Finding Meaning in Life via Lifes Transitions
To live a wild and precious life and find meaning in life is to live a legacy that could only be dreamed off. This is the legacy that will give meaning to the second half of your life and far beyond the second half of your life. I have purposefully written the words,
that could only be dreamed off.
In this blog I focus on the transition between the first half of life, through midlife and beyond, into the opportunity to finding meaning in life and a life of meaning and purpose. This is what I refer to as the life of the Wild Old Wicked Man, and in the case of a woman, is to live the life of a Dangerous Old Woman. These are not my terms. The Wild Old Wicked Man is the title of a W. B. Yeats poem. The term Dangerous Old Woman is a title of a series of recordings on that topic from http://www.soundstrue.com by the storyteller and Jungian analyst Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
In the first half of life which I measure as the years from birth to the age of thirty five to forty most of us are building a life around achieving and the attainment of some idea termed success. The energy of the life quest is focused on the question, “What’s in it for me?” or “How big a slice of the cake can I acquire for myself and those who are closest to me?” In the first half of life there is a lot of ego even if the goal is to get rid of the ego and attain to some kind of personal salvation.
Midlife, which is somewhere between the ages of thirty five and fifty,there is what is called the midlife crisis. This is what I call a crisis of the will to meaning. This is the call of the soul. It is the invitation to cross a threshold and begin the Hero’s journey. It is a time that very often causes havoc in many peoples lives. Then there is the transition to the second half of life between the ages of forty five until the time of the death of the body. This stage is also filled with crises and opportunity. In this stage one goes through what is called the menopause. This is true of both men and women. It is a form of death into rebirth. Most people, especially men, resist this birthing and in the process die in a very different way. This is a kind of living death into a life of narcissism and regret.
To find meaning in life is to leave a legacy. I am not writing here about leaving money or possessions to your children or leaving resources to a cause you believe in. There is nothing right nor wrong in doing this. A legacy of meaning and purpose is a legacy that is timeless. A legacy that you leave beyond time is a legacy that only you could have dreamed off. To put it more accurately, the legacy that only you could leave, is that which you allow to be dreamed through you. In the first half of life our dreams are driven by ego and culture. In the second half of life, if you are prepared to take the road less travelled, the life that you dream off is driven from the soul. The legacy you leave is that of higher consciousness, or to put it another way, off higher love making. Consciousness is never born and never dies. It is the non-stuff of the timeless. It is what allows you to be aware of life. Its expansion, and the expansion of Love, are not separate.
The legacy that you leave from finding meaning in life in the second half of life will be a paradox. You get what your heart truly desires when you learn to give yourself utterly away. You don’t give yourself away as some kind of martyrdom. You give yourself away by coming into alignment with soul purpose which is the only true way to find meaning and purpose in life. This giving yourself away is a living paradox. It is also a loving paradox. The more that you give yourself to this dreamed off legacy the more you expand into higher love making. You bring into your life a higher love or more to the point you allow a higher love to be lived through you. Your legacy for the second half of your life is wonderfully invited in the rock anthem by Steve Winwood entitled “Bring me a higher Love.”
Think about it, there must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is a wasted time
Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine– From Higher Love by Steve Winwood.
Might I suggest you listen to this song. Turn it up loud and dance. This is a way to embody the longing to meaning and purpose through the active. The body understands this longing for higher love making. It is after all the embodiment of Love in form. It is the unique manifestation of the in formed action of Love. For those of you who love drumming there is also the great opening.
I follow my dreams as a daily spiritual practice. These are the dreams that appear nightly. Recently I had what I consider a very important dream. In this dream I am gathered around a round table upon which there are plans to build a house of soul nourishment. The round table symbolises for me a kind of knightly endeavour. The dreamwork that I do is a true knightly endeavour that gathers those disparate parts of myself around a centre. This holy centre is represented by the round table. This is the nightly task (knightly task) of paying attention to the dreams that are gifted to me as symbols of meaning and purpose. What this house of nourishment will be will be revealed as a consequence of paying fidelity, or having faith in the process.
This process, is I believe, an eternal process. It is the eternal process of Love’s becoming. You are never apart from that becoming. You are here as a unique representative in form of the eternal movement of Love in form. Is that not a glorious opportunity? It is the revelation of this knowing that can be the potential blessing for the second half of your life and the opportunity of finding meaning in life for the rest of your life and beyond.
In the second half of life, which is becoming longer and longer, you have the paradoxical opportunity to die into Love rather than just die to the form of the body. I invite you to use the power of intention to allow yourself to have dreamed through the dream that only you can have dreamed through you. In that way you become your own religion. This is what the poet Rumi calls the religion of Love. In the religion of Love that reveals the essence of who and why you are you will have no regrets when the time comes to die to this form called the body.
Make it your intention to pay attention to your dream life. Dream huge but don’t dream simply from the ego. That is the energy of the first part of life and soul purpose is larger than any sense of ego purpose. Follow your dreams. Follow the invitation from the symbolic soul language that arises from within you each night. This is the one language that I encourage everyone to become fluent in. It is a language of a magical land. It is not simply a language of words but of images that speak to you in a unique and purpose filled way.
In the second half of life your focus is on the inner. If you do not turn inward then your life will become routine and dry because you are not drinking from the living well. However, don’t say that there is no water because if you are resistant to living from the holy well of your being. However, don’t be too hard on yourself if you do experience intense resistance. Birthing of Loves purpose through you isn’t less painful than physical birthing into form. The skills you learned in the first half of life do not suit the second half of your life. Turn within and go to the well of being.
The Fountain
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,up and out through the rock.
~ Denise Levertov ~
The inner contains the infinite rather than the finite. It contains the timeless rather than time. It contains the deathless rather than death. To know this and to leave a legacy of having known this never goes away. It is the flowering of a knowing of higher love making. It is not a product of time and thus death but the creation of that which is timeless and eternal. We humans don’t need more things. We need more soul that is radiating in form. Let this be the kind of legacy you leave to this world of form and time so that in your unique way you bring Heaven to Earth and time comes to an end. This is not what most people misunderstand as the end of the world but the beginning of the living from the birthless deathless experience of eternal life. This is the way to live a life of meaning and purpose that you could only have dreamed off but it is not enough to simply dream.
The dreams have to be made active and manifest. Let me finish by encouraging you to pay attention to your dreams and live your dreamed off life for the highest good of all. Then the second half of your life will be more than pleasure seeking. It will give you what you could never have dreamed off which is the knowing that you really are Love in form and also Love beyond form. In the second half of your life you can know, and are intended to know, that you are a living embodiment of Love’s purpose that lives forever. What could ever give you more meaning than to become what you are intended by Love to be?
Let it be so.
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Directions from A Hero’s Journey – Surviving Male Menopause for Men and Women
I am on a kind of heroic journey. It isn’t one I have chosen to take but one that I find is a life cycle in many men’s lives but that is not spoken about. It is a cycle that more and more men will enter because we are all living longer lives. There are more and more of us entering the second half of life. For both men and women this involves a deep period of transition. It is a period of crisis and a period of opportunity. My intention in writing these spiritual directions for this journey is in order to leave some pointers along the way. This is because, without these signposts along the way some men will not make it through this transition. They will leave in their wake the wreckage of broken relationships and an immense amount of suffering for themselves and others.
Let me say here that I do not feel in any way a hero. I feel lost, I feel frightened and I feel withdrawn. This is not really like me. I am becoming again the abandoned child that I hoped would not return to live within me. I feel afraid to reach out and when I do all I seem to express is anger. I have, however, anchors that keep me from getting totally lost. These anchors are this writing, my dreamwork, my connection to poetry and especially to my love of song lines and also prayer and meditation. These anchors also include the anchor of my long term relationship with my partner, my friends and the animals that grace my life.
When a man goes through the menopause, (but not having been through it as yet), he will very often have thoughts about death. This is common. An aspect of him is dying. This is the crisis aspect but there is also the opportunity called rebirth. I don’t feel reborn as yet but I know at least intellectually speaking that this life/death/rebirth cycle is an eternal cycle. At a deeper level within me there is also the knowing of this eternal cycle of becoming.
I was frightened yesterday by the lines from a song that I have recently found and am drawn too. It is the song called Hurt. The version I listen to is the version of this song sung by the wonderful Johnny Cash. He is the man in black and I suspect that inside him lived the archetype of the Orphan but also the archetype of the Magician. The opening lines from this song are
I hurt myself to see if I still feel.
Yesterday these lines would not go away even though I wanted them to go away. These lines made me thing about all those children and young people who self harm and cut themselves because on a psychological level they need to have evidence that life blood still flows in their veins. This is because they feel lifeless. They mirror back to us the absence of the life of spirit evident in the culture. My experience is not to fight any of the song lines that come into my mind. They are usually coming from a deeper place. Even though I do not know where they come from they often speak to my deeper condition. Song lines have opened up my heart and have guided me through dark woods before. Therefore, I choose not to shut down those lines that frighten me.
Does this mean that I intend to hurt myself in order that I might once again feel what I knew before and to find my life’s blood and passion. It might mean that because the Orphan in me is the kind of wild child within me who is crazy enough to wreck havoc. He will sometimes do things that he regrets. However, there is also the Magician archetype within me who can hold the dynamic of the orphan and he does this by paying attention to the signs along the way. There are always signs along the way and this is so even when the way is dark.
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost – from Dante’s Inferno
However, it is best that you learn to be a sign maker before you enter the dark wood. Then the wood will not appear as frightening. Then inside the dark wood you will still find clues to the way forward into the clearing and the light. This sign maker process is best begun when you are in your late thirties and forties although it can begin from the age of seventeen and beyond. This is a regular spiritual practice that inspires and nurtures you on a daily basis. When you do this for yourself you are also doing it for the highest good of the collective called humanity. You become in a real sense a pioneer. You go where no man, or woman, has gone before because your going is unique to you. Although unique to you it is not separate from your unity with humanity.
I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.
When you journey into the dark wood of male menopause you will feel hurt, and as a partner of a man going through such a cycle, you are likely to get hurt in some way. You as a man will hurt others because usually a man who feels out of control will strike out in anger. A woman on the other hand tends to turn this anger inward and withdraws. When a man and woman are experiencing this life cycle together it is a kind of dance of the prickly hedgehogs. More often than not they separate further and further into their own world of hurt feelings. I call this moving into the baggage room.
So although I feel frightened at the thoughts conjured up by these lines I have the foundation of years of practice behind me. I have years of technique that allows me to not feel overwhelmed. Although I will say that sometimes I feel close to that state. No one would know, however, because I do not show that face to the outside world. I only show it within the relationship that is central to my life. I show it to you in these words because I can and will. This is because there are lots of men moving through this dark wood who feel frightened and are ashamed of feeling frightened. They feel alone and many feel abandoned. They don’t know how to say what it is I am saying even if they had the courage to say it. I am not saying this out of some kind of arrogance. I am saying it from my experience of men as I know them. Men, in many ways create this experience for themselves but is out off a lack of understanding about what is going on. Primarily they do what most men do. They deny and they project. This keeps the cycle stuck and leads to more suffering for the man and those he loves and is loved by.
I have many life lines. Each is a line from a song, a poem or an inspirational text. Each of these invitations arise from within. It is the core from which all these lifelines connect. I feel lost but I have a kind of Ariadne’s thread. This is the thread that protects the hero when he enters the underworld or to use the metaphor I started with protects the hero when he enters the dark wood. Hero here also includes heroine. This is a golden thread that connects to the Self as represented by Ariadne.
I love song lines. They don’t always bring me happiness but I am more interested in revelation and how the revealed Self can move in this world of time and space. This is the movement that illiviates suffering of so many caught in the dark wood of opposites and opposition within. Sure I feel frightened, alone, abandoned but at least I feel these feelings. I feel hurt but still that is how I feel. I will try not to visit this hurt on others because that simply deepens the sense of abandonment. Although the Orphan in me is very good at creating the very dynamic he fears the most. Why is that? It is because when we feel vulnerable we go back to what we know. I know abandonment. It might not be the happiest of dynamics but it was and is familiar.
During the cycle that is the male menopause a man will return to those deep emotional wounds that are asking to be healed. This is the real opportunity of the second half of life. I invite you to begin to practice a spiritual technique of your choosing so that when the time comes that you as a man or a woman are not lost in the dark. Then you will be able to sense where any particular life cycle is taking you. This cycle of the male menopause for this writer and storyteller is an on going journey. If you know of a man who is between the ages of forty five and sixty who is lost and causing hurt to himself and/or others you could gently share some of this spiritual direction that is here. If any of this writing mans that one man or woman enters the light in the clearing of the dark wood then I have in some little way been a hero. That will be enough of a reward and a boon from the wish fulfilling tree of the heart.
A Silent Wood
O silent wood, I enter thee
With a heart so full of misery
For all the voices from the trees
And the ferns that cling about my knees.In thy darkest shadow let me sit
When the grey owls about thee flit;
There will I ask of thee a boon,
That I may not faint or die or swoon.Gazing through the gloom like one
Whose life and hopes are also done,
Frozen like a thing of stoneI sit in thy shadow – but not alone.
Can God bring back the day when we two stood
Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
I leave you with the song that prompted this reflection. Blessings to the wonderful Johnny Cash and his wonderful wife and to you who have taken the time to read this far.
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Feeling Hormonal – Sometimes its a Man’s Thing
It is unusual for me to feel depressed but for much of yesterday that was my experience. Symptoms included irritability, tiredness and a feeling of a kind of nothingness. When a friend asked me how I felt I said, “I feel hormonal.” I realise that this experience is part of the process that I am going through for a man of my age. It is called the andropause of male menopause. Jed Diamond writing in “Surviving Male Menopause – A guide for Women and Men,” writes,
In many ways, the male menopause passage is a “dark night of the soul.” It is a time to do down and feel our emotions, to feel the pain from the past, and to deal with unfinished business so it can be healed. It can also be a time of rebirth, a time of letting go of old dramas so that we can feel the love that awaits us into he second half of life.
I feel withdrawn and I project my feeling of being withdrawn unto my partner. I do what depressed men do. They project their depression outward and seek to find someone to blame. In many ways I am not the man I was and it frightens me. I used to be affectionate but now I am not. Many who read this blog will know how I pay attention to lines from songs. The song lines I hear and pay attention too are frightening me as well. I hear them and I know they are talking to me and I hope that they will go away but they don’t The song that I hear now is one I haven’t heard in decades. I hear it in cafes and I hear it in shops. It is a song written by Neill Diamond. This song has the following lines in it.
You don’t bring me flowers
You don’t sing me love songs
You hardly talk to me anymore
When you come through the door
At the end of the day
This is what it feels like on some days and I want to run away from it all. All of this is a kind of internal combustion that in many men becomes a silent killer. They turn to some form of addiction or to another relationship in order to avoid feeling the pain and thus avoid crossing the threshold into the second half of life.
Yet I know the process. It usually, if not inevitably, involves the experience getting more intense instead of lessening. One does go into a dark night or into a dark forest. In relation to male menopause there isn’t much light available. It is for this reason I share this kind of non-event through this writing. If I can assist men, and thereby assist their partners, to recognise the process then in some way I am shedding some light into the darkness. I have no idea what such sharing will mean. I fear ridicule. I fear that no one will ever return to reading what I write because of what they will think of me. Yet I will continue to write about this personal dark night of the soul because I can and because it is what I want to bring light and healing too. This healing is not only for myself but for others who are not as able to share their experience.
I lived in a family where the word depression was taboo. I live in a culture where the word depression is taboo. My mother lived much of her life feeling depressed and feeling guilty about feeling depressed. She had every reason to feel that way but would not share it. It made getting close to her almost impossible. I learned to get close to her by becoming sick and manipulating her in some way. As a child I had what where thought to be heart problems. I never did have physical heart problems but the symptoms all pointed that way.
It is my intention to make the experience of depression and its association with the male cycle called andropause not the taboo subject it is. I have huge resistance against doing this but this is no reason not to do it. Even when writing about this subject I want not too. I want to write about all the beauty, the power and the grace available beyond the experience of duality. Yet I see so many spiritual seekers who talk about, and aspire too, the attainment of personal salvation and transcendence who are emotionally depressed to a large extent. What they want to do as many spiritual seekers wish to do is avoid painful feelings.
Male menopause can drive a huge wedge between a couple who have been happily married for many years. The man is literally taken into the dark and changed by a process that he will resist and that in many instances can destroy him. Women who witness this process say they want the man back who they once knew. They don’t want the monster that he has become. If it does not destroy him it will in many instances destroy the relationship. At this point I can see how easily that could happen in my own life. I am to some extent more fortunate. I have not let the issue drag on and drag on although it has dragged on. I have asked for help from someone outside the relationship trained in such matters.
It has got worse since that time I began talking to the councillor. Yet I know from experience that you very often take two steps forward and one step back. People sometimes feel that they are taking more steps backward because the process opens up more painful experiences. This is not necessarily a step backward although it feels that way. Sometimes you go deeper into the darkness before you get insight into the coming dawn. I have of yesterday taken one step back.
In the past I would have had another drink and then another couple of drinks which would have lead to some more drinking. This way of avoidance is in the past. Today I will take an extended walk to a holy well and circumnavigate it. Exercise is one key way of alleviating the symptoms experienced with male menopause and the experience of depression. I will try, as best as I am able, not to be rejecting. This isolates me and makes my partner defensive. Simple expressions of kindness help. Patience helps tremendously for both parties but is not an excuse for continued denial or avoidance of the real issue.
I will look at what is positive. While I might be in a dark wood my dream life is more than alive. It seems to be a preview of coming attractions. I had for a long time stopped remembering my dreams. I think that this was a response to the denial that I was going through at the time. Now I am through (I hope) this phase of denial the dreams have returned. This is polarity. What is avoided in the conscious mind plays havoc in the unconscious. Now that denial has opened up other options the unconscious has again become alive. I am able to do this because the length of time I have spent in honouring my dreams as a spiritual practice.
The 10th September, 2011 was World Depression Awareness Day. It was a day in which we where invited to try and make depression an experience we refuse to deny. It is in our interest not to continue to deny it because it is one of the highest growing medical issues in the Western world. One day won’t do it. Awareness of the symptoms and how they differ in women and men and the process involved will help. It is in educating an awareness of how the process begins and how it can develop is a beginning to the end, not of depression, but of the cycle what can become chronic depression.
The first step, and I think it is a big first step, is to be courageous enough to admit the feeling of shame that hides the underlying depression and which allows it to begin to become chronic and more difficult to shift. In sharing this experience of depression that is a symptom of male menopause it is my hope that many men and their partners do not have to experience deeper suffering and deeper dark nights where it appears there is little or no light at the end of the dark forest. It is my hope that they can avoid the experience at the end of the song “You don’t bring me Flowers Anymore,”
And baby, I remember
All the things you taught me
I learned how to laugh
And I learned how to cry
Well I learned how to love
Even learned how to lie
You’d think I could learn
How to tell you goodbye
‘Cause you don’t bring me flowers anymore© 1978 Stonebrige Music (ASCAP) & Three
The answer is not to learn to lie about the feelings of shame and their related movements of anger, sadness, grief and depression. The answer isn’t always in another relationship but in the deepening of the one you already have which arises from the deepening awareness of your multidimensional emotional experience in this world of opposites. It also helps to be aware of that are natural cycles within the human condition. This is especially important for men because women tend to be more aware of cycles because their bodies are more tied to such cycles.
Having written this blog and walked and circumnavigated the holy well I feel better. This doesn’t mean that the depression will not return and that I will not feel irritated or sad. It is a process. I am in more psychological danger to the extent that I avoid feeling the feelings that arise. I am in more danger if I simply deny the movement of what is a natural life cycle. The cycle of birth and death and rebirth. I am not different from many in that I resist the death aspect of creation. I am different in the sense that I am willing to cross the threshold even if I do it all the while screaming.
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Finding the Warrior Within – A Path to True Intimacy
Relationship is a continual birth/death/rebirth cycle. This I am told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the Sounds True recording entitled The Dangerous Old Woman. At this time I feel I am moving through the phase called the death cycle. It frightens and upsets me. It causes me to feel lost and raises my deepest fear. This is the fear of abandonment. I fear the return of what was once so familiar to me. The experience of the child in the picture that I have lived entitled “Love Frozen”.
Even though I write about this adventure into the dark forest this does not mean that I venture into this darkness with any real sense of enthusiasm. It is the soul that invites me to journey and it is the ego that resists. The soul invites expansion even unto death. It invites the leaving of the known to venture into the expansiveness of knowing. It is uncomfortable for me because it makes me feel vulnerable and afraid.
My experience is that men do not talk about what they fear. We are taught that it is unmanly to feel afraid and it is taboo to display such vulnerability. This is a dangerous teaching. It is the teaching that wounded my father. He passed that wounding onto me and his other children. He was shamed by this wounding as I have been. This ultimately leads to the suppression of the life force and leads to violence, leads to addiction and in many cases leads to depression and loss of meaning and purpose. It is the slow and dangerous journey that James Joyce called “living some distance from the body.” It is a common enough journey in many men’s lives.
I feel unmanned by the experience that I feel too ashamed to share here directly. I have in a very large part died to an old way of being and I feel very lost. I am in a personal dark forest and I wonder where my guidance system has gone. So what to do? I still have this guidance system. I have simply forgotten what it was. It is the practice of sitting before this blank page that I sit before each day. This is the emptiness that is magically full and magically fulfilling. When I feel lost, and especially when I feel lost in the dark forest of personal distress, I write. Usually at the beginning I have no idea what I will write about but I have done this long enough and with enough trust in the process that inevitably there will at the end of the writing process be a degree of enlightenment. What was frightening to me doesn’t look so frightening anymore.
My experience is that women seem more able to talk about their vulnerability This in part is what I love about them. Men who I have known have, for the most part, a sense of shame around appearing vulnerable. When I was once depressed I shared this experience with a male friend of many years standing. He made it clear that this sharing was not part of our being together and that what I needed was a holiday in the sun and a couple of drinks. I left that friendship and found others who were not so afraid of vulnerability, not so afraid o
f intimacy.
In relation to allowing men to be vulnerable, our culture and our history, is a kind of a wasteland. It is the result of the teaching of the distorted masculine and the shadow aspect of the archetype of the warrior. The warrior in many cultures of the past, and even today is taught not to be, or to express any kind of vulnerability. It is an unspoken taboo. It is a known fact that many people take their lives because of depression. However, the number is three times higher in men than women. There are treatments that can alleviate the depth of this darkness but men feel not only the depression, they feel ashamed of the depression. It is the feeling of shame that leads to the difference in the statistics.
This feeling of shame, personally speaking, is a spell. It is a dark cultural spell that destroys many men’s lives and destroys their relationships with those who they are most intimate with, and wish to be most intimate with. It is the old chin up and pretend its not happening approach to emotional experience. It is the same experience that, culturally speaking, we have toward any kind of mental illness in Ireland.
A lot of this, I believe would be improved by the understanding of the life/death/rebirth cycle. This is a natural cycle but we become afraid of the death aspect of the cycle and thus we get caught up in it. I am caught up in that aspect of the death cycle which is denial. We men, I think, are good at denial. We deny what is dying inside of us and thus repress it and it becomes a shadow that drives us into addiction in some form, or into violence, in another form. There are several stages of this process of life/death/rebirth. This process has been outlined clearly by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book Death and Dying. This process applies both to the psychological and the physical process of dying.
When I get caught up in feeling afraid I become ashamed of feeling afraid. I shut down emotionally. The cycle begins to wheel in an attempt to heal the psychic tension. I keep resisting until the resistance becomes a habit and I have created what is called a psychological block. This becomes a habitual response to emotional distress and in time I find myself living some distance from my body. I find myself engaged in addictive or violent behaviour which is an attempt to resolve the inner tension.
The mature warrior archetype is one who turns to face the shame, face the fear of the shame and make friends with the taboo. Then he is not so easily manipulated by a shame culture to go out and fight and die or be maimed for distorted ideals of old men who have refused to do the interior work. This is the work where they honour the King and the Queen inside themselves. They then have the courage not to serve powers that lay waste to the land. Who live with wounds that fester and will not heal. Such is the story of the true masculine as revealed in the story of the Fisher King and Parsifal and the Search for the Holy Grail.
Shame of vulnerability has, and is the legacy of many men. I think it is in large part of the reason why we have what has been called the battle of the sexes. She, for the most part, is focused on relationship and he, for the most part, is focused on relationship while trying to maintain a script of invulnerability. This is the script that insures the struggle toward any kind of true intimacy. Intimacy of any kind means vulnerability. It is to go where you have never really gone before. You cannot be vulnerable and wear the armour that protects the heart.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes,says that over time aspects of relationship die. The important thing is to know when you should engage in the art of flowery combat to maintain and expand what is potential within the present dynamic and know when the present dynamic is to be allowed to die into rebirth. This, for most of us, including myself is easier said than done. It is not easy for me to write this let alone share it. However, my passion is writing about personal development and beyond. I write about the journey of what it is to be a human being living within this place of opposite and this plane of opposition.
I choose not to collude with a cultural more that invites a kind of living death that impacts men and their intimate relations with their partners and their children. To be vulnerable is to be human. To be vulnerable is to be available to intimacy which is the ability to see into who you are becoming. Most importantly it is the ability to forgive who you are. In this way you own the feelings you feel. Then they don’t get projected out unto loved ones. They are not then able to be manipulated by politicians and big business and particularly the nation state. They are not able to be manipulated to justify injustice. This is because you become a mature warrior and you become, first and foremost, a protector. You become a man rather than a boy living in a man’s body.
To my fellow men and women who are lost in the dark forest of shame, fear or depression I say to you that there is a way out of this darkness. It takes courage to be who you are. Do not under estimate the courage it takes. It takes courage to ask for help. It takes courage to be vulnerable. These learned responses to fear and shame can be unlearned. The real issue is the issue of getting stuck in one cycle and refusing to allow it to move through you. This I repeat takes courage . It takes courage to admit you feel afraid. It takes courage to admit you feel ashamed. Courage means to enter the heart. It is the ability to move beyond opposites and to move into the peace of the heart.
You don’t end up being perfect. You end up being human. You allow yourself to be vulnerable. You authorise the whole spectrum of human emotion and when you deny your emotional life you take your courage in your hands and you engage the true warrior archetype which is the dynamic of protection. You protect that which is vulnerable within you and thus you are able to protect the vulnerable within society. You will not be manipulated by political, religious hierarchies to go and destroy what is seen to be a threat. You have within you the clear understanding that violence in any form is the last resort.
Vulnerability is a major aspect of the integration within the phase of the mature warrior archetype. It is the boy becoming the man. It is the destroyer becoming the protector. It is the man who has integrated that which is vulnerable, that which is intimate and that which can be intimate within him. It is the mature warrior who is willing to die in the service of Love and into rebirth of Love at higher and higher levels of consciousness for the sake of his community.
I have moved on. I have taken a step into the light by simply writing what I feel. I have simply sat before the blank page and allowed this vulnerability to speak to me. Over many years this is the way that I have learned to trust the light within. I invite you to find your own way to allow this light to arise within you. Then at any time when you need it and especially during times of doubt and even despair that it is easily available to you. I’ll finish with a poem about a father who was not a protector.
The Boy Who Crawled
Once there was a boy who loved pancakes.
But when the family met for Sunday breakfast,
his mother left him home-so the boy crawled
in on all fours, but his sister hit him
with a potato masher while his father watched.
Today I visited that boy in the hospital.
Whenever someone came into the room, he’d rise
from his chair-erupt is a better word-
thin chest puffed out like a banty
rooster, arms stiff at his sides.
When the social worker, a kindly blond
woman, introduced herself, he stood even
stiffer, eyes enormous behind thick
trifocal lenses. “Your father feels vulnerable,”
she told me, “and he’s afraid.”
Because his father never stood up for him,
he has to keep standing, says, “I’m not
in trouble,” and “I can walk without
a cane.” At seventy-nine he’d rather
risk falling than be seen to crawl.
© 1997 by Thomas R. Smith
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Blessing for Fathers Day – A Man Stood Up
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward the same church, which he forgot.
Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly
Today, in the USA, UK and Ireland, it is Father’s Day. I have, over the last two days, had a tune running through my head. It is a song I haven’t remembered for a long time. It is a poignant song about the relationship of a son to his father and the way things left unsaid continue to haunt the soul from one generation to another. This is the song by Mike and the Mechanics entitled “The Living Years.” If you have not heard it this I suggest you listen to it before you read the rest of this article. Simply click on the above picture called “A Heavy Burden.”
As a storyteller I connect to, and I invite others to connect to, major archetypes. What is an archetype? The way I put it is this. It is a pattern. It is a pattern that one lives out in one’s life. This isn’t necessarily one pattern. It is more likely to be a combination of patterns although there is a primary pattern and a secondary pattern. Some of the main patterns of soul development are
The Orphan
The Hero
The Great Mother
The Magician
The Mentor
I am a combination of the Orphan and the Magician. When I first took the quiz that determined which archetype I could be most identified with the quiz told me that my strongest soul pattern was that of the Magician. This archetype I love.
To quote from Mything Links:-
“A magician is, of course, a person who does “magic. That is, a magician is a person who can make things happen that wouldn’t happen under the normal or familiar laws of nature. Something is transformed in a mysterious way, or disappears, or appears. We know also, if we reflect on our use of the word, that a “magician” could be an entertainer (a “conjuror” or “prestidigitator”) or a “real” magician (something like a “witch doctor,” “medicine man,” or, perhaps, “sorcerer”). Still, both conjurors and “real” magicians are assumed to have the power to transform things and make them appear or disappear, whether playing cards and silk scarves or illnesses and spirits. And such transformations take place in a way which is, literally, extra-ordinary.
The Archetype of the Magician – by John Granrose
This pattern of the soul was closely followed by that of the Orphan. This pattern I did not like and did not want to be identified with. I felt shame at being considered an orphan. The Orphan is one who is abandoned. She is the one in the story of the Little Match Girl who cannot get warm because she cannot connect to the fire within and so she freezes to death.
I fought hard not to be an orphan but the Orphan in me wanted recognition. He was the one with the fire and he would, if not recognised burn down his world and the world of others. He was on fire because he was enraged. This is what happens to children when they are abandoned. My father did not abandon me or his other children in a physical sense. He abandoned them in an emotional and psychological sense. It was just the way it was. His father who was an alcoholic who abandoned him and his father before him probably taught him the same lesson.
So it is that I come from a long line of orphans. As a child I loved my father. To get his attention I would buy him expensive gifts that I saved and scrimped money toward acquiring. I made most of this money from my ability to sing. When I gave him these presents he would say, “Thank you,” and not open them. He would put them away to be opened at a later time. I wanted him, at that moment, to take me in his arms and hug me. He never did. I lived all my life with that deep longing. It made me walk the world, not in beauty, but living the life of one who did not have a full moon in each eye.
With That Moon Language
Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz
I hated the Orphan in myself. I hated and loathed the neediness and the longing of this child archetype. His one wish, his one focus was, Love. If he couldn’t have Love, then life would not be worth the candle and his light he would take out. It took me to go to that place before I met with a man who would father me and take me into and through the fire. This was George Frankl. To quote from The Independent on Sunday the week following his dying on Christmas Day 2004.
George Frankl was a philosopher, psychoanalyst and visionary thinker whose great achievements lay both in the field of therapeutic work with individuals and in his writings.
His 1970s classic The Failure of the Sexual Revolution (1974), on which an international conference in Australia was based, has recently been reprinted. His major work The Social History of the Unconscious, first published in 1989, presents a detailed examination of the psychological foundations of human cultures. The Unknown Self (1990) and Exploring the Unconscious (1994) describe his revolutionary therapeutic method.
So with George Frankl my Mentor Archetype I fought the unfolding of the memory of the Orphan in me. I fought the terror and the rage that I would not let go. It was the one thing that connected me to the father I longed to know and be known by. This therapy, which is the journey of the soul, took me deep into emotions that I never would have imagined I could have been a part. They still are part of who I am, but I do not let them rule my conscious life. They have become the gold in the shadow.
This is the work of the 2nd and 3rd Chakra’s. It is shadow work. It is the work that chasers after the light tend to avoid. With good and understandable reason. The work of integrating the lost boy is not easy. The opening of the personal Pandora’s box that held all the fear, self loathing and also the hope that I could be free to Love is the work of the Hero. It is the path of the Hero’s Journey.
It is no coincidence that is was during that time that I met with the woman who would Love me into the fullness of who I am becoming. She is still loving me into that fullness after almost thirty years together. She would slowly unfreeze the blocks of ice that I have collected in my body and especially those that surrounded my heart.
I no longer have a love/hate relationship with my father. He died many years ago. The dream I carried in my heart of a death bed reconciliation where I would say, “I love you, Dad,” and he would say in return, “I love you too, son,” never happened. When he was ill just before he died I asked if I could come home to Armagh to be with him. My mother asked me to stay away and so I felt again the abandonment that was his legacy to me. I never got 
to live my Orphan’s dream.
The older I get the more I remember the richness of who he was and what he gave to others. This simply mirrors my feelings about myself. I am becoming the Magician. The power of the Magician archetype within me comes from the Orphan who has come home and who has integrated the opposites within and done the alchemical work of fire. This is the work of the 2nd and 3rd Chakra’s.
The Magician in me is who I identify as the Union man. This is the man who invites union through Yoga. This is the unification of the sense of the separate self with the true Self. In this way I have become my father’s son In that way I live out what he lived out. I also do what he did not do in many ways. I go out and I find the Church in the East. This is a metaphor for the warmth of the heart that I so longed for as an Orphan.
My father was a union man. He fought for the rights of the worker. He, I believe, founded the first Credit Union in Ireland and he also founded the Armagh Arts Club which was, and still is, his true legacy. He left to the world the gift that he could give and was in the words of a Joni Mitchell song
a lonely painter living in a box of paints. I’m frightened by the devil and I’m drawn to those who ain’t afraid.
I don’t know if my father was frightened by the devil but he wasn’t drawn to those who had the courage to take the journey into the hell of living a life without love. In the end he died frightened to death by the forces that he never reconciled in himself.
I honour him in the best way I can. I get up from the supper table and go searching for the church in the East which is my heart house. It is strange for me to think now that the one who opened that church door wasn’t the one I thought would open it. I thought that it would be the Magician in me but the one who held the key to that door of the church in the East was the Orphan.
Living the wild and precious life would not be possible without the embrace of this Orphan dynamic. He is the one that constantly reminds me what it is like to live without love. In fact, he can’t do without love and will not live such a life. The learning to love the Orphan within, and we all have aspects of the Orphan within us, is the work of the 2nd and 3rd chakra’s and precludes entry to the heart chakra.
Mike of Mike and the Mechanics sings the line in the song Living Years,
“I wish I could have told him in those living years.
It isn’t just for the son to tell the father, “I love you, Dad.” It works both ways. So on this Father’s Day let it be that both son and father and daughter and father be courageous enough to give not only a present but more importantly of their presence. I will tell you from experience that it only takes one such moment. That moment contains the hope that ignites the flame of Love. It is that moment that can be a foundation to taking the path of the Hero.
Say it loud and say it clear. Say it in words that we all fear. These are the words, “I love you.” Say these three words silently to anyone, anything living or dead who you connect to and who you know in your heart of heart’s will not abandon you to the deep waters of a life lived without love. Make saying these three words “I love you,” a daily practice.
This opens the heart chakra but don’t be surprised if you encounter the emotional dynamic of the orphan and the fire in which you have to alchemise all the unloved and orphaned energies you have abandoned within yourself. This is why this journey is called the Hero’s journey.
Was my father a hero? It isn’t for me to judge. It is only for me to love what was abandoned in him and the horror of his young life. I honour him by hugging all the men in my life who are family and friends and letting them, and hopefully demonstrating to them, that I love them and that I will not abandon them. This is also the case with the women in my life who are family and friends.
This is the Magician in me who writes about the gift the Orphan brought him and brings him. One has a different kind of power that one never would have had. Now I get to spend my time writing and speaking that sweet moon language. In the past my eyes have been full of moon. My eyes where filled with sadness. I played the role of a clown in order to disguise what lay behind the clown mask. Crying happens. I do not fight it and I certainly do not regret it.
I wouldn’t change it. What brought me to the edge has taught me how to fly. I have wings. I am precious not because of what I do or what I have not done but because I am the child of I AM. I am wild with the power of that sweet moon language that every other eye in the world longs to hear. I share that beauty with you here and that is the legacy of the child who had to go out and find his church in the East. For this I give thanks.
Thank you George Frankl. Thank you Dad. I love you.
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