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Men and Grief (Part 2)
Greetings from a sunny but cool day in Colorado. While the outdoors calls to me and Spring beckons from just a few days away I feel compelled to sit at my screen and write part 2 of what I began on Tuesday. And there is much to explore!
I hope everyone has a chance to connect with a comment I received on Tuesday’s post from Joseph Gelfer. He offers an extraordinarily thoughtful article from the “Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality” for which he is the Executive Editor. The specific article is: “Men, Loss and Spiritual Emergency: Shakespeare, the Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet” by Peter Bray.
In his article Mr. Bray explores grief in the context of Shakespeare’s losses (11 year-old son, Hamnet, and father) around the time he writes “Hamlet.” His other major framework for this exploration is the work of Stanislav and Christina Grof in the areas of pre- and perinatal psychology and transpersonal psychology. There are three elements of this article I would like to pursue today.
The first is a classification of grief itself and human response to grief into what Mr. Bray describes as a spectrum ranging from “instrumental grieving” to “intuitive grieving.” These poles correspond respectively to masculine and feminine approaches; men tend to “prefer ‘problem-focused’ strategies to manage their grief” while women are “generally more accustomed to attending to their emotions and more able to carry out the tasks defined in grief work,” an approach “shown to be marginally more effective.” Essentially men tend toward what I’ve referred to as “stuffing” their grief, getting back to work, on-task, buried in the daily activities of “normal” life; women tend to go into their grief, work with it, perhaps in a grief workshop or bereavement group. The most interesting point of Mr. Bray’s classification approach is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to indicate which strategy is more effective; in fact, “neither gender’s assigned coping strategy in adjustment to grief has yet been conclusively proved superior to the other.” For me this is surprising. But the evidence is thin because men don’t talk much about their grief. This leads me to my second point.
Mr. Bray concludes his well researched and deeply thoughtful article with a call for more research and better tools and means to offer men who find themselves in what Grof labels “Spiritual Emergency,” often triggered by loss. He writes: “there is little awareness in our communities of what consciousness transforming crises as a result of loss might be like for men and it is suggested that such deeply personal events go largely unreported or unrecognized.” Yes, this is my whole point in these posts on “Men and Grief” – we don’t do it well, we don’t have the tools or skills, we are not guided, we don’t talk about it and we don’t even have a base of literature and research to draw from when (or if) we seek help! As men we don’t know how to grieve effectively. So, do we go to war instead?
The third element I would like to point to from Mr. Bray’s observations is the work of Stanislav Grof which forms the structure for much of the article. It is Grof’s explorations and his technologies for inner work which may hold at least one of the keys to reaching a better understanding of loss and grief and finding better ways to cope with these spiritual emergencies. This approach has helped me in my personal life in dealing with loss. Inner work takes many forms and I have explored many, including Grof’s holotropic breath work. It is this inner work, which can range from passive moving toward emptiness meditation to active breath work, writing, chanting, dancing, drumming, sweat-lodge experiences, that can lead to deeper healing and deeper understanding of human reality: “consciousness reality” which extends far beyond the “consensus reality” of our “normal” lives.
There are many ways and tools to help us cope with grief. I will explore those I’ve experienced in tomorrow’s post with the hope that one or more may help you deal with your loss. And we all have loss to deal with.
Men and Grief (Part 1)
Yesterday I wrote about men learning how to nurture and explored the role of women in teaching men. And I argued that perhaps it is not up to women to teach us but rather for us to go inside and find our hearts, find our compassion, find our nurturing spirit there. This is, of course, easy to say. But for many of us it is not so easy to do. And, perhaps there are some stages we need to address, some growth areas to go through before we get all the way to our nurturing spirits.
Men have heart; it is inside them; and they can get in touch with it, frequently do! Too often that heart, that feeling comes bubbling, even bursting out as anger. I’ve encountered angry men much of my life. In fact, again too often, I have been an angry man. Where does this anger come from? Why are men angry and what are they angry about? I believe a lot of our anger comes from stuffing our feelings, way down deep in our dark places. These feelings are unprocessed, unexamined; they are hidden and raw. They come up and out, flashing and hot, as anger; often we may not even have a particularly good cause behind the anger. It doesn’t take much to trigger repressed feelings. And, anger is the one emotion that it seems safe or comfortable for men to express: “men are men” and can be “rightfully angry.”
But how “grown up” is it to only express our feelings as anger? Is there a more conscious way to behave, a more evolved, higher-vibrational way to express our passion?
A first step is to process feelings rather than stuff them. And I believe one of the primal feelings that men stuff is their grief. There has been a lot of excellent work done around this subject. Grief is one of the key motivating forces behind the so called “men’s movement” from the early 1980s spear-headed by wonderful men like Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Michael Meade and the other leaders of the mytho-poetic men’s movement. Robert Bly, extraordinary poet and severe critic of the Viet Nam war, all war actually, examined men’s grief in the context of returning Viet Nam veterans. There is a lot of grief about that war on all sides. It usually was expressed as anger, but the underbelly of that anger was grief. There was a shared grief about that whole era from the late 60s on; and a lot of it remains unprocessed, unexamined. And, it’s pretty clear that few lessons were learned by those of us who lived through that time. But in the 80s some of us began to process some of that grief. It is a long process.
Another of my excellent teachers I am so blessed to have in my life, Martín Prechtel, also does a lot of work around grief. He offers a recording that I highly recommend to everyone; it is a deep expression of something I am trying to get at here; “Grief and Praise” is available: www.floweringmountain.com/CATALOG.html.
We have much to grieve! Some things are immediate and personal, like the loss of a loved one, a parent, a friend; some may be a bit more distant but no less personal, like the loss of life through natural disasters we seem to be experiencing at an accelerating rate; some may be distant in either space or time, like wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or war in Viet Nam, assassinations; and some may be very distant like our national history of slavery and genocide. Once we start digging there is much to grieve!
In the current issue of “Archaeology” there is an article on “Cloning Neanderthals.” Recent evidence indicates that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were in in contact for several thousand years and there was likely some interbreeding. Neanderthals “disappeared” – became extinct – about 30,000 years ago. Did Homo sapiens have anything to do with that extinction process? We will never know, but I wonder if old stories, like Cain and Abel, are some ancient, “cellular memory” of that evolutionary process. And is part of our interest in bringing Neanderthal DNA back to life in some way motivated by our unexamined grief?
Perhaps I reach back too far. And perhaps there is no reason to reach back very far at all. Grief, like so many things to be examined, is like an onion: as one layer is peeled back another is revealed. And the deeper we examine our feelings, especially grief, the deeper we can experience true and healthy emotions.
There is a lot here; I am far from peeling away the layers to get to compassion. I’ll continue this thread on grief in Thursday’s post.
Meanwhile, how are you in touch with your grief?
Men Learning to Nurture
It was a fine weekend. We got Rosemary off to LA safely where she is busy with a business coaching intensive. Meanwhile I stayed home to take care of business! I got to play with numbers from 2009, getting ready for tax time! What a joy…I finally gave up on QuickBooks after getting myself into trouble and turned it all over to our book-keeper this afternoon! Phew, that’s a load off!
We had a very nice Sundays at The Center Celebration yesterday with a great turn-out. It must have been the spring-like weather here in Colorado Springs; people seemed to be out everywhere! While Rosemary is away our friend and colleague, Finbarr Ross, offered the message and meditation at our Celebration. And his words were thoughtful and meaningful! One of his concepts especially stayed with me and I’m still giving it thought.
He began with “we are in the time of the woman.” I definitely subscribe to that; this is exactly what is motivating this blog! We are moving through a time of feminine energy ascendancy to begin to right the balance we are so desperate for now. He concluded that women need to show men the nurturing way. And this is the thought I continue to work with today.
I agree that men need to move toward a more nurturing approach to life. What I’m struggling with is placing the burden of showing men how to nurture on women. Is it their job to teach us this kinder, gentler way of life? As children we were all nurtured in some form by our parents, guardians, some of whom were likely women; many of the fortunate among us were nurtured by loving mothers. And as boys we had friendships with girls in school, teachers, aunts and girl cousins. Did we not learn anything from these associations, many of them loving?
Yet, we were not taught to be nurturing; there was no curriculum, no catechism of stories and myths of men nurturing and caring for others. Quite the opposite. So, while we may have seen many wonderful examples of nurturing, we were not encouraged to emulate those models.
But what can women do now to change this? If men are not taught and men have no motivation to become nurturing creatures, is there something to be done? At the close of yesterday’s Celebration we listened to a lovely piece of music by Catherine Wilson on her album, Seeds of Light; the song: The Answer Lies Within. I believe the answer to how men may become more nurturing lies within the hearts of men themselves. Yes, women can show the way, they can encourage us toward a gentler path, they can demonstrate compassion, they can lead by modeling. Men need to look inside, we need to search for better answers, and as the song goes: “The answer lies within, my friend.”
I have been fortunate through much of my adult life to look within. It was years ago I learned that in my astrology chart my North Node of the Moon is in the sign of Cancer. I don’t want to get technical here, but the North Node points to growth and potential; it points to your lessons. Now it happens that Rosemary is a double Cancer; both her ascendant and moon are in Cancer. Do you think it is coincidental that we have been together for nearly 30 years? And I sure hope I’m learning some of those lessons! Cancer is the sign of caring, of homemaking, of, yes, nurturing! Is it Rosemary’s job to teach me how to be a Cancer? No, it’s my job to learn how.
I have another pointer to my case. Rosemary and I are students of the Enneagram, a model of personality types (I’ve seen it labeled as a psychospiritual typology). Again, I don’t want to get technical here, but I am a type 1, “the perfectionist” – I like everything to work or I will try to fix it so it does work. Rosemary is a type 2, “the helper” – she sees people in need and wants to “nurture” them! Once again my lessons are in my face!
But it’s up to me to see them, to learn them. My nurturing self is inside of me. And with all the modeling, teaching, way-showing in the world at my disposal it is still up to me to find that nurturer with myself.
That nurture is the Divine Feminine energy working within me. Can you find it within yourself?
Men and The Goddess 