I want you to use your imagination for a minute.

Think about the perfect teen girl. Now, of course, no one is perfect. But just hang in there with me — what image or ideal comes to your mind? A photo from a magazine? A celebrity? Someone you know from school? A friend? Or just a general sense of somebody with a certain kind of face, hair, and body? Now, think about the ideal teen boy — the perfect guy. What does he look like? Is he someone you know or more like a picture you’ve seen?

The reason I am asking is that the ability to think about an ideal, like the perfect boy or girl, is very important to the adult women and men that we become. These ideals — our deepest and often unconscious sense of who we are and should be — are basic to our identity. They tell us who we are. These ideals aren’t something that we usually think about, but we often bump up against them when we try to do things that are new or go against the usual expectations for girls and boys or men and women. In powerful ways, these unconscious ideals shape our choices.

And these ideals, because they are so much a part of our identity, also block us from realizing Spirit. I don’t mean “spirit” in the sense of being a lively and warm person. I’m referring to the deepest level of existence, the invisible, all encompassing dimension of reality that just IS. If you think about the words on this page, notice that we tend to focus on them as what is important in front of our noses. But we don’t usually pay attention to the screen or page in the background. The page or screen is like the ground of existence or Spirit. Each of us, and all the things around us, are like the words on the page. When we open up our awareness and pay attention to the background of everything, we can awaken to this spiritual dimension.

Spirit itself is neither male nor female, masculine nor feminine. It just IS.

I think it’s really interesting that both the capacity to create ideals in your mind and to have breakthrough spiritual experiences develop during the teen years. Most of us think about adolescence as the time when our body changes so that we can take part in reproduction, having kids. These important teen years are the time when we go through the most rapid growth in our lives after infancy. We all know how fast babies change and develop, and teens develop almost as fast. The teen years not only involve big physical changes, but also really important changes in our minds and inner worlds. Between the ages of 11 and 16 or so, your mind begins to form ideals. Before that, questions like “What is the perfect girl?” don’t make sense. When you are young, you can only think about people you know and really like. Being able to imagine an ideal is a complex thinking task. Your mind sifts through all of your experience, all of the movies and TV shows you’ve seen, all of the pictures you’ve looked at in magazines, and then figures out what is most valued and rewarded with love, money, and fame or recognition. This becomes your sense of an ideal or “perfect” girl or boy. It is a standard that you hold inside yourself, often without knowing it, and that you measure yourself against. Or it becomes something to react against.

These ideals are a big part of our gender identity. What is gender identity? Most of us are one of two biological sexes: male or female. (A small percentage of us are somehow a mix of the two.) There are two parts to the process of sexual reproduction and those are the basis of sex difference: males inseminate; women bear and give birth to offspring. Sex and gender are related to each other but are different. Gender, generally, refers to the ideals and expectations for how males and females behave in your society or culture. So, for example, in many societies, girls are expected to be less physically aggressive than boys and not like team sports. In some cultures, boys are expected not to like reading and books, and it’s thought to be “manly” to drop out of school to get a job very young. Ideas about gender, about how we are supposed to be male and female, are communicated through media, parents, teachers, and school, as well as from other kids. Most of us have seen what happens when a boy or girl does something that is “taboo” or goes against his or her gender — like a boy wearing lipstick or a girl who doesn’t shave her legs. They are usually laughed at or shunned because they are seen as not normal. They can find themselves with no friends. While these cultural norms have nothing really to do with sexual reproduction, they have a big impact on how attractive we are to others in our culture. Figuring out the ideal of “normal” is a big part of what our minds begin to do during the teen years. Once this falls into place in our minds, this ideal becomes an inner guide for what we do. We may try to become that ideal, reject it, or try to adapt it, but in one way or another, it forms a part of our self that unconsciously affects our choices. When we align with this ideal, it gives us a deep sense of identity—yes, I am really a man now! This is our gender identity and it is a very basic part of our self.

Our gender identity affects the women and men that we become.

Not living up to our inner ideals for our gender can make us feel really bad or wrong. In fact, some men who have lost their jobs in traditionally male occupations, like steel working or auto mechanics, have actually committed suicide rather than getting available jobs in more traditionally female areas like education or health care. Their internalized, inner ideal of what a man is supposed to do was so strong that when they couldn’t do that kind of work any more, they no longer wanted to live. A less dramatic example involves the many girls who do great in math and science in primary school but “dumb down” when they hit the teen years because they realize that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) professions are mostly held by men. These girls probably have a very strong inner ideal of a woman that doesn’t do things reserved for men. They want to be attractive to men, not compete with them.

Gender identity is not something that we usually spend time thinking about, but we often become so preoccupied with trying to live up to or against our inner ideals that we miss the deeper part of our self that is Spirit. We think that being a girl or boy, man or woman is who we are most fundamentally. But it’s not. The deepest part of our self has no gender. Spirit, the ground of all that exists, cannot be male or female. It’s more fundamental than that. Think about it: can aliveness belong more to women or to men? No. Existence — life — belongs to no one and to everyone. Understanding that there is a part of our self that is before and beyond the struggle to figure out how to be a boy/man or girl/woman is very liberating. Realizing this makes it possible for us to live with greater freedom, no longer so trapped by trying to live up to our inner gender ideals. It changes our answer to the basic question: Who am I? Yes, we are male or female, but we are bigger than that — we are Spirit.

To find out who you really are, I’d like you to try something. Sit up straight and close your eyes. Open up your attention and awareness, wide, wide, wide. Does it have any end? Inside, behind your closed eyes, is there any limit or boundary to your awareness? Can you sense the infinite — a ground of awareness that goes beyond your body, beyond the room, and out beyond the furthest reaches of the cosmos? This is Spirit. It is who you really are.