Learning to actually feel and be fully present to one’s pain can be the gateway to becoming fully conscious and self-actualized…
– – –
Every human experiences pain. For the most part, men in western culture are taught to repress it, hide it, or ignore it. But this ignorance comes with a cost. Men are 4 times more likely to commit suicide. It’s time to relearn how to feel.
Avoidance Man
At the most primitive level, our whole motivation as men is to avoid feeling pain at all cost. In the last couple of centuries, an interesting switch has occurred. Physical pain is no longer thought to be bad, in fact ‘real men’ seek out physical pain rather than shying away from it, and those who handle pain well are celebrated. But it is still taboo in our culture to feel emotional pain: loss, sadness, shame, guilt, fear, confusion, and even great joy.
Men have found ways to avoid difficult feelings through opiates, alcohol, marijuana, sexual addiction, intellectualization and overthinking. Just about any compulsive activity can become addictive, all fueled by an instinct to avoid feeling.
This avoidance comes at a terrible cost to men, our families, and even our planet. Taking back the full range of our emotions, and learning to work with them in a healthy way, is a priority for conscious men.
A good first step is to take a journal, and start to catalog all of the ways that you avoid feeling painful emotions. The more you can get them onto paper and recognized, the less power they will have over you. Here are a few of the avoidance methods we’ve seen. Use this as a springboard into your own exploration of the huge momentum we all share of dulling ourselves emotionally.
- Arguing, overthinking, the need to be right
- Alcohol and other substances
- Dulling out: watching TV or cruising the Internet
- Work addiction
- Extreme sports or dangerous situations
What’s on your list?
Invalidation as a Lifestyle
As men, we can be lead to believe that there is no reason to get in touch with feelings, that they have no purpose or value. A man’s first reaction in his primitive brain, when there is danger, is to either fight or run. This is how he responds in anticipation of pain, and it was the most intelligent response when men lived as hunters, faced continuously with physical danger. Stopping to feel could be a suicidal step. His first reaction to the anticipation of pain is action. Because of her very different role in the social fabric in the past, a woman’s first reaction when faced with pain might be “I need to tell somebody about it.” Her first reaction is expression.
The key to becoming a conscious man is to be aware of the emotional aspects of being a man without letting it run your life.
|
Although our brains still work in the same way, fight or flight may not be the most appropriate reaction in the boardroom, or when faced with an upset partner. Your physical survival is, we hope, not on the line anymore. Because we do not follow the instinct to take action, feelings get stored, bottled up in the body, and then emerge at a different time, in a way that is generally inappropriate.
The key to becoming a conscious man is to be aware of the emotional aspects of being a man without letting it run your life. By becoming aware of your emotions and the practical wisdom of fact, you allow the “feminine” side of you to support the “masculine.” Only by becoming aware of feelings can you have the presence to understand that you do not have to act on them, they will dissipate and reveal another part of your humanity: you can become more sensitive, more considerate and more compassionate.
Not Present Man
Just as we can sabotage ourselves as men by invalidating our feelings, so we can also lose our way by getting lost in feeling. In order for a man to fully feel his feelings and not act on them, he has to have a way to experience feelings without being threatened or overwhelmed by them.
A lot of research is being done in the last years of the effects of video games on teenagers and young adults. For the first hour of playing a video game, it is simply a break from your life: you get to do something that is not stressful, and it is not important if you win or lose. It is a break from the normal pressures of life. The blood flow is going to the front part of the brain, which is where we make conscious choices, develop good leadership, and we are better able to deal with life. After an hour, however, the front part of the brain become less active, the middle part of the brain becomes more active, and the connection between the two is diminished. The nucleus acumen becomes activated, which is the same response to taking cocaine.
This kind of self-hypnosis is something that a lot of men use to disconnect from their emotional reality when they don’t have a place to take it.
Without ways to develop presence, you may feel compelled to blurting out your feelings, without enough awareness to actually experience them. Or you may be acting out disproportionate to the emotion of the present moment as a way of trying to unbottle emotions from the past. It is a little like premature ejaculation. You need to develop the stamina to contain your energy, so that it can be released at the right time and in the right way.
Being the Disembodied Man
The way to experience feelings, without becoming emotionally reactive and getting caught up in drama, is to experience them through the body. The reactivity and drama is all coming from thinking, from the head. The feeling itself is a sensation in the body.
Placing too much emphasis on the influence of the past and memory as a cause of pain may actually cause a man to disconnect from his body. It may be necessary to let go of the logical cause-and-effect understanding of why you are having feelings, in order to actually fully be present with them as bodily sensations.
Ultimately, you get free of the past by stabilizing yourself more and more deeply into the tangible reassuring reality of the present moment, which is where the body lives.
– – –
image: DollarPhoto.com
******
Arjuna Ardagh is the author of “the Translucent Revolution,” and “Better Than Sex.” Ardagh is partnering with John Gray, author of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” and the ManKind Project USA to host a series of conversations with globally recognized thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and authors on conscious manhood. Look for more posts coming from the Conscious Men Summit – coming in November. ConsciousMenSummit.com
Apparently Mankind Project accepts no dissenting opinions
M’d out again! Bummer
Premise is men don’t feel their pain. Anything empirical on that?
Men commit suicide at a higher rate than women. This is the fault of not feeling one’s pain. Is there anything that men do or don’t do that doesn’t cause them to commit suicide? Suicide; the Swiss Army knife of results of…anytning.
Society allows me to have all the emotions I feel. What jars my preserves is the implication that I have to show them to other people and damn’ quick, too.
How about society itself not allowing men to have a full range of emotions?
Bravo on this article. Men, you ARE emotional creature. Stop letting the world system tell you otherwise. If women can learn to embrace and excel at S.T.E.M., men can learn that acknowledging emotions as good! [Also, it’s “nucleus accumbens”. JIC men want to research the seat of emotional well-being.] Men are “hormonal”–and not just testosterone; the sooner they understand this, the better able they’ll be to appreciate and use emotional energy to their advantage instead of being imprisoned by thinking they don’t have emotions. That’s been the most harmful of attitudes and catchphrases hurled by men (and some women) to… Read more »