Failing the Evolving Man
November. 04, 2008
Since the time when Robert Bly took up the drum and men gathered in men's circles, no new voice or movement has offered men a powerful and relevant voice for their experience in this culture. While Ken Wilber's theory of evolution has great insight into the stages of consciousness, it only encourages men to anchor themselves in the mental realm and attach to notions of achievement in the areas of evolution. He still fails to offer men a personalized journey home.
In a culture that puts a premium on production, mastery and outward engagement, an introverted, sensitive or evolving man has no model for his journey. There is no commonly shared vocabulary for his experience. In a dieing culture, any man moved to untangle himself from the crumbling infrastructure is at a loss when it comes to understanding the process of disengagement.
Whether it is the high functioning attorney who has a stroke at age 35 and must learn to walk and talk all over again, the financial advisor that must relinquish the notion of making clients money in a falling market, the entrepeneur committed to sustainability who comes to understand there is no saving the planet or the management consultant who must watch his wife die of breast cancer - when these men face the abyss, there is no philosophy, book or cultural movement to support them.
Men remain a fringe population. We have failed to make available to them tools that assist them in:
~achieving access to inner realities
~gaining trust in themselves
~learning skills of intimacy as they relate to themselves and relationships with others
~separating and healing from cultural biases
~tolerating an absence of competence
~developing a relationship to their personal values and vision.
The maverick, eccentric, bohemian, fringe dwellers who chose long ago to opt out as a way to maintain their inner integrity remain the largest group of men in our culture who have forged lives independent of the mainstream. Sailors, homesteaders or entrepeneurs, they found a way to march to the beat of their own drums.
This population tends to make choices by avoiding engagement in cultural norms. Yet, they can often feel alienated from possibilities that might be available to them if they were more in and of the mainstream. They can feel alienated from others, they can miss intellectual stimulation and they can feel deprived of emotional intimacy.
Perhaps, as economic, social and political turbulence continue to fracture preexisting paradigms of the culture, men who are outside of the mainstream will find greater room to participate.
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The Quality of One's Heart
November. 02, 2008
We have inherited schools of thought and modes of teaching and instilling knowledge that may have worked in other cultures or other times. However, they do not fit the requirements of this age. Our commitment to learning - our belief that knowledge holds the key - leaves us vulnerable to avoidance of deep matters of the heart....
If the capacity to be present in one's heart, to gain greater and greater depth in one's ability to show up to oneself feels like the way to true presence- then the road home leads in, not out to some spiritual philosophy.
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The Lonely Path of Healing and Evolution
October. 31, 2008
Your journey is not about being understood by others. It is about valuing your experience. You can be assured that most people will never have a true sense of your suffering, your disorientation, your perseverance, your loneliness or your triumphs. That is not what matters....
It is also demanding to understand that, most likely, you will have nothing "to show" for your months or years of pain and suffering. There will be no diploma, no party, no raise, no recognition. Of course, how could it be otherwise for an independent agent, bound only by the calling of the spirit?
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Declining More for the Wisdom in Less
October. 24, 2008
...The more you own your own adequacy and wisdom, the more difficult many forms of interaction become. School systems, medical settings, religious institutions and governmental agencies are some of the places where the "helping systems" are founded upon our agreement to surrender our voices.
As you step back into your own knowing and your own enoughness- remember that most people you will meet are still inside of the paradigm of disempowerment. They have agreed to surrender their own knowing to be taken care of.
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Gifted? Not Me!
October. 22, 2008
I remain surprised by the number of extraordinarily gifted clients who, even after reading on the topic of giftedness, will say - "Gifted? That's not me!". Who knew how loaded this word is in our culture?! To most of us over the age of 30, gifted means being a genius. We know we are not Einstein or Oppenheimer - so we could never be gifted.
It is not the label that has meaning. Rather, it is the predicament a highly engaged enthusiast finds him or herself in in a culture that is not operating at the level of engagement, enthusiasm, depth or intensity that is natural to the highly engaged enthusiast. This HEE can end up thinking something is wrong with them when the world does not meet beauty, complexity, challenge with the degree of engagement so natural to the HEE.
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