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 of 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

OTHER GREAT CONTENT Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.

midlife crisis
SEVEN STAGES OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION - n his spiritual evolution, man passes through different stages, each of them having some specific characteristics. Recognizing these characteristics can open the path toward superior levels which leads us to perfecti
SPIRITUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION - The study shows student life is enhanced if students engage in "inner work" through activities such as meditation or self-reflection
4 STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH - The stages of spiritual growth is sometimes not easily identified, and we’re all of us are undergoing a transformation down this path, even if some of us don’t know it.