It dropped another layer deeper for me today. This thing I walk with as a man who feels deeply. It’s been a hard road to get here, to this place in which I can stand in my sensitivity, my empathy, and also feel the rightness of the boundless rage and grief that lies so close to anything that is rooted in the truth of my being. In the places where “my” being is not only mine.
This is a place of power. And what a toxic load that word carries in this culture. Rightfully so. But that’s not all of it. I’m not invoking the word “power” here in an attempt to validate the delicacy of my masculine heart. No, I use the word here because it speaks of Life. Opening to the truth of my sensitivity places me in direct relationship with other truths of my being. There is a raw, ruthless, fierce and loving fire that is everything, if not powerful. It is the type of force that cracks open the surface of the earth so an unstoppable river of molten rock can devour everything in its path.
I believe it is our capacity to hold the depth of our connection to all things – to embody the most subtle griefs – that makes it possible for us to also feel profound anger in a way that is not dangerous where it needs to be protective.
Men’s capacity for anger is needed right now to help drive the type of confrontation and destruction of harmful systems that is needed at this time. But, this anger needs to be deeply rooted in the experience of our connectedness. It needs to arise from the experience of our relatedness as a force of nature; as a response from the laws of interdependence and reciprocity to which we are subject. At least, if we wish to survive.
It is our sensitivity that offers a pathway to this type of relating, and to the life-serving power of this anger. This connecting sensitivity comes alive in the places within us that only open when feeling deeply seen and cared for. The creation and impact of spaces that support this type of safety are a threat to the assumptions and structures of a capitalist patriarchal society. This is why there is such rabid condemnation of empathy and other “soft” expressions of “masculinity” from some loud voices in the broken manosphere.
The men’s groups I co-facilitate are, among other things, spaces in which there is sufficient safety for men to find their way back to these parts of our experience that have been mostly shut down and unwelcome for generations.
The groups provide an incubator of sorts within which men can reconnect with and deepen these parts of our authentic selves sufficiently in our nervous systems so that they can start to withstand some of the pressures of our culture and lives. It is an incremental process, like the growth of mycelial networks that eventually support the massive trunks of a healthy forest. And if we can support and sustain these shifts, then we begin to be able to create lives that align with who we are and what feels alive. And if enough of us do that, the structures of oppression will crumble – through direct action, and irrelevancy.
The greater the degree of sensitivity, the more profound the experience of connection and belonging that is possible. In our bodies. In the ecosystem. In this family of living beings.
Try telling me there isn’t strength in this.
