Masculinity is a Transmission

All right. And welcome back. Today I want to talk about something that impacts all of our lives as men.

And it's this idea that masculinity is a transmission. So this is something I started thinking about a couple years ago when I was in an intensive men's program, program of my own for my own leadership and growth and development and was talking to my teacher John, and really just started to notice the truth of this. I had read the book Iron John by Robert Bly, who was kind of one of the forefathers of the men's work movement and really kind of started bringing it into the mainstream in the early 90s.

And one of the main things he talks about is the big shift that happened in the Industrial Revolution. So, you know, in the 1800s and forward, when we moved from an agricultural based world to more of an industrial one. So, you know, instead of working out in the land, we started working inside, in factories. Now one of the big shifts that occurred with that industrialization.

And here we're mainly talking about the West, Western countries, right? Europe, North America. There's a bit of a Eurocentrism there and a white centrism as well. So this doesn't go for all cultures. But speaking towards the culture I know and I experienced and grew up in, which is the culture of the West. And in those industrialized nations, as work shifted from agriculture to factories and whatnot, and now information and finance and all the different things that have emerged since then, that work tended to take place away from the family, away from home.

So instead of working the land with our family or working our family business, a lot of men started leaving the house to go work all day in what has now become known as the 9 to 5, right, the factory hours. The consequence of that is that boys had a lot less exposure time and connection to fathers and older men in these this kind of traditional setup, which isn't so much the jam today, but I'm just naming then oftentimes with the father being out of the house, or uncles or cousins or whatever, all going off to work, boys were left to be raised by women, their mothers, their sisters.

That's when the educational system took off and kids started going to school around that time as well to prepare them for factory work. And while it's changing, traditionally schools and teaching have been dominated by women. So young boys went from spending time in their father's shop or the family trade or the family farm, where with their father and uncles and brothers and other older men to spending a lot of that time with women or at best, other boys.

Now there's a huge impact to that because that act of being separated from the masculine meant and means to a large part. Even this day, where a lot of men are absent, a lot of fathers are mostly absent from the day to day of their kids. Other than that brief window before or after work. What it meant is a lot of us boys were raised mostly by women and we didn't get much embodied experience of what healthy, integrated masculine looks like in the world.

Now that idea itself has evolved quite a bit. Healthy, integrated masculine today is way different than it was 50 years ago or 100 years ago. But the idea was and is what I mean by masculinity as a transmission is it's an embodied experience we have. So as I started first getting into my personal growth and development and transformation in my early to mid-20s, one of the first things I noticed was how powerful an experience it was.

When I would step into the room with older, wiser and deeper men than me, I would immediately get a felt sense in my body of that's it, that's how I want to move, that's how I want to talk, that's how I want to lead. That is the direction I want to grow into in my life as a man. And so my various mentors, coaches, friends gave me that transmission of what a healthy, integrated, open hearted, masculine might be.

It helped me anchor in what that energy actually was, what that type of presence actually was and is in the world, so that I could then move towards it, oftentimes with their counsel and guidance directing me. This is one of those things. We often don't know what's possible until we've experienced it ourselves. So we can read all the books, listen to all the podcasts like this.

We want about masculinity, presence, leadership, manhood, whatever you want to call these things. But it's totally different when we actually have an embodied experience of it in the moment. This includes seeing how men lead, seeing how men connect with each other, and most importantly, I think, seeing how other men deal with emotions and stress and conflict.

These are the things a lot of us lost when the industrial revolution happened and fathers mostly left the home. We didn't get to see our fathers interacting with co workers Interacting with other customers, interacting with their friends. See how they breathe and move and learn and show up fully in the world.

There's no hack to this transmission. It's handed down man to man, person to person. It's a resonance in the nervous system. One of the quickest ways we can deepen ourselves as men is to receive this transmission from other men that are deeper than us, that are wiser than us. Oftentimes that depth and wisdom comes from age, but it doesn't always have to.

I've been in many men's programs and a lot of men's work activities where there's been guys younger than me that show me a different way of being, that provide to me a certain transmission around what they're embodying and how they're showing up in the world. You can't get that anywhere else other than being in the presence. And yeah, these days, I would say even virtually being in the presence of coming out of the COVID pandemic, been shocked by how incredibly impactful even being on Zoom together can be for men to experience this different type of presence and breath.

Now being in person is going to deepen that even more. And again, this is one of the many reasons I believe every man should be in a men's group. If you can get in a men's group with guys who are at least at your level, if not deeper, you're going to accelerate your growth tremendously. And the cool thing about men's work as a culture is you're going to get exposed to a lot of men you wouldn't otherwise.

I'm in a couple different men's groups these days, and almost all of them. I'm one of the youngest guys and I love it because I get to benefit from their many years of experience and a lot of the wisdom they've accrued as fathers, leaders, businessmen and artists. Now I have things to offer those guys too, and I do.

But I also get a deep transmission. Like I said, a model, an actual experiential model of how the masculine can show up in the world. How a man responds when he's having a hard time. How a man asks for help when he's having a hard time. How a man can create a deeply impactful business that not only allows him to live well, but to deeply serve others with his most incredible gifts.

What does that actually look like day to day? What's the impact of that on his family, his friends and other men? This masculinity piece, right? Masculinity is an energy It's a perspective. It's something we can access in our bodies. Whether we were born into a male body or a female body, we all have access to masculine energy. You can use different labels for it if you want.

We see it in nature itself. Mountains are more masculine than rivers. They have a different presence to them. You can feel that presence. In a lot of the workshops I've been in, we intentionally do that. We go to these incredible places of masculine presence so we can feel that energy, feel that transmission, feel how the masculine moves at a different pace than the feminine.

It holds itself differently. And we see that in other men as well. I've learned so much from seeing incredible men who are holding these energies in ways I wasn't able to. Seeing them interact with others, seeing them direct and lead and take breaks and nourish themselves and ask for support and open their hearts themselves. I've seen the full range and it's part of what started to anchor into me.

How to be in the world gives me that direction to move towards. The trouble with a lot of the guys I work with is we've never gotten a better model. Particularly here in the west, we're offered some pretty shitty archetypes for what masculinity or manhood is. The most common one guys I work with know and consciously choose not to be is the caveman, the macho jerk, the brutish ass, the my way or the highway, take what I want.

Macho caveman is often very self centered, just focused on moving himself forward and because of that, often can't see the impact he has on others. We all know the macho jerk, the brutish caveman, and a lot of us have decided we don't want to be that guy. We want to be more than that guy. We want to have open hearts, we want to be sensitive, we want to be thoughtful. Now that often leads many of us to the nice guy.

My friend and mentor, Dr. Glover, wrote the incredible book no More Mr. Nice Guy, which is probably more than any other piece of men's work out there, changing lives right now. It is literally the matrix book for so many men I talk to, and rightly so. Dr. Glover's lived that transformation, knows it firsthand. Now the nice guy sees the macho dick or the caveman and says, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to cause that destruction. I don't want to cause that pain.

And more sensitive, but ends up often putting other people's needs before their own. Now uncoincidentally oftentimes nice guys, as we label them, are often guys who find it easier to relate to the feminine than they do other men. And they often find it easier to relate to the feminine because they have a closer connection to their mom than they did their dad. Either their dad was absent, unpresent, or just incapable of relating to them on a person to person level.

So instead, they spend a lot of time with women and learn to develop the capacities of heart, empathy, connection, all incredibly important things and huge wins. But oftentimes what gets thrown out is the healthy version of ego, the healthy version of self, the self that sets boundaries and asks for what it needs and has access to its power. Now, there's also a third archetype that I've certainly experienced that I think a lot of people have experienced as well, that's maybe not quite as prevalent now, but I would call it the stoic guy sometimes.

These are our grandfathers, these are men who went through war, or these are just loners who are kind of the lone wolves who don't reveal anything. They're just very quiet. They're good men, they fulfill their roles, they do what they need to do, but they're not open in the heart, they're not able to express, they're not able to ask for what they need. And they're often carrying a lot of pain, but they just keep it all under the surface and they tend to lone wolf it through the world, which makes it even harder for them.

Those are the main archetypes we're given here in the West. And so when we're raised by men who embody those archetypes, we're going to move towards one of them because we don't have a model of what else is possible. We haven't gotten a transmission of this deeper masculine, which is a transmission you can get these days, I'd argue, primarily in men's work and men's groups.

What we would call the more integrated man, or in David Data's language, the third stage man. What this essentially means is as men, we have access to our power. We have, we have access to our balls, we have direction. We can stand up for ourselves, we can stand up for other people. We're not afraid to use force to create safety in the world. And we're open hearted, we're extremely sensitive, we can feel the impact our presence has on other people around us.

We're attuned to those people. We're both, and we're both powerful and sensitive. And we don't try to do it all alone. We know our strength is reinforced by being around other men of high character, of integrity, and oftentimes of more depth than us. That can call us forward in life. When we're not showing up as fully as we could be, who will give us straight feedback to our face.

Not to break us down or shame us, but to help us grow into what we could be and to help model for us what we could be. That's the transmission. When our bodies share space, whether virtually or physically, with other men deeper than us, we get that transmission of masculinity, of that integrated man, that evolutionary man, the man who takes all the gifts of what came before, discards the pieces that are harmful and moves it all forward.

Yes, you can be open. Yes, you can be sensitive. Yes, you can be a sexual creature. Yes, you can be powerful. Yes, you can be direct. Yes, you can set boundaries. Yes, you can get what you want. And yes, getting what you want can actually benefit other people. You can serve them in the process and leave the whole world better than you found it. So if you don't have these type of men in your life, one of the greatest investments you can make in yourself and your future is to seek them out.

Find men that are deeper than you, find men that are more sensitive than you, find men that are more in touch with this masculine energy than you, and then spend time with them. You will receive a transmission from them you can't get anywhere else. There's no shortcut to it. You can do all these practices alone, but if you don't know where you're headed, it can be hard to make sure you're going in the right direction.

There's a reason most trades and arts and spiritual paths have these lineages. This transmission of some kind of important information and learning in a way of being that goes person to person. Masculinity is the same thing. It's a transmission we push down through the generations. And it's a transmission that in the process of embodying, we get to evolve into ways that even our forefathers couldn't have imagined.

We get to make it more whole, more sensitive, more aware, more alive, more modern. Where do you receive the transmission of masculinity? Where can you seek it out in your life? It's really important to know these questions. If you like what I'm up to and want to receive part of my transmission, you can work with me by joining my twice a month drop in men's groups here on the site.

Or if you want to go really deep you can join my intensive coaching programme, Men's Group for Guys that I co lead with Melanie Curtin by going to Evolutionary Men webinar and watching our free training. Get good men in your life. Till next time.