The Equality of the Sexes—Healthy, Spiritual and Imperative

I’ve worked with a lot of women over the years in my business, assisting them with health and lifestyle changes–which can bring up deeper emotional issues.

In this day and age being a woman is challenging, especially given the demands placed on us as mothers or spouses. By helping women to change undesirable lifestyle habits and unwanted challenges laid at their feet by families, colleagues and society, I try to empower them to be stronger in their personal and professional lives.

Meanwhile, society still has a long way to go before we reach total equality of the sexes, because on a spiritual level we often grossly misunderstand that vitally important goal. Having witnessed this disequilibrium around the world, I have found peculiarly that in the physical world, some men have actually become weaker and women have become stronger.

The aggressiveness of these women manifests itself in certain extreme instances, such as putting so much muscle on their bodies that they actually start to look like men. This confusion between mistaking external, physical strength for inner spiritual strength takes on a whole new meaning when pushed to the extreme. On the other hand, many males still look upon women as objects they can possess, disrespect, then use and discard.

On another front, some of my married female clients have expressed to me how they have to do everything connected with managing the household with hardly any support from their husbands. They have full-time jobs outside the home. They take care of the household chores, and they attend to the children. Disturbingly, men complain about the lack of any good women that are loyal, drama-free, or mentally and spiritually stable.

These warring attitudes between men and women reflect a deeper spiritual unrest, much of it due to the global issue of the inequality of women as a whole. In the West, where women often have better legal rights than the restricted and controlled female population in some countries, we may not think we have far to go—but we do. Men have done and continue to do horrible things to women in every country around the world.

I tell my clients that physical strength is no indicator of a fairer playing field. Rather, men should realize that manly strength requires as its counterpart the strong contributions latent in women’s character. After all, woman is the first educator of the child. She is often more intuitive and keen sighted than men, and she is more tender-hearted. Surely when women emerge from the obscurity of inequality and male maltreatment, they will contribute to a better-educated and more peaceful planet.

Equality does not mean that both men and women have the same responsibilities or roles. Obviously women can’t always perform tasks demanding massive physical strength–but neither should men be expected to endure the pain of childbirth. We should try to understand equality in its spiritual context:

Daughters and sons must follow the same curriculum of study, thereby promoting unity of the sexes. When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife. – Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 175.

The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality between the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged pre-requisites of peace. The denial of such equality perpetrates an injustice against one half of the world’s population and promotes in men harmful attitudes and habits that are carried from the family to the workplace, to political life, and ultimately to international relations. There are no grounds, moral, practical, or biological, upon which such denial can be justified. Only as women are welcomed into full partnership in all fields of human endeavour will the moral and psychological climate be created in which international peace can emerge. – The Universal House of Justice, 1985.

For these reasons I focus my work on helping women gain strength–not only physically through exercise and movement; but on a deeper spiritual level, empowering them in teaching themselves and their children about their full and equal rights as human beings.

I do this work because I have suffered myself, at too young an age, the unwanted attentions of men who refused to consider my potential contributions. I’ve also seen friends and clients suffer from similar male-dominating attitudes, including physical and emotional rape on both individual and professional levels. These actions and attitudes must stop.

When they do, we can raise up a world of healthy minds, bodies and spirits for the women and men that occupy this neighborhood called Earth.