Men in Relationship – Heart Freedom (Part 5 of 8 )

 

    Many men are reluctant to embrace relationships but relationships are the marquee event in the Olympics of Life. Winning the gold medal in relationships is as good as it gets in this world. Ask yourself: Is a great relationship so rare because it is not worthy of my attention, or does my attention wander away from a relationship because of fear? Am I afraid of a relationship or do I simply not know how to be in one? Fear and ignorance are two reasons why men resist intimacy and commitment so strongly.

    To help men whole-heartedly embrace relationships, it is time to join three archetypes that have traditionally been separate: the hero, the warrior, and the lover.  As Joseph Campbell said, “What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of [the heart] is a myth. These are totally different things altogether.”i What’s made up in the head is the Hollywood hero—a heroic warrior-savior/destroyer. What can come out of the heart is a heroic warrior-lover.

    The hero myth has been saturated by Hollywood with characters of extraordinary physical powers who are basically alone in life. They might have sexual relationships but without emotional intimacy. If they are involved in love relationships, such relationships are viewed as liabilities, bringing an unwanted vulnerability to their characters and their circumstances. Although there are many images of the hero warrior, there are few of the hero lover. And the heroic warrior-lover is virtually nonexistent.

    Like it or not, Hollywood is now the main source of our mythological incarnations. Few read the classics or ancient mythologies today. There are many Hollywood images of horrific warriors of destruction, such as Darth Vader, the Borg, the Terminator, and Sauron. Countering these demonic warriors are the heroic warriors who defeat them: Luke Skywalker, Captain Picard, Sarah Connor, Gandalf, and Aragorn. The heroic warriors who conquer evil using violence are rarely portrayed as lovers with lasting relationships. Now the time is ripe for warrior-lovers who conquer with love but remain lovers in the flesh.

    Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King are modern examples of warriors based in the unconditional love of non-violence. They were remarkably courageous but essentially sexless in their public personas, perpetuating the unnecessary separation of sex and spirit typical of virtually all cultures of the world. A healthy, passionate sexuality is a natural human element connected to the universe’s energy flow, which is fundamentally sensual and broadly sexual—penetration and envelopment in harmony and balance, the oneness of yin and yang. Denying the energy of eros, sensuality, and sexuality might be commendable if such denial were a necessary condition for spiritual awakening, but no one has ever convincingly demonstrated this is actually the case. Indeed Tantric, Taoist, and Egyptian sacred sexuality practices have apparently been successfully employed as paths to enlightenment for thousands of years. 

Recently a number of observers have noted the connection between sexual repression, scarcity of pleasure, and increased violence:

A recent interview on national public radio with journalist, Jonathan Rauch, who managed to enroll in an Islamic training school for future Jihad ‘warriors,’ suggests that the extreme sexual repression of these young men and boys results in what Rauch calls ‘a lust for death’ – a transfer of libido that Freud would certainly have understood. All of which leaves war and those who participate in it looking like regressed juveniles at their animalistic worse.

Among human beings, a pleasure-prone personality rarely displays violence or aggressive behaviors, and a violent personality has little ability to tolerate, experience, or enjoy sensuously pleasing activities. As either violence or pleasure goes up, the other goes down.