Safety

I believe more and more in the concept of just slowly chipping away at things through focused attention. I believe if you surround yourself with the right people and the right practices, the right emotions bubble up and the right events take place in service of our healing and our purpose. My purpose is to be in service of love.

My journey arguably began when I found John Wineland’s work and I began to use his online course to stop the bleeding from my wife leaving me. My 2nd step with John was to pay for his Path of the Embodied Explorer program. It felt very powerful and was deeply in service of my healing. Today I took a look at my notes and low and behold on the first video he spoke of moving from a place of I am unsafe, to a place of I am safe, to a place of I am love. At the time, that passage was good enough for me to note it but I don’t think I fully understood its implications.

A year later in an exercise at an intensive, we were asked to discern what our biggest wound was from childhood. Mine seemed obvious and related to being loved unconditionally. I didn’t feel very loved as a child, or an adult, and thought I needed to do exceptional things to get even a little attention, much less adoration. So I continued to work though this wound right up through the final practice where my reality was literally ripped apart and it became all too clear to me that safety was my truest deep cut. In short order it became clear to me just how unsafe I actually felt all the time. I worried a lot…about my future, about my health, about the heat, about the cold, you name it. Rarely was it unpalatable but it was certainly always operating in the background. So to finally have this awareness surface it has been quite a thrill.

I have a lot of ways to work on safety but lately I have found just how much safer I actually feel. I can recall running outside at my beach house and feeling deeply unsettled about what was beyond the light. Recently, on a similar run I could sense no real fear in a night run. I am indeed learning to feel safe. So to now see that safety leads to love is quite a powerful realization. Of course you can’t love others when you don’t feel safe. It seems obvious now, but I really didn’t have a solid grasp on this before. I had no idea how unsafe I felt myself, much less how much more unsafe others felt.

Consequently, I have begun to try to cultivate a sense of safety for others in everything I do and again the results have been surprising to me.

Man’s Search for Meaning

At some point I will likely do a more fulsome review of Under Saturn’s Shadow but what I want to dig into quickly is just how lost men are in today’s society. I don’t know enough generations back to see where it started for my male lineage, but somewhere along the line we got off the right track and it is my assumption that every man was left to try to figure it out themselves. Unfortunately I think my line has an all too common story.

Men today occur to me as lost and I agree with James Hollis’ assessment that men use personas of successful with women or successful in business to define themselves as men. If you are reading this passage then you have probably figured out that those are both dead ends.

So that does leave us a little bit out of luck. No one to teach us and the most common answers a little disjointed. But all is not lost. I think we actually owe a debt of gratitude to our sisters here. Not only were they able to break free of their own gender roles and expectations, but their insistance on us become softer and more in touch with our emotions was doubly effective as both a useful tool and as an impetus for a rebellion back to masculine polarity.

In my new experience we are living in a golden age of being a man. Yes, the rules are a little hazy and the patriarchy really dug a hole for us to have to dig out of. But I do think, and have seen firsthand, what the modern man is capable of becoming and the leadership and depth they can bring to the world. This is the journey I am on and it is one of integration of my masculine and feminine gifts. I invite you to join me and lets see what we can discover together.

Anger

Why not start with my most complicated relationship. Anger, I hardly know ye. As I will repeatedly beat into the ground, I was not contained as a child. I had two loving parents that were lost in their own dramas and dropped me. Consequently, I was taught nothing of what it means to be a man in this world by men. That responsibility was outsourced to women, Hollywood, and the public education system. I don’t think I need to go deeply into any of those groups other than to say that none of them know me very well and have their own agendas. Therefore I was taught that anger and physical conflict was something to be avoided. Throw in my dad spewing out rage at the slightest provocation and I was left believing that I wanted nothing to do with this problematic emotion.

The costs of denying a genuine feeling are many. For starters I was taught to believe a part of me is bad and that I need to dishonor pieces of myself. As if that isn’t enough, when this emotion did arise, as it naturally would, I had to then do what I could to rid myself of the bad feeling. Amazingly, while you can probably guess where this story is heading, I did not in fact have a meltdown or any sort of release when the genie finally came out of the bottle. Being an overacheiver is something that came natrually to me, so if I was told not to have anger, I was going to do my darndest.

There wasn’t really a watershed moment here beyond my growing awareness that there are not bad emotions and that I needed to start integrating all my emotions to complete myself. But as the journey led me to address this feeling head on I received a most generous surprise. My anger is a gift. I can use it consciously to elevate people as needed. Now, this is a powerful tool and one that I must honor and create containers for if I want to use it fully, but I share this because I have a suspicion that other men of my time were taught that their anger was bad too and I want to invite them to begin to question that believe and find healthy channels of expression.

A final word on anger before I leave you to contemplate your relationship with it. The anger we see out in the world today is not a healthy expression of this emotion and the men that you may have reference points from only exude it from a trauma response. It comes out of hurt and is sprayed indiscriminately. The anger I speak of is that of a weapon that a warrior has mastered and is consciously deployed. It does not come from triggered reactivity but is brought forth as a tool at the proper time. Think more of the coach screaming at the player to catch the ball with both hands, as practiced, so that his team can maintain possession vs. a drunken worn out man coming through the door and releasing all his pent up frustrations through his fist. The coach is trying to bring awareness to a player who lost focus and who from the right place wants the player to flourish, vs. the beaten down man in a trauma response.