My wife and I finally went to that restaurant we had been meaning to go to for maybe a year. It is in a neighbourhood where we don’t shop or go to often. Returning from the bathroom I looked up over the doorway to the dining room and saw that famous quote attributed to Gandhi – ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. Well, yes, yes, yes. I agree. I need to hear that and follow through on that everyday. Now, I am adjusting that sentiment slightly – ‘be the man you want to meet in the world’.
Angry young men are angry young men for a reason. In part they are angry because after puberty we all receive and process more higher energy. The higher energy has more potency than we are used to receiving so if you don’t know how to deal with this new energy potency then it can be dangerous. Imagine you park your Prius outside your home at night and wake up to see a Lamborghini in your parking spot. You simply are not used to the power at your finger tips. You don’t know how to direct the abundance of potential at your disposal. It is this same influx of life force that make young men feel invincible. This can mean there are no second thoughts to drink and drive or do drugs or have unprotected sex or vandalize or be a bully. Why do all those activities if they aren’t productive? Well – to a young man that isn’t the point.
It is important to clarify here that it is crucial to get out there and have as much fun as possible. Have a party, travel, take your selfies. It is, however, not fun if someone else pays for the diversion. That means your inner religious life shouldn’t be sacrificed by you being a slave to social media or other ego based pursuits. Leave some time and energy to investigate your inner life. Leave some energy for patience (as in patience for you to understand) to understand women because they are not men.
Men generate violence because they don’t create other options.
Get patient:) Get creative! Get spontaneous!!
So why is bullying or vandalism so attractive to a young man? The young, unaware men are just using up the energy they wake up with each day. In fact if they don’t use it up then it gets bottled up and the result can be much worse. Just think of the ‘incel’. The involuntary celibate = incel. Guys who struggle socially so they sit at their computer hating women. These guys don’t understand what to do for themselves so they hate. An easy target for their hate is women. These guys actually don’t hate women. They don’t know what to do to get happy, to be accepted or who to talk to who can meet them where they are at in life and help them grow. Hate is not a good use of young man energy.
Our formal Faiths that are practiced in temples and churches are failing young men. Men need tools for maximizing their daily energy and their elevated energy. Because our society generates few real resources for higher energy focus this very potent force gets squeezed into the quotidian confines of looking for a (better)job, looking for a (better)life partner and figuring out how to look cool and make money.
We need relevant steps and tools for the spiritual aspect of life. (Check out other Wild Coach posts)
We as a society do not give our young men the references needed to understand this force that wants to convert him into a vibrant power. We do not provide inspiring opportunities for men to express themselves and figure things out. We provide the internet and floundering faiths. They need a scale of stuff to do and a reason for it so they can bridge intensity of youth into intention of life.
We as men cannot continue making women pay for our ignorance of what a man is and the stages he goes through in life. We need to know what those stages are asking of a man so he can respond and feel accomplished. So he can offer not just a bruised or inflated ego but also emotional agility instead of fragility!
Look up, breathe, smile and be the man you want to meet in the mirror, in the world.
I was shaking – or rather I was being shaken. I was shook like never before.
I was on my knees with my head on my bed in search of a position where my body didn’t seem to vibrate me out of sanity. It was amazing! Don’t get me wrong – I am neither a hypochondriac nor a sadist. I don’t look for ways to be sick. The thing is it is increasingly amazing to me how the human body responds to illness, hostile bacteria and nasty viruses.
So I am so glad that my body fights back. Yes the experience is anywhere from a hassle of a few days to weeks of cough/vomit sessions but that is very likely better than no response at all (i.e. probable demise to the death). Thank you body for generating the energy and directing it with force against the flu, stopping a cold and damming the diarrhea. Thanks for the healing. After getting knocked out for a few days I am ready to rejoin the fight.
Healing brings our systems up to date.
Whatever part or function in us that needed healing is like an eddy in the river. An eddy is where the water whirlpools on one side as the river flows by. There are the swirls of bubbles that get caught in the elbow of a river until a new wave brings them back into the mainstream (pun intended) community. The eddy is still part of the river, never not wet but spinning in a smaller world until it rejoins the flow. Healing gets us back up to river speed.
Healing feels fabulous, refreshing, renewing. Funny, some of us might even help ourselves to get unwell. As in we damage/sabotage ourselves or relationships because the instantaneous natural healing response from our bodies and the earth can feel so good. It’s that adrenaline rush of injury or danger bringing us back into oneself by the beautifully efficient and loyal powers of healing. These powers return you to your best. The healing force is true to your development direction and stage in life.
My golden retriever didn’t go pee for about 10 minutes. She had been in the van almost 2 hours but when she jumped out she could smell something. My wife thought it was a skunk but it was late March and they didn’t seem to common during the spring thaw. Her retriever nose was sniffing so much I thought she was going to hyperventilate because I didn’t hear any exhale. She was pulling hard on the long red leash taking us to the edge of the gravel/mud/grass parking lot of the fairgrounds. She made her search for possible squirrels/rabbits/chipmunks or even a fox – the all consuming priority. Completely focused. Admirable.
Apply that to us.
Make Important Things important.
Everything has a reason.
But not everything merits the same amount of investment of your energy.
Our daily life challenge is to educate ourselves how to manage our energy. Implicit in this education is to identify and prioritize the higher purpose we all have that tugs at our sub conscious. As a way to self educate (instead of self medicate with delusions or distractive hobbies or actual drugs) is to know what we can do for ourselves about ourselves.
We can build our ego into our Best Ego because it is the foundation for growth.
We can find soul level resources from inspiring people, from our Faith, from nature, from taking the time to be in the moment. This soul level is important because it is where lives the residue of the human qualities we uphold.
Human is important because it is where we get meaning for continuance
So we can see not everything has the same role or purpose because there are different levels of energy and fatality that they are connected to. Being petty and impatient is connected to an egotistical ego that is addicted to incoming, positive energy about it; only. Your Best Ego has a lot of positive energy about how you interact in the world to get an overflowing result that makes you feel great and endears you to people. Best Ego energy has the role of making today, now, you the best – for a good reason. That reason is …
The Soul
Soul energy has the role of getting you destinic. Of giving you the sense of being part of a greater purpose. That greater purpose comes to use via the agency of …
The spirit. The role of the spirit is to stay true to itself. The by product of that is we have the opportunity to partner our life with spirit level future.
Big Stuff!
Amazing stuff.
Think about it!
Do something about it!:)
Make your ego your Best Ego because it is important that you believe in you and what you do. This is important because it supports your soul. Let your curiosity make following your soul urges important aspect of your life. Both of these say to the higher realms that you believe the spirit is important.
In the hit movie Crazy Rich Asians the mother of the protagonist is Eleanor Young played by Michelle Yeoh. She plays the part with icy precision. She tells her son Nick’s latest girlfriend Rachel that a woman does not follow her personal passion at the expense of her family duty. That comment encapsulates the conflict that women have to deal with. The task of prioritizing and investing energy and time in one aspect of their life at the expense of others. Specifically being looked at here are three aspects of our life: the adventure life, the professional life and the maternal life.
Now men have their paternal life that they have also to balance with the satisfaction of their professional and emotional lives. A man’s life can be rich, deep and layered (not that guys ever talk about it). However it seems that the internal management of these three lives does not incur the same degree of internal conflict as it does in a woman. That is not to say that men are better at personal life management because we all know that isn’t true. There are many a man out there who is lost inside himself and would be lost in his daily life if a woman (mother, girlfriend, sister, or his partner) did not keep him on track with a progression of simple life hacks.
It is not that hard to see how this difference between men and women can then lead to conflict between them. Men often can’t grasp how these same three categories of daily life instigate so much drama in a woman. For the man there is no conflict between these lives. They are to be prioritized and dealt with. Welcome to ‘Man Dealing’.
An expression of Man Dealing can be that he understands, in the moment, that his wife needs what she needs. Whether it be a massage, arrive home to a clean house or to jump in her car and see someone filled the car with gas so she doesn’t have to stand out there in the wind of a blowing cold, dark January morning for five minutes filling the thing up. The uncomplicated way of Man Dealing can be useful and efficient. Not to mention a huge relief so a woman doesn’t have to ask for things or explain why she wants them.
On the other hand the cold satisfaction of Man Dealing can be a massive frustration for women and has no doubt played a part in many an argument. This can involve him getting angry, fed up, frustrated from his lack of understanding of these three life currents. A woman feels these currents as three distinct tributaries flowing into a greater river. A man sees one river, feels one river and makes decisions based on that river. And that is why, at least inside the man, there is no conflict. So, according to him, there is nothing to talk about . Its pretty straightforward.
These life currents have different implications for a woman. Having children does not impact a man and woman in the same way: physically, psychologically and in terms of the Satisfaction and Fulfillment experience (see my article on Satisfaction and Fulfillment on The Wild Coach blog). With the hope/expectancy/preparation of having children means the Professional life of a woman will almost certainly be on hiatus, stop or change. Having a child or children quite possibly translates into less of an adventure life. Adventure can mean romance, travel, active social life, independence. Having a family is a nuclear reaction in a woman’s maternal life.
So for women it is a conflict that is not a problem. However many a problem has been born from the poor management of this reality by both men and women. There is no female deficiency or lack of feminine perception. Communication is a two way street.
My wife is a great cook. When I step out of the elevator, turn and am walking down the hall to our condo I can often inhale the scent of lunch. The sweetness of sautéing onions, or burnt chiles, of broiling sweet potato. She doesn’t love to cook but for her it is important to provide for her family. Oh and she is a tornado in the kitchen. She uses three different spoons to stir the broth, cilantro is in the soup and on the counter and in the sink. She glows with fulfillment as we set the table, pour the drinks and gather for the meal. Behind her is a crime scene of pots and pans. We give thanks, eat, talk and we clean.
I am not a good cook. When I make something I always screw the top back on the jar, cut just enough food for us to eat and leave the cutting board in the sink ready to be cleaned after we eat. I am not exactly a robot in the kitchen but I think a robot would like my style.
For my wife cooking for her family is a fulfilling experience that fill the home with familiness. For her husband cooking is a succession of satisfactions. Occasionally it is even satisfying for my family who eat what I prepared. My wife’s meals are a mini family event. Mine are mini missions.
Having a sense for when somebody is looking for satisfaction as opposed to searching for fulfillment can help to avoid lots of problems that get in the way of getting what you want.
Satisfaction means getting something done so you can get to the next thing.
Fulfillment is living the experience of realizing the accomplishment of something.
They are not competing concepts though that can be the experience a lot of us have in our relationship and professional lives. In taking a look at a real life example what better place to look at than marriage. We don’t all get married but we all have experience with marriage in its broad range of expressions whether from living with our parents or observing relatives and friends.
Often, for men the wedding fulfills the desire be in a relationship that makes both of you happy. The years of marriage that follow , again for the man, can be a series of satisfactions.
The woman takes the courting of being boyfriend-girlfriend as a romantic connection fulfilling her vision she has built in her mind of being fiancees, walking down the aisle and going on the honeymoon . The man uses the same steps into marriage to fulfill his desire to get the girl – before someone else does. So they are both finding happiness together but not for the same reason. They end up married to each other with same anniversary and wedding photos but their concept and feelings about the marriage often are ongoingly divergent.
So when the first, second, … fifth anniversary comes around the wife rekindles the romance of the wedding and courtship. For those same moments the man is checking things off his list: dinner reservation, flowers. It feels good to him that his wife approves of his thinking in advance of the details – and getting them right. So he is investing satisfaction level emotion into the anniversary and she is investing fulfillment level emotion. It’s not that fulfillment is any better that satisfaction because it is not. The problem is they are different. She is expecting fulfillment emotion in return from him on their anniversary and she can feel he is in it for satisfaction. There is discord so he asks what’s up; conflict ensues. She doesn’t understand why he isn’t more in their moment, more reminiscent, more romantic. He doesn’t know what the big deal is!
What happened?! The love is gone!!! Not necessarily. He may love that she gets so excited about their anniversary night getting all dressed up and telling her friends where they are going for dinner. Being an agent of her happiness may be fulfilling for him but their anniversary is just part of the whole marriage package – therefore it falls into the satisfaction category.
The anniversary night is not categorized as ‘satisfaction’ out of malice. He does it because of what it means to him. Of course there are those men who cannot overcome their relationship issues with their partner. Things get personal and minimizing the importance of their anniversary could be a revenge tactic by him.
At the beginning of the relationship/marriage they are using each other to make themselves happy. A by product of them achieving happiness is it makes their partner happy too. Win – win. Or in the words of Justin Beiber; ‘You smile – I smile’.
When there is a breakdown in the relationship his using his partner to get happy does not make her happy. This negatively impacts the possibility of either person finding satisfaction or fulfillment in their marriage. They will likely search for it elsewhere: work, hobbies, bad habits, friends or an affair.
How can we be proactive? Stay up to date with our partner as we go through stages in life and marriage?
Share with your partner about their role in what satisfies and fulfills you. And find a way to recognize the value of their satisfaction discipline or fulfillment feelings. Love their satisfaction of cooking from scratch, gardening, organizing the garage, talking with their mother every day. Love their fulfillment in fixing the broken window themselves, helping her sister, their annual reunion …
In February a pipe burst on the second floor parking garage and flooded the elevator bay in our condo. This had two major impacts.
One was we couldn’t use the elevator for 2 days. We had to, get ready for it, use the stairs. We are on the 11th floor so it was a work out. I work from home so I was in and out about 4 times that day as usual walking the dog etc. The exercise actually felt good and I thought I should do it more often.
The other issue was that the drywall by the elevators was damaged and they had to replace some wires. The wires went behind the four long mirrors in the elevator bay. They had to take out two of the mirrors and boarded the up with plywood. It has been like that for 6 weeks. When you rely on those mirrors to confirm how you look to the world it can really throw you off your game. Especially when you have been coming out of those elevators for years and habitually being pulled to your reflection. Good thing there area about 10 more mirrors in the lobby to confirm my looks.
Not unrelated to my ego and how I look is how I grow. I grow up through my ego into My Best Ego.
Your Best Ego can help you see your abilities as a woman/man. This can lead to perception about you as a lady/gentleman. So you using your ego as an agent for growth is a great ego boost:) As in your ego boosting you up the energy scale to connect with higher realms that can be of use when you are challenged in life. Times when you need the mental and emotional agility to find reasons of how and why to keep maturing as opposed to being petty or lazy. As opposed to being flat-lined by society and a lack of life education leading to perception. You Best Ego is part of the foundation that can receive and handle the call for you as human. You as the human embodiment of spirit.
So ego is useful.
You full of ego is dangerous.
Your ego is not the answer for personal growth endeavours. That is the territory of you the woman/man who can manage the divergent tasks of daily demands and a search for soul understandings.
Ego is good to get you through your day. Your Best Ego will get you through the day intact as a person on a development journey so that you have the energy to follow through on those urges to be quiet, to wonder about the soul, to want to be of service to the planet and your community.
And to have your life decisions uphold your spiritual growth.
My ego is egotistical. So is yours. Your Best Ego is funny, proud, vulnerable and has a huge bounce back factor from the challenges of life. In the end it is about what you make possible: the elevations of you! Along the way (as you discover the how and why of your elevations) you need to make money and have friends and help your family and have learning experiences and struggle with the various aspects of well being. Your Best Ego knows that a lower level ego has an incredibly addictive personality that is dictatorial on all things in its life: people, love, time. So it is to recognize that we don’t need to go to the gym and build ego muscles that make us bulky strong but not so flexible. More along the lines of ego yoga that makes us supple for what life throws at us and ready for the invitation to grow into a surprising you.
Knowing what you want in Your Best Ego is an empowering life decision. Take the time to make the delineation between run of the mill, dollar store ego and Your Best Ego.
The Joker is mesmerized by the photo of Vicki Vale in a photo and says …
you guessed it,
“Stop the presses!!!”
That was from the Batman movie of 1989 with Jack Nicholson falling in lust for Kim Bassinger. That was when we knew what the phrase meant and where it actually came from.
Even with the decline of print media it is still a great phrase to communicate your amazement at something that takes you by surprise – like when you walk by your teenager’s room freshly cleaned room?!:)
The ‘presses’ being alluded to here are a few incumbent processes on our developing lives. Depression is getting more air time these days and that is great for those who can use the relief of being able to just talk about what they are feeling as a way to ‘take out the garbage’ and move on. That is one of the presses: depression. One of the pressures we feel as we grow and struggle with everything from identity to career choice to life partner choice to adding and subtracting to our beliefs. Unto itself depression is sickening but it can somehow deliver a sense of belonging that can confuse us into thinking we want to stay under that cloud. That we are happier where we are depressed?!?
Repression of emotions is another effective and common press – ure we feel on a daily basis. We don’t speak our mind at work about our feelings regarding incompetent politicians that seem to be multiplying internationally. Or we resist challenging cultural assumptions like polite Canadians, ignorant Americans, feminism or manism (what it means to be putting authentic man into the world). These are daily emotions that we may not speak, we repress, for fear or repercussions.
Repression continues when we resist answering any kind of higher calling. A higher calling doesn’t imply the priesthood – but it comes from the same source for the same reason. This is where our society (education, religion, corporate) is failing – in a big bad way. Soul satisfaction is calling, is available, is normal/natural/necessary and we aren’t sure who is calling, why, what the message is and how to respond. We repress our searching urge with elegant distractions like shopping, social media, hobbies, travel and even religion. In fact none of these things is bad and some are excellent manners of personal growth but not at the expense of souling. Feeling lost is the best thing that can happen to you if can locate the desire, the external help, the internal resources to forge your path into the future. We can’t kid ourselves – there are very few of us in our daily lives who use same the tools and techniques of living a modern life to investigate and understand what to do about fate and destiny. We repress the real reality of being called to a development journey and its painful.
Compressor – compression – compress – that’s the name of the game. Take life and get the residue out of it that is valuable for daily success and elevated connection. Go for it! Try it. Think about it. Ask the morning breeze about it as you walk through the park early morning, lunch break, late evening.
The 3 year old child that lives on the floor above us really doesn’t make that much noise. As in I have never lost any sleep or been woken up by him/her.
I can’t say that about the young guy who used to live beside us and have friends over (they weren’t parties according to him). My daughter would be kept up late at night or woken up many times – and she was really tired the next day.
How we manage our energy determines a lot about what we do and what we become. Personal energy management is exposed to various factors that can challenge its effectiveness. Sleep, as we saw above, or any other aspect of health that is not in well being can be a drag on our physical, mental and personal health.
Since in school we generally are not introduced to the concept of a development journey or the idea of levels of energy it can be really useful to take the time to find a few practical tools that can help us deal with daily life and still have a little time and desire to pursue an active soul life.
Lower levels of energy are heavier or coarser and impede your best you. You won’t be as willing to grow or have the same insights about how to address all the challenges and opportunities of life with coarse energy. Energy, as it elevates is refining and fosters your mind to be agile and look for a positive way forward in life.
One way to delve further into these gradients of energy is through the 3 levels of you: Ego, Soul, Spirit. Another way you can call them is: You, Man/Woman, Higher self.
Each level of energy is a natural state to be in for any of us. However we don’t spend our whole life in just one level. Nowadays I think it is safe to say that most of us spend 80% of our time in the Ego level. Then perhaps 18 or 19% on the Soul leaving just 1% for the Human Spirit.
If we find ourselves looking for meaning in life or a sense of purpose in our personal and professional life then having a specific strategy for energy management can be useful. Simply put it can be broken down to the Ego level of your life gets FEELING energy. This means it is about how you feel about you in the moment. This is important but not very powerful because it is about just one person.
The next level is the Man / Woman level as we grow into our abilities to use life’s twists and turns to help us develop into an honourable person. This soul level of us gets EMOTION energy. This energy is about human qualities and so it is a much more powerful energy. So in fact the more we want energy and attention for our ego self it is recommended to focus more of our time into the human level of us because being in service to something bigger than oneself makes us more attractive. This may seem like a funny apparent contradiction. However it can pay off for all levels of our life and for those around us as we become a person whose words are congruent with their actions and therefore can be trusted by the people around us to follow through.
Level 3 of 3 – the Higher You; Spirit realms. And quite often unknown territory. We can feel this aspect of ourselves when we are out in the park or forest early morning. A few birds are chirping and a fox lopes away at the sound of our footsteps. There is a connection that has been built overnight in the park between the energies of the natural life that we walk into and are graced by. The energy of this sensation feels peaceful. When we try to visually locate it it seems elusive – dashing behind a tree. It is the finer levels of natural energies that we can connect to and arrive at clarity about what we think about and we are worried about – what we want our life to be about. Because it is about what you want in the spiritual context it is the energy of PASSION. What we want others to know about us as we really are. This can have the greatest impact on: all levels of our life, those around us, those yet to come and the atmosphere of the planet.
Find what words can locate you in each level of your life and use those words to become the person you want to be at each level.
Photo by Parker Whitson on Unsplash
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