Book notes: “The Way to the Superior Man” by David Deida

The trend toward 50/50 has resulted in economic and social equality, but also in sexual neutrality.

The “mission” or the search for freedom is the priority of the masculine, whereas the search for love is the priority of the feminine.

The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift.

Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.

To act as a superior man, a samurai of relationship, you must** feel the entire situation with your whole body**. A closed body is unable to sense subtle cues and signals, and therefore unable to act with mastery in god situation.

Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them.

Use aids to support your relaxation into, and creation from, this source. Read books that remind you of who you are, in truth. Spend time with people who inspire you and reflect the source to you. Meditate, contemplate, or pray daily so that you steep yourself in the source.

I’m willing to be wrong, and grow from it. I trust this process of acting from my deepest wisdom.

He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort. Constantly. In everything he does.

You are ready for the unknown as it unfolds since you are not pulled back or pushed forward from the horizon of the moment. You are hanging right over the edge.

Own your fear, and lean just beyond it. In every aspect of your life. Starting now.

A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth.

It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center.

You probably need to burn off the karma, or fulfill the need, of the present purpose by which you are fascinated and distracted.

It is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling you time with distractions (don’t watch tv or play computer games, etc).

The priority of the feminine, in men and woman, is the flow of love in relationship. The priority of the masculine, in men and women,** is the mission which leads to freedom**. Ultimately, true freedom and true love are the same. However, the journey of the masculine and feminine to this unity of love and freedom is very different.

The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: imperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her.

A man’s word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman’s word is her true expression in the moment.

You might ask her, “Do you want to go to the movies?” She might reply, “Not really”. Then you hug her and spin her around and say “Let’s go to the movies!”. And she says, “Ok!”

For a man, or for anyone speaking in the masculine style, to say something that is not true is lying. But, for the feminine, truth is a thin concept compared to the thickness of her flow of feelings. The “truth” of the feminine is whatever she is really feeling, in this present moment.

The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely.

Only the masculine side of your woman will grow through challenge. The feminine side thrives on support and praise. Telling her, “I love the shape of you body,” will be much greater incentive for her to exercise than telling her, “I hope you don’t gain any more weight.”

It is a difficult practice for most men to learn, but you must learn to praise the very qualities you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so.

Praise works. Information doesn’t. Praise motivates. Challenge doesn’t.

His attitude has become one of wanting to escape woman and the world, rather than wanting to serve women and the world into love. A man shouldn’t tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment, because he knows he has done everything he could.

Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.

You cannot avoid this by changing women or waiting for the moods to stop. You can only develop your skill in serving your woman into openness.

The amazing thing is this: 90% of a woman’s emotional problems stem from feeling unloved. So don’t stand back and analyze her, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, or like a therapist questioning a client. Give her your love — the same love that is motivating your questioning — immediately and unmistakably.

Assume she is more like a flower that needs watering than an engine that needs a carburetor adjustment. Don’t assume anything is wrong at all. Assume that she wants love from you, in a deep, strong, steady, and sensitive way.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do.

When you ask her to analyzer her heart’s emotions, it’s like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It’s safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening. Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can ben analyzed to the point of “fixing” them.

By analyzing your purpose and realigning your direction, you can solve many of your emotional problems. But love is the feminine priority, not purpose and direction.

Basically, most men are afraid of, or disgusted by, feminine emotions. That’s why you try to fix them or escape from them.

The game of life is to find each situation workable, to transform each occasion through the magnification of love, to give your fullest gift in every moment, and to have no attachments to the outcome, knowing it’s all going to rise and fall and rise again.

Often her feminine feelings will be a much better basis for a decision than you masculine analysis. So, encourage her to feel into the situation and trust her feelings. But, for the sake of polarity and you happiness in intimacy, always tell her what you would do and why even if you think she should make her own decision.

Your sexual essence is always attracted to its energetic reciprocal. Masculine men are attracted to feminine women, feminine men are attracted to masculine women. Balanced men are attracted to balanced women.

The more you seek a woman who gives you everything, the less you get of anything. Business skills are for the most part masculine skills ( in both men and women). Friendship, in itself, is a neutral, nonsexual matter. And sexual passion requires a clear polarity between your masculine core and your woman’s feminine energy. When you don’t prioritize the purpose of your relationship, these different energies often cancel each other out, and you are left with a sexually neutralized alliance.

If you are a particularly easygoing man, perhaps a man who has difficulty getting motivated, then a hot woman is probably better for you. Her fiery nature can heat up you system and get you moving. On the other hand, if you tend to be quick tempered and hot yourself, you might find that a more cooling woman heals you and brings a balance to you body and psyche.

Understand what is happening. You used to really enjoy your wife’s spicy temperament, but now that you are boiling all day at work, you need to be balanced by a cooler energy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to end your marriage. It doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have sex with her cool friend. What it means is that you need to find a way to balance your life.

The priority of the masculine core is mission, purpose, or direction in life. The priority of the feminine core is the flow of love in intimacy. If a woman feels your feminine is stronger than hers — if she feels that the intimacy is more important to you than to her- then she will naturally animate her masculine. She will want space, she will want freedom to pursue her own direction, and she will be repulsed by your clinginess.

You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor. She usually is speaking in very tangential, but revelatory, style. She is revealing your unconscious habits that prevent your fullest awakening in consciousness. Your unconsciousness causes her pain. She won’t say it that way, but that’s what she is indicating.

How can you tell if your woman’s self-direction is healthy for her? If she becomes more and more full and happy as she pursues her direction, then it is good for her. If she becomes more and more stressful, taut, and emotionally angular then she is animating excess masculine direction. You become more responsible by knowing your deepest purpose, and then arranging your finances and spiritual life from that knowingness.

Your basic motivation is to be released from constraint and experience the freedom on the other side. What are some of the most common forms of masculine ecstasy? Orgasm is one. The typical masculine orgasm, as you probably know, involves a build-up of tension, or constrain, until the dam finally breaks, and your tension and energy are released. The post orgasmic state is one of death-like peace, an emptiness akin to a blissful oblivion. The masculine is always seeking this release in one way or another.

All masculine goals — at work, on the mediation cushion, or on the football field — are directed toward more freedom.

The capacity to face death for the sake of freedom, whether actually in war or ritually on the football field or chess board, is the ultimate masculine act, evoking men’s deepest emotions.

The desire to ravish is the sexual aspect of the same masculine desire that wants to break through opponents on a basketball court, break through philosophical barriers to intellectual insight, or break though the fear of death into spiritual freedom.

So, if you are like most men, you are willing to lose your self in controllable ways like sports, newspapers, and orgasm, but you remain fearful of losing your self, for real, in love-ecstasy with your woman, surrendered in the unknowable infinity beyond mind.

As an experiment, the next time you make love with your woman, feel through your own physical and emotional boundaries into her. Feel into her so deeply that you become unaware of yourself and totally aware of her. Feel yourself move into her, your boundaries dissolving so that you become her, utterly aware of her breath, her movements, her emotions. Love her with more abandon than you’ve ever allowed yourself before. Feel through not only your boundaries, but also her boundaries, so that you are both dissolved in the immense force of your loving. Relax into the force of love so completely that only love remains.

To truly ravish your woman in love, you must yield yourself in the worship and trust of her heart, which, in truth, is your heart. Such fearlessness will prepare you for and perhaps even initiate you into the worship and trust of consciousness itself, such that you will find greater and greater capacity to yield into and as the boundless One who you truly are.

Whatever energy she offers you, you can be sure the world will offer it to you as well. If you have ever tried to increase your income, or magnify your spiritual clarity, you know that the world will test you. Only through your persistence fearlessness, and loving service does the world yield to your efforts.

If your hide your deepest gifts from her in fear, you will also hide your deepest gifts from the world in fear. If you give up at a certain point with her, you will likewise only go so far in the giving of your gift to he world.

Your woman knows your weaknesses better than anybody. She knows where you will falter and give up. She knows the degree of mediocrity you will settle for. And, she knows your true capacity as a full man, a man of free consciousness and love. Her gift, if she is a good woman, is to test you with her darkest moods, over and over an over, until your consciousness is unperturbed by feminine challenge, and you are able to pervade her with you love, just as you are here to pervade the world. In response to you fearless consciousness, she will drench your world in love and light.

The feminine is abundant. There is never a shortage of women or feminine energy. Life itself is the feminine. There is never a shortage of feminine energy, only a resistance to receiving, trusting, and embracing it.

You are living in an ocean of feminine energy right now. Feminine energy is filing your body with life, beating your heart, and breathing your breath. There are women all around you who, with the proper initiation into mutually surrendered loving, would feed every cell of your body with juicy, enlivening rejuvenating feminine energy. If you fell stranded on your own masculine island of weariness and hunger, it is because you are refusing to embrace the energy and women around you.

Whenever you are feeling isolated and weary, fell the present moment as if it were a woman.

Feel like you are embracing a woman, physically. Feel the front of your body as if it were pressed against the front of a woman’s naked body, being filled with the delight of her feminine softness and liveliness. Feel her breasts and belly against you. Breath deeply as if you were inhaling her intoxication fragrance. And, while inhaling, receive deeply into your body not just her scent, but her very essence of feminine deliciousness, as if it were nourishing food for your masculine soul.

Relax your body and feel the ocean of feminine energy around you. Feel your surrounding as her form, the sounds around you as her moans and laughter, and light around you as her smile.

Actually relax with the moment as you would relax with your lover, not metaphorically but literally, bodily, with full intention and presence.

Relax and enjoy the bountifulness of feminine energy that surrounds you, both in the form of human women and in the form of the moment altogether.

The purpose of sexual desire is creation. Reproduction is but the biological aspect of creation.

It is not time that kills delight, but familiarity, neutralization, and lack of purpose.

Familiarity breeds depolarization, and depolarization breeds contempt amongst lovers.

If you have accumulated a lot of tension in your daily life, ejaculation will afford you with temporary release and relaxation. But as you live your life with more and more true purpose, you won’t accumulate so much tension during the day. Then, you will discover that ejaculation, for the most part, actually depletes and weakens you.

It feels great for a few moments, but the price you pay for the genital sneeze of ejaculation is a much higher level of mediocrity in your daily life. You will find that you just don’t have the extra gusto necessary to live your life with utter impeccability. Excess ejaculation pave the road to living a good life, but not a great life.

In a subtle way, excess ejaculations will diminish your courage to take risks, professionally and spiritually.

Most women can experience many orgasms, and deeper and deeper orgasms. And more importantly, most women have a natural connection between their genitals and their heart. When you ejaculate and lose your erection, you are probably depriving your woman of her fullest capacity of heart reception and expression, which is evoked by relaxed, loving, watery hours of your fearless and unstressful genital penetration.

It is not simply your genital penetration that touches her deeply, though, The main penetration she feels is your yielding into her, through her, in love. It is the fullness of your presence, the actual invasion of her body by your consciousness, that most ravishes her.

Your masculine sexual gift is to coax, humor, shock, and cares her love into melting through her layers of fear.

A superior man is dedicated to the magnification of love through sexuality. He does not settle for less than the total surrender of his woman’s heart, as well as his own, into the fullness of divine union.

Your addiction to cycles of release will stop you short of full and conscious dissolution in your deepest source, and so your true gifts will not emerge.

Inhale deeply, through your nose, and breathe through whatever tensions you notice in your body. Inhale deeply into your lower belly. Then exhale. On your next inhalation, breathe into your lower and upper belly. Then exhale. On you next inhalation, fill your entire belly, then you solar plexus and lower chest. Then exhale. Then inhale and fill your belly, solar plexus, and your entire chest, in that order. For several breaths, inhale fully in this way, filling your lower belly all the way down to your genitals, then the rest of your belly, solar plexus, and finally your chest. Then exhale fully, slowly, and smoothly.

Throughout the day, practice this kind of breathing in random moments. Pay special attention to any part of your body that seems particularly tense or closed.

The main way you generate bodily tension is by turning your attention back on yourself in self-concern, curling into yourself so tightly you feel all knotted up. Therefore, the main cure is to give yourself to others. Whenever you notice that you are mulling over your own problems, knotting energy into your body as tension, take that energy and create a gift for others. It could be as simple as doing the dishes in the sink, or as complex as building a business that will benefit others.

You could do this practice at work, with your lover, or with a whole crowd on a bus. If you are alone in your home, you could** imagine all the tension in the world and inhale the force of life into this tension to open it up. Then exhale, releasing the tension into love to be dissolved, like a handful of salt released into the ocean.** By practicing this form of breathing, you uncurl your attention from yourself, alleviating the knots of contraction in the front of your own body. And at the same time, you assume your true status as servant to others, who also, in their own way, are serving you.

Make love with the world in this way, all day, pervading and dissolving all unease. Feel the world against your body like a naked woman, vulnerable and alive, and allow the front of your body to press into and through the world’s body, liberating the knots of accumulated pain.

Also, when sexually embracing your woman, use your breath to open her body and heart, in exactly the same way. Fill her with the force of your loving, inhaling down through the front of her body as if it were yours, filling her genitals, belly and heart with love and energy.

The first step is undoing the habits you learned while masturbating as a teenager. Instead of tensing your muscles as you become sexually stimulated learn to relax them. When you notice your face squinting up, relax it. When you notice your breath getting fast and shallow, slow it down and deepen it. When you notice your belly tight and your chest hard, open your belly and soften the area around your heart.

The next step is to redirect your attention. Learn to feel your partner more than your own sensations during sex. Rather than curling attention into yourself and feeling the pleasures moving in your own body, feel outward, into, and through your partner.

Feel your partner more than you feel yourself. Feel her movement, her moans, and her internal energy.

Eventually, with practice you will be able to feel through your partner, as if your partner’s body were a doorway into a vast open space of energy, light, and awareness. This unobstructed feeling is the basis for true lovemaking. Extend your love out beyond yourself and, in time, through and beyond your woman. This takes practice, since there is a strong tendency to focus on your own physical sensations, especially during times of intense sexual stimulation. Counteract this tendency by practicing to feel beyond yourself and through your partner as if there were no obstruction to your loving at all.

Besides relaxing and loving into and through your partner, you must become very sensitive to the force of your breath. Breath moves life energy through your body as well as your partner’s. If your breathing becomes too shallow, the life force cannot be conducted through your body. Instead, this force builds up, usually in your head or in your genitals. If it builds in your head, you will begin to spend more and more time fantasizing about sex and women. It if build up in your genitals, you will feel the need to ejaculate, either through sex or masturbation.

Therefore, if you have not breathed fully during the day, by the time you approach your sexual partner you will be filled with fantasies and ejaculative urge. So, a large part of avoiding premature ejaculation is to breathe fully, deeply, and with great force, throughout the day. Your inhales should feel like they are drawing energy down the front of your body, filling your belly and genital region. Your exhales should feel like they are moving energy from you pelvic floor, up your spine, into your head.

By breathing fully in this circle, down your front and up your spine, your internal energy can flow freely. Your head and genitals don’t get clogged or tense with energy. And your urge to ejaculate is diminished.

As a single movement, practice contracting and pulling upward the entire floor of your pelvis, including the anus, perineum, and genitals. You can practice this in sets of 15 or 20 contractions, holding them as long as you can. Do several sets like this, three or four times a day.

Eventually, you will be able to contract and pull up your pelvis floor easily, holding it for as long as you want. this means you have developed the necessary muscular control. Now you can practice the more subtle work of moving the energy up your spine.

At first, it may seem like you are just imagining internal energy moving in your body. But, with practice, you will more easily see or feel this energy moving. After all, it is the same energy that, during intense sexual stimulation you have no trouble feeling build up in your genital region, which is then released through ejaculation. You can feel it building up like water behind a dam, wanting to burst out.

Well, the same energy can burst upward. And when it does, you will experience an orgasm far more pleasurable than the brief burst of a typical genital ejaculation, and also far more healing and enlivening.

While you are having sex, but before you are close to ejaculating, practice contracting your pelvic floor as just discussed. While you contract it and pull upward, breathe the energy up your spine.

You will have to experiment to determine whether to inhale or to exhale the energy up your spine, although most people find that exhaling up the spine works best. If you combine the upward contraction of your pelvic floor with breathing up your spine, you should lose just a little bit of your erection as well as the need to ejaculate. As you continue making love, repeat this exercise as often as you need to in order to maintain relaxation and openness.

When the energy shoots up your spine, relax and enjoy the colors, feelings, and blisses that will fill your head and rain down through your body. Once you are proficient at this exercise, you can evoke the same sensation in your partner by feeling into your partner from your heart as the orgasm shoot up your spine. The upward movement of your energy will magnetize the same movements in hers.

If you want to expand sexual bliss as fully as possible, remember that your emotional disposition is far more important than the technical exercises themselves.

Rather than fantasizing or entertaining inward sexual imagery of any kind, remain totally present, aware of your own body, breath, and mind, and especially attentive to your partner. Break the masturbatory habit of inward fantasy by consciously practicing sex as a relational play of love with you partner.

Keep your body and breath relaxed and full. Especially keep the front of your body relaxed, so that your belly is vast and your heart is soft and wide. This will help prevent too much tension from accumulating in any one area.

Learn to feel into, and then through, your partner, so that your attention is directed beyond your own sensations and even beyond your partner’s sensation. Practice feeling outward, without limit, as if you were feeling to infinity. In other words, whatever you are felling, feel it fully, and then feel through and beyond it, so that sex becomes a constant feeling through and beyond every sensation, rather than focusing on any particular sensation.

Throughout the day and during the sexual session, practice breathing so that your inhalation movers energy down the front of your body and the exhalation moves energy up your spine.

Excessive, chronic thinking or addiction to ejaculation is often a sign that your energy is blocked and you are not yet breathing fully in this circle throughout the day.

During sex, occasionally practice the upward contraction of the floor of your pelvis while breathing sexual energy up your spine, so it fills your whole body. Especially as you begin to approach orgasm, you can combine the upward contraction of your pelvic floor with breathing up the spine in order to shoot your orgasm up into your brain, and even out through the top of your head, rather than down and out your genitals. This upward orgasm will then feel like it is gently seeping down through every cell of your body, saturating you with thick open light.

These techniques will be less than effective unless you practice love during sex. The natural intelligence of love itself acts to circulate energy in the most healthy way possible. These techniques are mostly exercises to counteract years of poor sexual habits, usually initiated during teenage masturbation.

After eliminating the mechanical habit of ejaculation and unobstructing your energy, the force of your heart will very naturally guide your orgasm so it explodes upward, throughout the body and brain, before raining down in a profusion of bliss, which not only rejuvenates you, but dissolves your edges like shadows in the sun.

Although you and your woman are equal beings, you are very different creatures. If she has a feminine sexual essence, her core will be fulfilled when love is flowing. For example, she can experience difficulties in her career, but if full love is flowing in her life — with her children, friends, and with you — then her core will be fulfilled.

Not so for you. If you have a masculine sexual essence, then your woman and children can be loving you all day and night, but if your career or mission is obstructed, you will not feel at ease. You won’t even want to share much intimate time with your woman until you have your career or mission back on track.

While it is common sense that she should live a fulfilling and engaging life outside of your relationship, it is sexual wisdom to understand that her feminine essence will always hold the flow of love at its center. That’s just the way it is. This flow of love could be in direct relationship with the divine, although it is usually in relationship with a man.

If you want her to honor and support you in your quest for freedom, you must honor and support her in her love of loving. Her devotion to love has a lot to teach you.

She will point out your weaknesses better than a boot camp drill sergeant. She will reflect your ambiguity or clarity better than any workshop teacher. She will do you better than a whore and give you more loving than you can handle. And all the while she will shower your life with radiant blessing, healing, and enlivenment — if she learns to own her true feminine desires and you learn to own your true masculine desires.

The man is responsible for the woman’s depth of love, or openness of mood, and the woman is responsible for the man’s “erection” or energy in the body.

You realize that you are responsible for your own happiness. Nobody can live your life for you. You must create your own health, success, and happiness.

This sense of self-responsibility is only a partial maturity, however. Beyond self-responsibility lies the responsibility to give your gift. It is important to grow beyond dependence on your intimate partner for your own happiness. But it’s equally important to grow beyond simple independence and autonomy. The next stage of intimacy after personal independence has been attained is the mutual flow of gifting, or serving each other in love.

It is extremely difficult for most women to get our of their mood once they are in it. Your loving intervention is one of your great masculine gifts.

Your masculine gift is to know where you are, where you want to be, and what you need to do to get there. If you don’t know one of these, then you need to discover it by any means necessary. This vision is, essentially, the basic gift you have to offer your woman as well as the world.

Through her touch, her loving, and her attractiveness, she can also give you energy, so that your whole body becomes like and erection, full and alive, and ready to penetrate the world into love.

Your woman may not want to receive your gift. Your woman may resist your gift. And so may the world. But you have no choice. Live at your edge. Love as fully as possible. Let your body be erect with the energy of your deep source. And take full responsibility for giving whatever love you have realized to the world and your woman. Both will seem to refuse you and seduce you, until you can feel through them.

“The divine way or the highway!” It’s the same masculine insistence on direction that a weaker man will demand. But rather than wanting his woman to follow his personal direction, a superior man wants her to move in the direction that most servers her growth in love and happiness. He will settle for nothing less.

Align your own life so that, at least in this present moment, you are living at your edge, fully aligned with your sense of purpose. If you are not absolutely certain that, in this moment, you are living exactly the life you need to, then your woman will feel your lack of clarity, and she will fight any kind of guidance you offer her.

There is nothing to wait for and nobody to blame. Whatever techniques are appropriate, use them. Try talking with your friends, using therapy, practicing meditation or prayer, going on a vision quest, reading scripture, walking in nature, keeping a journal, or studying with a teacher. Remember that your success with any method you choose depends entirely on your actual commitment to discovering your deepest truth and aligning your life with it.

A man rediscovers and fine tunes his purpose in solitude, in challenging situations, and in the company of the men who won’t settle for his bullshit.

If you spend too much time with your woman, you will rub off on each other in the worst way. In order to get along together, she will begin to adopt your masculine patterns of speech, denying her feminine desire to flow in play and pleasure without having to take masculine-style sense or fulfill a purpose. You will begin to adopt her feminine patterns of touch and affection, denying your desire to get down to it, with your mission or your woman. Instead you will find yourself pecking your woman on the cheek or giving her hugs and pats of lovey-dovey reassurance.

The cure for lack of purpose is to be challenged to live at your edge, since you have lost the capacity to live there by yourself.

The two ways to bring you right to your masculine edge of power are austerity and challenge.

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazine. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn’t about truth, love, or the divine.

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living you truth, rather than hiding from it.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel.

And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.

Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel you suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you’re afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

The other means, besides austerity, for rediscovering you masculine core is through challenge.

The more superficial forms of challenge include activities like mountain climbing, ropes courses, competitive sports, and boot camp. These** forms of physical challenge instantly enliven the masculine sense of purpose and direction**, in men and women.

Deeper forms of challenge involve directly giving your gift in ways that have been blocked by your fear. If you have always been afraid of public speaking, you can take on the challenge of speaking in public once a week for three months.

If you fail and miss an appointment one week, the following week you must give three talks. If you have always wanted to write a novel, but could never finish one, you tell your friends that you are going to complete one chapter a week ( or a month ) for the next year.

Every time you don’t complete your weekly goal, you owe your friends $100. If you don’t complete your yearly goal, you owe them $10000.

The point is, there must be a consequence for freezing in the face of fear. There are obvious consequences for freezing in the face of fear when mountain climbing or playing competitive sports.

You must instill consequences throughout the rest of your life, unless you want to cling to the safety net of superficial pleasures.

The most potent forms of masculine realignment involve both austerity and challenge. Go to the middle of the woods, by yourself, with only survival necessities. Nothing to read, nothing to do. Fast from food and don’t sleep for as long as possible. Challenge your attention with some practice, like chanting or ritual movement, so that your attention doesn’t drift or become balmy. Open yourself and wait. Do not cover your suffering. Do not quit before you fall through the hole of your fear and emerge with a vision of your true mission, the unique form of your living sacrifice.

This kind of isolation and challenge is an extreme and potent form of masculine vision questing, but there are more common forms that are useful in everyday life. Spend time everyday in solitude, with no distractions. Just sit, for ten minutes. No fidgeting, no channel surfing, no magazine thumbing. Just be, exactly as you are, not trying to change anything. Stay with your suffering, until you fall through it and intuit the groundless source of your life.

Just as your woman must regularly spend time with only women, you must regularly spend time with only men. At least once a week, get together with your men friends to serve one another. Cut through the bullshit and talk with each other straight. If you feel your friend is wasting his life, tell him so because you love him. Welcome such criticism from your friends. Suggest challenges for each other to take on, in order to bring each other through the fears which limit your surrender in gifting. Always agree on consequences for not persisting in the challenge. For instance, if you agree to ravish your wife for thee hours every other day for a week, then also agree to mow your friend’s yard if you miss a day of ravishment.

You should alternate these kinds of “cutting through the bullshit” gatherings with masculine celebrations. Even during these celebrations, though, there should be a challenge to remain conscious and undistracted. They are not occasions for lapsing from fullness, but for communing beyond fear.

Perhaps you can all go swimming in ice cold water together. Or drink to the point of inebriation then spend the rest of the night chanting hymns of mystery of existence — nobody allowed to drift.

Whatever you do, share as much loving as you can with your friends, without settling for mediocrity or less than each man’s fullest gift.

Make sure that you arrange for your woman’s rejuvenate time and your own. Otherwise, you will rot in the cushions of bargained stagnation and sexual neutralization which pad your true edge of living your gift in relationship.