Women boxing and "Beginner's Mind"

I don't much like boxing. I don't "object to it" as people like to say, sometimes a little self-importantly. If two people want to hit each other, and risk brain damage, and other people want to pay to watch them do it, then provided there are reasonable safeguards, help yourselves, as far as I'm concerned. I just don't particularly want to see you in action. 

When I was growing up, there was a strong taboo against men htting women (of course it went on, it simply wasn't generally acceptable. Hopefully, it's still generally seen as unacceptable.)  

Coupled with that,  and apart from scratchy/slappy sorts of "cat-fights," women didn't often hit each other, as far as I could tell. (Not in public, anyway...) That's simply how it was.

Recently I caught bit of Olympic women's boxing (between events I would be more likely to enjoy.) It was this sort of thing:

 It turns out a GB female boxer did well in Rio.

I commented to the room at large that I didn't like boxing, and that in particular, it still seems strange to me - unsettling - to see women thumping each other with enthusiasm. A younger member of my family pointed out that this was a sexist comment. Which indeed it was.

There is absolutely no reason why women boxing should be more unsettling than men boxing. But our emotional and psychological make-up is about a lot more than reason.

My feeling came from my upbringing, the cultural context of my early years. It seems to me important to acknowledge the power of one's personal context, the power of the story of years gone by. 

We don't free ourselves by denying the reality of the past, individually or collectively.  It's no use simply disapproving of or denying the existence of where we come from. To do so is destructive of our self-development, it hinders change.

The way to keep growing is surely to acknowledge and integrate where we come from with where we are now. In Jungian terms (I think...) I need to bring together memories and dreams with my present ego, if I am to realise my true Self, a much wider and more profound state of being than my noisy little social ego.

Buddhists sometime speak of approaching the present moment with "beginner's mind." See it new, in the now. Let go of conditioned responses.

TS Eliot (again, sorry..)   

"There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. "

I take him to mean knowledge as in knowing things. 

Deriving understanding from acknowledging my past story and integrating it with my present being: that must be how to free off the mind, how to use "beginner's mind." That's how to live in the pattern, "new in every moment."

I can't approach the present with beginner's mind if I ignore or repress my feelings about female boxing, rather than to acknowledge them and have a think about where they come from . 

To ignore or deny such feelings would be phony, it would leave me stuck to the old attitudes more firmly.

So well done you, in Rio:

 
 But I still don't want to watch you, and if I do, it will probably still make me uneasy!

(We're inconsistent creatures, aren't we? I'm as happy to watch women's judo as men's. Maybe with women's boxing there's something in there about women's faces getting hit? H'mmm. Interesting. But as for taekwondo - whoever's doing it - how boring is that?)