciliation. But I also know it's not uncommon when confronted with a difficult issue inside of a relationship, the response can be something along the lines of how can there be a problem or a gender imbalance? I love you. So I just want to bring that to the table that…
…love being present doesn't mean that these problems aren't present.
Right? So can you just speak to that?
Cynthia Brix:
Yes. Societies and also I'll say religious and spiritual cultures or traditions have often said, forgive, just go back in there and forgive even if you're getting beaten up or you're getting abused verbally or physically. And that's bypassing the issues. I just want to say that if anyone is in any kind of relationship like that, there's also tough love that sets a boundary and says, I am not going to be a doormat. And gets out of those situations that you're in and make sure that you find safety and that's loving yourself. But it's also loving the abuser in a sense, to not allow that to happen anymore. And so I know that takes agency and you need support. Not everyone has that level of support to make that action. It's very important to recognize that and to make that clear.
Martha Williams:
Right. So let's actually kind of step back. So why is it that the sacred and the emotional are so terrifying?
Why is it that the sacred and emotional have to be controlled or killed off and the society we live in?
Will Keepin:
So I think that the answer to that question needs to be more deeply explored. That question doesn't get asked enough. And my hypothesis about it, which I think is backed up with some evidence, is that there is actually a fairly straightforward cultural historical reason for it, and…
…it has to do with the essentially military and war like nature of human societies and the traditional separation of labor where the men fight the wars.
And in order for young men to be turned into killing machines at age 18 to 20 right when their hormones are raging and they're flowering into would be lovers and would love to follow the call of learning what it is to truly love the feminine. And they have to be, instead of trained to be ruthlessly violent with the enemy. So the key things that have to be controlled are two things.
Will Keepin:
One, their emotions have to be radically suppressed and two their sexuality has to be basically co-opted or controlled because otherwise they won't go along with the agenda of the military program. It was one of the great French military generals said to his senior fellow military generals is the last thing you ever want is for your troops to begin or learn how to think for themselves. Because if they did, every single one of them would walk off that battlefield. That right there shows the depth of programming. If you're training men to be warriors as you have got to get them to shut down their emotional feelings, otherwise they will be horrified by the actions that they are taking. There'll be horrified by the prospect of murdering people they've never met and know nothing about it goes against human nature to do that except maybe for a small pathological minority. That whole idea of the honor of the soldier as the highest honor in the civilization, the highest honor a man can have and the true sign of courage and manhood, all of that is inculturated in order to create a functional military. I think that has a whole lot to do with how it got this way and why it has not been seriously questioned.
Martha Williams:
I just want to point out that a lot of people would respond to what you're saying by saying, well that's just the way it is. We need the military.
There's no crying in baseball. Toughen up already.
Will Keepin:
I'm not denying that we do need a military especially in the past. But what's happened of course is that this whole militarization of the global society is now really one of the major threats to human civilization because the weapons are so advanced now and we now have the capacity to destroy the entire human family and possibly even all life on earth. There is a signal to humanity that it's time to transform this and it's not working.
It never really was a great way to resolve conflicts. I'm not saying it wasn't necessary and particularly if one is genuinely attacked and one needs to be able to defend oneself.
Yeah. But it really is time to transform an outmoded way of resolving conflict. And part of the, one thing I want to say about the sexuality is that part of the whole exploitation of women and sexuality is also part and parcel of the military.
Will Keepin:
And although they don't explicitly say that, and I'm not pointing the finger at any particular military group, the fact is, that sexuality is an avenue that could lead the young men in particular away from the whole conditioning. And so it has to be essentially co-opted and channeled in a particular way. Now I'll give you an example. There was a chant that one of the people in our workshops said that they used to chant in military training. They would stand with their rifles and they would basically take their hand and put it on their crotch. And they would say, this is my penis. And then they would put the hand on their gun and say, and this is my gun. And then they'd go back and forth doing that and they'd say, this is my penis and this is my gun. One is for killing and one is for fun.
Will Keepin:
This is my penis and this is my gun. One is for killing and the other's for fun. Now in that chant and that mantra, it's simple. It rhymes, it goes in deep, the power of mantra. They're using spiritual technology there, which is the power of repetition. And that goes in deep. And then their whole understanding of their life. That's Hey, co-opting of sexuality.
Cynthia Brix:
And we become callous to so much of it and to even speak at the level that we are speaking is unpatriotic in a sense. Some of these things need to be broken open and looked at.
Will Keepin:
This is across the globe. This training is across the entire human civilization. So it's not unique to any one country.
Martha Williams:
So where did all this come from?
Will Keepin:
Let me just briefly say in terms of origins, there's many different theories of the origin of this structural injustice in the human culture. One of the analysis that I find most compelling was carried out by and historian back in the late eighties and nineties of the last century, Gerta Lerner. And she wrote several books. One is called Creation of Patriarchy, and another one is called Rise of Feminist Consciousness. But what she shows in that book, creation of patriarchy and all these countries and civilizations that she studied going back to 3,200 BC, she said, in every case, the emergence of patriarchy came when the women's connection to the divine or the sacred was severed in some way. We're denied their natural connection to the sacred, to the spiritual dimension, and then what you had following naturally in each of these different cultures was women's sexuality and their reproductive rights became commodities that were essentially bought and sold. And you have the emergence of the oldest profession so long with the oldest oppression.
Will Keepin:
There are two other key factors in the creation of this whole imbalance. One of them is the spiritual replacement of the goddess cultures, the goddess civilizations, and the feminine side of divinity with a male patriarchal God, which basically marginalized women's spirituality and the role of women's participation in the sacred covenant. So in religion, you know, in Eastern religion, in, in, into some, in Buddhism, you have actually more of a gender parody between the masculine and feminine deities. Even though the reality on the ground is it's incredibly patriarchal and oppressive, but in the West you had in the divine order, you've had the replacement and the dethroning of the feminine side of the divine for the single male God. That had a very devastating impact on the female psyche. And the other one was in philosophy where the Western philosophy basically deemed that women are inherently inferior. Both Plato and Aristotle believe this, although Plato supported the education of women, Aristotle did not. As Aristotle it on the female is, as it were, a mutilated male. So they both held this view that the female is inherently inferior to the male. That view coupled with the religious denial of the feminine side of the divine, became very foundational factors in the creation of the female as lesser in our civilization.
Martha Williams:
Wow. This is so incredible to hear you talk about gender from so many advantages and has left me personally with so many things to think about. And I just want to begin to wrap up with one final question for both of you. And we always ask people that we interview, how do you imagine scaling your work?
Will Keepin:
We know that this methodology is robust. It works in multiple cultures, cultural settings, everything from the boardroom to the bedroom and everything in between.
So we're really looking to roll it out and expand tenfold over the next five to six years. Growing from there.
Cynthia Brix:
There's a real need in our society for people who identify as male and female to do this work and not to bypass it and to get in there and do the work. That said, we have a program that's being piloted in South Africa right now for people who identify outside the binary. And so we're developing that program and in want to just be inclusive that way. It's also true of the intersectionalities around race and culture. But race in particular where we have a people of color workshop that we're also offering where it's just for people who are brown and black. And those spaces are really important right now too, for the safety to be there and in non-white spaces, a level of truth can be spoken there. We're really aware of the intersectionalities in our work as well.
Martha Williams:
Yeah, so if people want to learn about your work, obviously they can go to your website which is remind us...
Cynthia Brix:
Grworld.Org.
Martha Williams:
Okay, so G R world.org which obviously stands for gender reconciliation world.org and they can find out about one of your workshops, right.
Cynthia Brix:
We have online programs starting at the end of may, so tune into the website
Martha Williams:
And in some ways the virtual is a great way to definitely connect with a lot more people and very practical in a lot of ways so we are very excited that you are embarking on that journey.
Will Keepin:
Thank you so much Martha and thank you John, in the background. We appreciated this opportunity to speak about our work.
Martha Williams:
Thank you so much for joining us today on our interview with Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin on the Culture Shift Podcast where we dig into critical conversation with those who are shifting culture by defying status quo. The transcript and links related to this podcast as well as other episodes are available cultureshiftagency.com. Please help us shift the conversation by sharing this podcast with the people in your life. See you next time...on next month's, episode.