Deep Masculine: The Warrior or the Masochist/Sadist

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Gentlemen,

I revisited the Masculine qualities from the Men's program. Makes for great reading.

Choosing to Live Consciously
Herb Stevenson

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Deep Masculine

The Warrior or the Masochist/Sadist

The courage, commitment and discipline to Show Up and be present without preconceived notions, while having the Ability to Take Action and Enforce Boundaries consistent with your true integrity as a man

The Warrior

The Warrior energies are that which supports our courage to face fear and to do things in spite of it (the fear). It requires us to be fully present and without preconceived notions, all the while being able to take action at any minute and yet maintain clear boundaries around whom we are. It means that we have examined our core values and are willing to fight for those values regardless of circumstances. He has a vision for himself and serves a higher order. Warrior energies are a resource that permits us to be assertive about our lives, goals, needs, and causes.

The False Self

In childhood, we tend to create a false self, a mask we wear in order to feel safe and/or get along with others. Behind the mask is our true self, the vulnerable core of the self. Under-supported internally and externally, the true self begins to defer to the false self that conforms to what others want, demand, or expect. The young male does this in hopes of getting some of the love and approval he needs for survival. Unfortunately, the mask soon becomes the only consciously speaking self and the core self slips away as suggested in the following poem, where we mistake our masks for our face.

In time, the real person, our fully embodied warrior that we’ve concealed behind false smiles, macho bluff, and melodramatic pretense, is reluctant to come out of hiding for fear of being attacked again as it was in childhood. Unfortunately, the wounded child rarely realizes that it has grown into adulthood and tends to perceive the world through the uninitiated child’s eyes. The child seeks intimacy, wherein it is safe to allow another to “see into me”; however, childhood experiences, because of the lack of internal and external support, often were more about being totally vulnerable and exposed without any way to protect one’s true self. This often surfaced as being attacked for who they are through sarcasm, ridicule, criticism, deprecating remarks, and absolute humiliation. Successfully achieving a masculine identity requires enormous work in terms of self-definition and boundary setting.

Boundaries to Define One Self

Self definition and boundaries means that we are always aware of how fear and illusion might create detours for the true self to be sidetracked and even lost. Hence, in adulthood, a man continues to need a defensive perimeter. He should not surrender it under the illusion that he is safe without it. Because of his hard fought struggle to be a legitimately autonomous man, he must be careful to build his relationships with women out of a consolidated masculine structure. With firm boundaries in place, no relationship will permanently challenge his psychological integrity. Rather, he may fall on occasion; however, he will always rise stronger and wiser about how to manage his boundaries without being too rigid. A fall or breach strengthens the awareness of who and how much to allow others into his inner sanctum.

Appropriate Use of Aggression

The warrior is no fool and understands that controlled aggression and anger are valuable tools for setting and maintaining boundaries. To never invoke such energies is pure foolhardiness; yet, to an uninitiated warrior, any form of aggression could prove to be overwhelming. This overwhelming suggests that the man has lost his center and therefore is not fully present. The mature male warrior knows that the safest place for his true self is to be fully present in his body, in this space and time. Hence, even if brow-beaten, a forceful response builds courage and self-confidence and lets others know there is a boundary. We must stand up for our self, firmly and resolutely.

The warrior can be ambitious and generate goods and services that can make our life more liveable, healthier, more comfortable, and even psychologically and spiritually richer. Aggressive energy that is focused and disciplined is the essence of the creative thrust of masculine energy. It is the creative thrust that energizes the creation of life.

Adventurous

One of the misunderstood aspects of the mature, male warrior is his craving for all sorts of adventures, whether they be into the wilderness of the self or the woods standing before them. “It is the warrior’s willingness to charge into the unknown that moves the mind and soul of our species forward, claiming new territories” emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. “The warrior is the dynamic inspiration of the phallic thrust. A man who is appropriately accessing the warrior is filled with a sense of adventure.” He looks for ways to stretch himself and to push fear and the unknown further. “Adventure by definition is perilous. During an adventure, a man needs Warrior courage. He may come up against any number of obstacles: fear, depression, malaise, despair, and even the possibility of death. Yet, he remains steadfast and witnesses himself, his process, and all that is happening around him as indicated in the poem Dread below.

The warrior gives us a fighting chance to live and to flourish. He supports leaders to develop their potential, always seeking ways to serve others to be more fully who they are. He provides energy towards creating determination, fidelity, courage, and self discipline in himself and more importantly in others. Supporting them to dig into the depths of their inner potential even when it is not easy or simple so that a new insight or new talent can be born into this world, no longer hiding in the unconscious shadows of the soul. He supports goals that stretch others into a more fully developed self. He reminds us that “yes, we can” when all else indicates we should give up.

Highly Disciplined

The warrior is highly disciplined in his approach to life. He knows that determination and drive is what stretches us to move to new heights while discipline reminds us that the day-to-day details of life are just as important. His will is applied even more fundamentally to the mind and the emotions. He offers us greatly heightened vigilance, sharpened perceptions, and the capacity to discriminate between friend or foe. Like a calm before a storm, he may appear unconcerned and then like a lightning bolt from the gods, he takes action with precision, clarity and direction. He is a force to be reckoned with, while imparting an amazing capacity to be faithful to himself, others, and his vision for a better world. He constantly seeks to ingrate all parts of himself into a higher way of life, a higher way of knowing, and a higher way of being.

Great Mystery/Earth Bound Reality

The Warrior innately accepts the Great Mystery of life and therefore knows that a Transpersonal Other, possibly a higher self, exists. In his eyes, “if we are not in conscious and committed relationship with the divine reality, we will tend to experience our parents, children, friends, and lovers, and spouses in idolatrous (god-like) ways.” As such, we diffuse and disperse our own power and burden those we love most with idealistic standards. When we humble ourselves in earth-bound reality and see them as fellow humans, we will be free to experience them as the beautiful wounded creatures they are. We are then free to love them realistically and to be faithful to them with all of our mutual limitations accepted.

Purposeful Detachment

The warrior is able to witness himself and therefore to maintain a purposeful detachment from himself and from life. Fully engaged yet detached enables a higher purpose to evolve so that co-dependency, enmeshment, and merger/fusion with others do not destroy our unique identities. This detachment enables us to distinguish ourselves from others as well as to separate our false self from the internal authority of our true self.

Once we are able to purposefully detach our selves, we begin to see the larger or longer picture that life is finite and that we will one day die. Knowing the end is unpredictable and more importantly that we have absolutely no control over when we die, we profoundly realize that we need to live each moment fully, by choosing how to be in the world, instead of allowing the false self to induce repetitive old comforting patterns.

Creating New by Destroying the Old

The warrior within each man is a destroyer. He seeks to destroy the enemies of the true self by invoking courage and values that support being fully present and choice-fully living life. He attacks whatever is wounding and damaging, whatever causes despair, depression, injustice, oppression, whatever is cruel or discouraging or making demands that are abusive. The warrior clears space for renewal and a new, more just order.

The Uninitiated Warrior:
Masochist or Sadist

The Masochist: A Dishonest Warrior

A shadow is something that hides in the background, unable to fully embrace his power and therefore to be fully present in any situation. He is passive in his approach to life and therefore in his contributions. As the Warrior, the shadow surfaces in various forms of dishonesty about his passion, his aggression, and his rage. He often tries to be the ‘nice guy.’ He is afraid to make a pass at his date for fear she think “he wants only one thing.” He will fawn (subordinate his desires), rather than allow it be known that he afraid of his repressed passion and consuming instincts. If he spoke up and asked for the intimacy he desired, he might find that his desires could be met. Instead, his silence cowers over the seething rage deep with inside him.

The masochist exhibits many of the traits of the dependent personality where he is deathly afraid of self-affirming behaviors. He has an infantile need for people to like him, no matter the cost to his own self-esteem or authentic identity. He is willing to conform to whatever others want so long as he can remain in a passive relationship with them. He depends entirely on others for his meager sense of self worth.

This meager man will do anything to please his ill-behaved children, his wife, coworkers. When he takes the warriors sword, he plunges it into his own chest rather than defend his right to exist. The unconscious fantasy that drives the dependent man is that nobody could possibly like him for who he really is. His creative adjustment as a child was to give up all of his masculine energy to feel safe as occurs when a child is abandoned, beaten, or abused, sexually or emotionally by his parents whenever he was self-assertive.

To preserve the passivity, he becomes naive. This man cannot deal with the forces of evil that undermine his business, his life, his friendships, or his family. He tends to be quiet and ‘patient’ with others, even when they are aggressive toward him. He allows himself to be victimized by putting up with abuse from others far beyond the limits of healthy human endurance. He has no right to self expression. If he were to do so, his aggressive self-expression might burst forth in an explosion of rage. The victim is thus afraid of his own repressed vengeful impulses. He is afraid what his hostility might mean about him, and his masquerade as a saint. Hence, he depresses himself. Men who are depressed are at least temporarily healthier than men that act out their rage in acts of rape, domestic violence, murder and other forms of carnage.

Another hallmark of the masochist shadow is passive aggressive behavior. Instead of the public warriors sword, the masochist carries a hidden dagger to stabs others in the back as they walk away. He uses verbal warfare as a means to perpetuate negative and cynical comments about others causing them to feel gravely inadequate.

The Sadistic Phantom: Possession By The Warrior Within

A phantom leers ahead of a person much like a haunting ghost desires to keep all comers away from the person. It is an inflated and active form of creative adjustment that can show-up as the inhuman sadistic warrior. He experiences a blackout of his human identity and transforms into a Hulk-like creature seeking to avenge the world for his creation. “Out of a man’s sense of intolerable vulnerability and violation, the raging inner Sadist is constellated and his temporary insanity is released unto the world. His inability to deal with his rage fuels his pretense of innocence and purity, which gives him the illegitimate power of self-righteousness. Men who are clearly sadistic are terrified by the humanity inside of them, so they shut it out of their awareness.”

Characteristics

Besides the burning rage, the sadist is able to passionately express cruel words and actions. If the rage is cold and seething, he will express the rage in a subhuman, profoundly alien, and completely divorced from reality expression. He is the sociopath that has no sense of right or wrong.

Sadists are envious of those that can feel love. Envy is a destructive emotion, uncomfortable for both the envying and the envied. Envy exacerbates the underlying feelings of hurt and rage. Envious men gleefully watch or actively participate in the fall of the powerful. Part of the excitement of watching another’s fall in status is in feeling one’s own status rise.

Everybody wants a piece of the energetic power from the kill. This was clarified in olden tribes that scalped without killing as a means to humiliate and therefore disempower others.

The Sadistic Phantom can be active/independent, antisocial/aggressive, and compulsive. All three forms of behavior involve a man’s unrealistic sense of power, his self-perception concerning his imagined invulnerability, and a dangerously defiant fearlessness. These delusions mask a terror of underlying passivity, dependency, vulnerability, and weakness. Sadistic phantoms are defensive maneuvers designed to ward off feelings of helplessness and worthlessness. Because of this fear of personal weakness, the sadistic phantom feels the need to control others. The paranoia surfaces when the sadistic phantom's weaknesses are awakened. Vigilance becomes hyper-vigilance. Danger is imagined behind every bush and an innocent remark or event is experienced as a life-threatening display of hostility. He moves into hyper-control. What this man does not realize is that he is really trying to control his own impulses to be free and happy. He is hostile to any signs of healthy feeling because health threatens the sadistic phantom’s autonomy and existence.

The man possessed by the sadistic phantom warrior is compulsively driven. He doesn’t know when to stop because he feels no pain. He is driven by goals that are often meaningless or even viciously destructive. This man is in constant motion because he can never appreciate what he has or what he has done. He often tries to do in a day what it would take others a week to accomplish. He lives to work instead of working to live. Numbed to his own sensations and feelings, This can lead to disastrous consequences to his internal health.

Women for the sadistic phantom are not for intimate relationships. The tenderness, caring, love, and respect they demand and deserve are too much for him. These nurturing feelings are unacceptable to him. He keeps them beneath his repression barrier. Women are only for sex.

Becoming a Knight/Samurai

Most men have great difficulty integrating their power. They have been taught by abusive fathers and controlling mothers that it is not good for them to feel powerful. Invasive parents prevent the male child from expressing his wants and needs and discourages the construction and maintenance of a viable boundary around the Self. The child’s Self is often humiliated and attacked as being shameful whenever its desires and actions do not meet a parent’s own demands for mirroring as was done to him.

Men should be empowered. They need encouragement to accept, experience, and exercise their power. The initiatory processes of pre-modern societies helped to teach men how to become responsible, nurturing and powerful.

Men have trouble with their potency not because they symbolically associate their penis with the sword, but because they do not understand that the phallus is both a physical and an imaginal representation of a psychological and spiritual reality. For a man to gain maturity and generativity, he must accept his warrior's sword and make decisions and take responsibility for planning and implementing effective actions, instead of continuing to function as the hero, an uninitiated warrior, whose inflation holds him in childish beliefs. The man-child hero needs the chance to draw his own sword under the supervision of a wise elder that can guide and mentor him into mature adulthood. This guidance creates a larger container for the initiate to learn to accept his own tenderness, vulnerability, humility, and sensitivity while being able to maintain clear boundaries and to take action as needed. Such balance enables the initiate to wield power wisely instead of abusively. Any form of humiliation of another is an act of abuse that will result in loss of the warrior’s sword and internal sense of impotence through a terrible sense of guilt, a crippling sense of shame (done unto oneself) and degradation. It is only when the man has confronted his masochistic shadow and his sadistic phantom and looks at the damage he has caused himself and others, that he come to accept that he is part of the tragedy of life, neither the victim or the master, inextricably bound up in the forces of creation and destruction. He learns to wield his warrior sword reluctantly and only when he recognizes that it is necessary. He knows that he alone is morally and spiritually responsible for his own aggression. He understands that he is the creator of his own world, that his choices, conscious or unconscious, are the rubric of his life. Hence, an authentic warrior initiation presupposes not only getting through one’s denial and projection to access Warrior energy, but also developing the discipline and courage necessary to master and channel his masculine energy with restraint and effectiveness. Mature masculine energy honors a pledge to steward his power for the good of the inclusive community where he seeks not only to serve and protect, but to seek peace with justice.

The masculine self is never stronger or more cohesive than when he is clear about his mission and when his vision of the world are worthy of his supreme commitment. Self-serving missions to accrue the most or to conquer the most of anything are not healthy warrior energies. They are uninitiated children stuck in hero worship of themselves.

Adapted from Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette, (1992)The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. New York: William Morrow and Company.

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MoMen Return

September 22-25, 2016

We shall not cease from our exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot

The MoMen Return weekend is for those who have completed the year-long program. It is a return to where we started. It is an exploration into the four principles of presence. The focus is to delve deeply into the relational next steps of the four chambered heart, the four phantoms of fear and the resulting shadow behavior. Dynamic exercises will be provided to support an inward journey and then the opportunity to share these private stories with each other.

The intention of the weekend is to take advantage of the wooded area of the Pebble Ledges. Living in tents, we will have the magic of solitude, the comfort of the surrounding forest, and the support of the community of other MoMen. Woven into the fabric of the weekend are experiences that support personal and interpersonal explorations of whom are you as a man in today’s world.

When

MoMen Return will occur September 22-25, 2016. Start-up is 9:00 AM on Thursday, September 22nd with a brief hello and get to know each other before we build our village and homes for the weekend. One or two small villages will be created depending on how many MoMen Return.

Costs

The MoMen Return workshop is $600 per person. Mail checks to: Cleveland Consulting Group, Inc. at 9796 Cedar Road, Novelty, Ohio 44072-9747.

Supplies

Food and tents are provided for the weekend. However, all sleeping gear, eating utensils, and personal items must be brought to the weekend. In addition, we are asking that each MoMan bring 2-3 gallons of water that will be used for drinking and washing stations.

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or download the PDF brochure here

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Learn more at www.natural-passages.com

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Natural Passages
9796 Cedar Road, Novelty, Ohio 44072-9747
440.338.1705 | herb@natural-passages.com