The masculine wants to feel the bliss of a life lived at the edge, and if he doesn’t have the balls to do it himself, he’ll watch it on TV, in sporting events and cop shows.
Practice love instead of trying to bring an end to the quality that bothers you.
The love that you magnify may realign her behavior, but your effort to fix her and your frustration never will.
Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.
If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place.
Read books that remind you of who you are, in truth.
Spend time with people who inspire and reflect the source to you.
Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner. The next time you notice yourself “giving in” to your woman, postponing your mission and denying your true purpose in order to spend time with her, stop. Tell your woman that you love her, but you cannot deny your heart’s purpose. Tell her that you will spend thirty minutes (or some specific time) with her in absolute attention and total presence, but then you must return to carry on your mission.
Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it.
primary fear shows you that you are at your edge. Staying with the fear, staying at your edge, allows real transformation to occur.
About once a week, you should sit down with your closest men friends and discuss what you are doing in your life and what you are afraid of doing.
“I want to have an affair with Denise, but I don’t want to hurt my wife. I’m afraid of her finding out,” you might say. “You’ve been talking about Denise now for six months. You are wasting your life energy on this fantasy. You should either have sex with her by tomorrow night, or drop the whole thing and never talk about it again,” your friends might say, challenging your hesitation and mediocrity. “Okay. I know I’m not going to do it. I see now that I am too afraid of ruining my marriage to have an affair with Denise. My marriage is more important than my desire for Denise. I’ll drop it and refocus on the priorities in my life. Thanks.”
Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another.
A man must be prepared to give 100 percent to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge.
The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision.
You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.
When it comes, it usually won’t be a detailed vision. You will probably have a sense of what direction to move in, but the practical steps might not make themselves clear. When the impulse begins to arise, act on it. Don’t wait for the details. Learn by trial and error what it is you are to do.
As you help them, you continually feel for the “groove” of your purpose. You might have a few false starts.
It feels as if the universe is supporting you in this direction. You have no idea whether you can earn a living doing this, but it feels right for now. So you apply yourself fully to it. You give your gift 100 percent, without holding anything back.
Children learn most from their parents by osmosis. If their father is subtly weakened and compromised, this will flavor their experience of his love. Just as you did with your father, your children will unconsciously replicate or react to the emotional taste they absorb from you. Your essential emotional tone—at ease in your deepest purpose or fearful in the ambiguity of your intent—becomes part of your children’s home.
If you and your woman both work, it is better to make arrangements with other families to “timeshare” childcaring, or to hire someone to help with your children, than to permanently compromise your deepest purpose and truth because you feel you must do so to spend more time with your children. It is not the amount of time but the quality of the interaction that most influences a child’s growth. Children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional tone. If you are not full in your core, aligned with your deepest purpose and living a life of authentic commitment, your children will feel it.
are you so absorbed in your work and projects that you no longer feel the miracle of existence,
To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable. In your own way, remember the infinite, and then return to the task at hand. This way, you will never lose perspective and begin to think that life is a matter of tasks. You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love.
Of course she knows how much this moment of success means to you. This is precisely why she is negating it. Not because she wants to hurt you. But because she wants to feel Shiva. She wants to feel your strength. She wants to feel that your happiness is not dependent on her response, nor on you making a million dollars. She wants to feel you are a superior man.
It never ends. A woman will always test her man for the pleasure of feeling his strength in loving, his capacity to transcend nuisance, his persistence in his own truth, and his capacity to share that truth in love with her, even when she is complaining—especially when she is complaining. Her complaint is the beginning of her pleasure. It is not true criticism, but a test of your Shiva-hood. The criticism is entirely dissolved in love as soon as she feels your humor and happiness in the midst of the poke.
When she says, “I hate you,” or “I’ll never move to Texas,” or “I don’t want to go to the movies,” it is often more a reflection of a transient feeling-wave than a well-considered stance with respect to events and experience
The feminine says what it feels. A woman’s word is her true expression in the moment.
When you listen to your woman, listen to her as you would the ocean, or the wind in the leaves. The sounds you hear from her are sounds of the motion of her feeling-energy. Of course, there are times when she speaks in the masculine style of meaning exactly what she says, but more often, and almost always in emotional moments, what she says is the sound of her feelings. Her feminine speech is far more like poetry than like a clearcut agenda for action. In an emotional moment, what she says she is going to do is actually an expression of what she feels like doing in the moment.
The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely.
A superior man sees his woman’s moods not as a curse, but as a challenge and an amusement
There are many ways to creatively deal with her moods and help her to open. Tickle her. Take off your clothes and dance the watusi. Sing opera for her. Make animal sounds. Shout at her louder than you ever have and then kiss her passionately. Press your belly into her until she melts. Lift her off the ground and spin her around. Occasionally, talking with her helps, but not as often as humor and physically expressed love.
The next time your woman is in a bad mood, try this: Assume she is not feeling loved. Simply assume it, even if it seems that it can’t be that simple, that there must be some underlying reason for her upsetness, a reason that you could fix. Assume she is more like a flower that needs watering than an engine that needs a carburetor adjustment. Don’t assume anything is wrong at all. Assume that she wants love from you, in a deep, strong, steady, and sensitive way.
One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything.
As a practice, always help your woman make decisions by giving her your perspective and telling her your choices, while letting her know that you love her regardless of the decision she makes.
Feminine energy gets you out of your head and into your body. Music, beer, nature, women, they are all forms of feminine energy.
kinds of women, is natural, normal, and beautiful. In fact, it is
Know that your woman is always pleased most by your strength in love, freedom, and consciousness. If her requests and desires can sway you from what she knows is your highest goal, she will be angry and disappointed with you, even though she asked for
To you, the garage seems trivial. To her, you have failed at your word.
You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor. She usually is speaking in a very tangential, but revelatory, style. She is revealing your unconscious habits that prevent your fullest awakening in consciousness. Your unconsciousness causes her pain. She won’t say it that way, but that’s what she is indicating.
Don’t argue with her about the garage and the job interview. That’s not what she’s talking about, even though that’s what she’s talking about.
Hear her complaint as the universe giving you signs about your life. Is watching TV right now the best way to use the moment?
You know the amount of bullshit you are kidding yourself with. So does she. It just hurts her more than it does you.
Although she would never admit it, she wants to feel that her man would be willing to sacrifice their relationship for the sake of his highest purpose.
Though she may not always like your choices, she will love them, and she will love you for having the courage to live your truth.
Instead of getting angry because she’s so upset that you made one little mistake in a long series of successes, instantly shift the energy between you. Remember, history is irrelevant to the feminine, so your mistake is as easily forgotten as your successes
Men will always enjoy facing forms of “death” and coming out the other side into freedom, whether in the form of boxing matches, cop movies, martial arts, orgasm, philosophy (the stress releasing “ah” of insight), or ego death.
A lesser man might decide, “Well, she’s going to have to deal with it herself.” But she would not be in relationship with you if she wanted to deal with it herself.
A man rediscovers and fine tunes his purpose in solitude, in challenging situations, and in the company of other men who won’t settle for his bullshit.
You will begin to adopt her feminine patterns of touch and affection, denying your desire
Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn’t about truth, love, or the divine.
Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth.
The most potent forms of masculine realignment involve both austerity and challenge. Go to the middle of the woods, by yourself, with only survival necessities. Nothing to read, nothing to do. Fast from food and don’t sleep for as long as possible. Challenge your attention with some practice, like chanting or ritual movement, so that your attention doesn’t drift or become balmy. Open yourself and wait. Do not cover your suffering. Do not quit before you fall through the hole of your fear and emerge with a vision of your true mission, the unique form of your living sacrifice.
At least once a week, get together with your men friends to serve one another. Cut through the bullshit and talk with each other straight. If you feel your friend is wasting his life, tell him so, because you love him.
Even during these celebrations, though, there should be a challenge to remain conscious and undistracted. They are not occasions for lapsing from fullness, but for communing beyond fear. Perhaps you can all go swimming in ice cold water together. Or drink to the point of inebriation and then spend the rest of the night chanting hymns of the mystery of existence—nobody allowed to drift. Whatever you do, share as much loving as you can with your friends, without settling for mediocrity or less than each man’s fullest gift.