Cultivating a healthy relationship to your inner masculine means exploring your relationship to healthy sexuality, competition, power and the physical body and realm. Our society is riddled with connotations for men and this reflects in our inner masculine as well as how we relate to men. What does it mean to be a man? Do men want sex and women love? As a culture do we love women but respect men? Can you have passion for another without fixation and it’s consequences of neediness, which inevitably repels and brings ruin?
“While indulging in addictive passion promotes delusion and death, denouncing passion altogether only maintains the crippling schism between heaven and earth – romantic inspiration and marital commitment – that has plagued love in the Western world for centuries. Neither inflating passion nor condemning it gives us a path.” – John Welwood
Finding another way to narrate your history with men and your masculine gives opportunity to explore your past conflicts, find your awareness and lets you stop repeating those same old patterns within yourself, your relationships, your sex life and your career. These are all mirror reflections of each other and when you explore any one of them consciously, the understandings will ripple far and wide throughout all the masculine areas of your life.
“For passion to become path, we must learn to dance on the razor’s edge of this energy – now taking hold, now letting go, now focusing our passion with single-pointed intensity, now releasing its focus and feeling its source in the life flowing deep within us. In this way, we can begin to ride the energy of desire instead of getting swept away by it. We can let it resonate through us and flow toward others without having to cling to them.” – John Welwood
I’ll never forget the beginning of my honeymoon which started off horrendously with my new husband getting accidentally very drunk (the dark rum overseas packs a mean punch) meaning very hung-over the next day and my fantasy of romance and falling even deeper in love with him was dashed. The book I was reading at the time had a sensual Italian man as the main character and he was constantly saying Bella as a term of endearment for his lover. I had nothing to lose and at every turn where I wished my new husband was treating me differently I invited this man in and imagined him giving him the honeymoon of my dreams. Within a couple of days this inner shift reflected externally, and my imagined romance became a reality for the next 10 days of our time together, salvaging and transforming our very first vacation in 9 years.
If you’ve ever felt like you had to prepare to battle to express yourself in a way that you’re heard; if you’ve no idea of what the term healthy masculine means or what that looks like in it’s expression; or if you’re curious about the conscious cultivation of love, sex and discovering your inner masculine in a whole new light, come dance with your inner man in the 30 day exploration Men, Sex & Love – he’s waiting for you.