“The feminine in a man?” A big burly man says. His massive biceps dwarf his muscle shirt, as he lifts at the gym. “Ha, you got to be kidding me. Next thing you know, you’ll be asking me to be join the knitting club.”

“That manly man ain’t so manly,” another man says, “if he’s afraid of his heart.”

Ok, you guys, break it up. Let’s talk here. The feminine in the masculine.  What’s that mean?

Most guys say, I don’t know.  Yet, guys who have done some work on themselves say, it’s being in touch with your emotions. True, and there’s more.

Fear, anger, sadness, joy. Those are the basics. Not so easy for a man to access.

“What are you feeling?” I ask Jason, my client.

“Well, I’m frustrated. My wife is insisting that we go to her parents for Christmas. She knows I always feel picked on by her mother. I don’t want to go and…”

“Jason, what are you feeling?” I say. He looks at me, annoyed. “Frustrated is not a feeling. It’s a state of being. What is the emotion behind the frustration?”

He takes a breath and continues. “It’s just, I don’t want the holidays to be a shitshow, like they were last year. Why’s she asking me….?”

He’s back in his head. A man who can’t access basic feelings is stuck in a compromised state. He can only be so strong as a man. He can only be so strong in his masculine.

Any man who stays in this place for too long will notice that most of his relationships are compromised – with his partner, his kids, his parents, siblings, etc.

He is often told by his partner that he’s emotionally absent. Told that he’s not enough. And as a result, he feels diminished in his masculinity — his ability to be strong, capable, and directed.

The paradox is this. A man is more empowered in his masculinity when he cultivates his feminine.  

And that begins with his ability to feel his emotions. When he can’t feel his emotions, they come out sideways in…

…rage
…violence
…impotence
…numbness
…and self-destruction (drugs, alcohol, pornography, etc).

The statistics are staggering.

In response to the emotionally sideways man, most women leave. Yes, 70% of divorces today are initiated by women. And it’s as high as 90% for college-educated women.

Dudes, it’s a new world. Women aren’t taking our shit anymore.

Today, relationship is the super-currency to happiness. Your marriage or partnership is an external manifestation of the currency you traffic in. And the backer is your relationship with yourself.

Your ability to work with your hooks and triggers.
To feel your emotions.
To bring your masculine to the feminine.
And ultimately, to own, master, and be self-responsible with your emotions.

Until you do so, you will naively believe all your emotions, especially if you can’t feel them. And they will run you from the unconscious. You can’t master what you can’t see.

The new male warrior of the world is the relational master. Relationships dictate everything – his work, his friends, his family.

The relational master partners with a woman who is his equal. He has his tribe of allies. And he does business with those who can meet him at his level.

His self-relationship is his compass for all his relationships. He ascribes to the old age truism,  inscribed on the Delphi Temple millennia ago – Know Thyself. Today his greatest challenge and most critical endeavor is … Know Thy Heart.

Yet the climb to such mastery is steep.

Ken Wilber, integral theory pioneer and acclaimed philosopher said, a man has been trained, for thousands of years, in two instincts – F*ck it or Kill it. For a woman, it was one instinct – Relate to it.

And so it is men… we’re on a massive evolutionary uphill climb today. Only in the last 50 years have we been asked for more than two instincts. And that more is this — to be relational, which starts with knowing what you feel.

But to add insult to injury, we have to do this uphill climb in The Man Box, and no less daunting, with an empowered post-feminist woman.

Observe Exhibit A: The Man Box.

An emotional box that a male is caged into as a boy, often as early as age 3, restricting the range of acceptable emotions he’s allowed to access.  (For more on the Man Box, check out “The Mask You Live In”.)

In this construct, only one emotion is allowed – Anger. Not permitted are fear, sadness, and joy. This wreaks havoc on a boy, positioning him to grow up and be in few healthy, empowered adult relationships.

Men, let’s get real, this is warrior work; to do it, we must look at the dark places within ourselves that were once prohibited. To see what the caged monsters of fear, sadness, and yes, even joy, have to offer us — keys to defusing the all too prevalent male anger.

Accessing the feminine in the masculine is far from sissy work, as the hyper-masculinized body builder above would have you think. It is more difficult than any physical training a man can undertake.

I’ve heard many a combat vet, fresh from Iraq or Afghanistan, say it took more courage to get emotionally healthy than to have fought on the actual physical battlefield. The mission is often not clear within.

“Jason, what are you feeling?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. I already said. Frustrated.”

“I’d say you’re feeling anger.”

In time, we get to his sadness.

But for now we keep working on it. Eventually, he reports feeling less fragmented, and more comfortable asserting his masculine gifts.

His wife no longer asks, “Where’s the Man in my man?”