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Chapter 20

Together

"Out of nowhere, in place of where the tree had stood, appeared a tall woman dressed in black from head to foot....Never before had I felt so much love... There are no words to paint what it felt like to be in the hands of the green lady in the black veil." Malidoma Some, Of Water And The Spirit.

Initiation brings a man to a different view of all his emotional and spiritual connections, especially to his relationships with women and the feminine. What does a covenanted relationship between two initiated people look like, especially a committed relationship between a man and a woman? What is the new connection to the feminine after mother separation? Who is the green lady and what does she have to do with initiation? How does a man honor a woman?

Malidoma experienced Spirit as woman in his initiation. His elders expected this epiphany. They knew because they had found her before him. This is why they laughed at him when he made up a tree story about seeing an antelope on its hind legs. He was so embarrassed at being behind the other initiates that he made up a story after fruitlessly sitting in front of the yila tree for three days. The other initiates had all seen long ago. Many elders felt because he was raised by white men, so contaminated by our Western cultural values and even literacy, that he had lost the power "to see through the veil". One of the first things Malidoma saw when his vision pierced the veil was the loving green woman.

In initiation a man separates only for the purpose of reconnecting at a higher spiritual level and a deeper psychological level. Boundaries are not ends in themselves. Men are not meant to be boundaried lone rangers. In initiation a man must separate from his personal mother, then from the mother complex he projects on to women in his life. This separation is so he can find the life force directly, the life force that is often experienced as emanating from the Great Mother, the divine feminine. This is a movement from matter to spirit, from projection to inner knowing, from outside to inside. Once a man has found the deep feminine in himself through initiatory connection with the feminine aspect of God he can then have healthy emotional and spiritual relationships with earthly women. He also is on the brink of learning the joy of community.

Welcome To The Life Force

The mystery of initiation for a man is that he journeys much of his life to return to where he started, with the connection to the life force, with the connection to mother. This is an earthy yet not an earthly mother. The return is to a great Mother, a grand Mother of spirit. The return is to the feminine aspect of God.

Malidoma experienced this feminine aspect as part of his initiation. This feminine aspect represents the abundance and limitlessness of life with yet a personal sense of nurturing and feeling "at home'. When a man feels the connection to this life, with its sense of loving connection to a fruitful power, he finds the strength to move on his mission, facing its inevitable loneliness without discouragement or despair. This life giving connection becomes a trusted comfort and source of emotional and spiritual sustenance. The Bible points to this reality when talking of the birds of the field who neither sow nor reap but are taken care of. Other religions see the divine feminine is forms of goddesses of mercy and compassion such as Kwan Yin. Carl Jung intuited that the mystery of the Assumption of the Virgin Mother into heaven was the psychological epiphany of recognizing the divine feminine, simultaneously balancing and completing the masculine trinity. Regardless of one's theology, mother Mary is a wonderful symbol of God's nurturing, unconditional compassion and love.

The feminine aspect of God, as God the Mother, leads a man to see the universe as nurturing and abundant and accepting. Albert Einstein remarked that the primary question for human beings is whether we live in a friendly universe. Like a healthy mother¹s love, God the Mother gives unconditional love, expecting nothing in return. This is not the conditional love of a father, especially a patriarchal father, who expects obedience in return for protection. This love is not a contract, but a covenant. This love is a constant energy given at all times to any willing to receive it.

The feminine face of God communicates that the life force, a kind of psychic or soul force, radiates continually. The only choice for a man or woman is to accept or not. For a man this acceptance takes initiatory humility. He learns to accept this force as from a mother. Later, as he grows in his psychospiritual path he often finds himself relating to the feminine divine as a partner and lover. He finds himself identifying with the feminine, allowing himself to be penetrated, to receive, to be transformed. This is the humility of giving up control in order to learn in a deeper way of connection. This is the humility of a love relationship when a man trusts his lover's truth.

To an uninitiated man, the feminine in the guise of mother becomes a substitute for the life force. Because he first experiences this life force through his mother, he can become stuck within the mother complex and this illusion of the source of life. To an uninitiated man mother, in the guise of the mother complex, continues to be the higher power as he projects her sense of life on to other women in his life. He makes the important women in his life into goddesses, false goddesses. He loses his soul in his own illusion of her soul force.

Initiation helps a man to see the other side of the veil, beyond his physical mother. As with Malidoma, it is there he will find the source of life. Finding himself in the arms of the green lady he found it "a homecoming of utmost healing. I was sobbing as I had never done before, for I felt that I was in the hands of the ultimate divine being, hands that provided the ultimate sense of acceptance and home that could never be denied."

When a man is initiated he learns to separate the need for a physical and emotional mother from the need for the life force itself. When he does separate he travels on an initiatory bridge from mother to Mother. Within this process he also learns to respect the feminine in every woman he meets.

A man who confronts and integrates the feminine realizes that the bridge from mother to Mother is initiatory space. And this space can be seen as feminine. Initiatory space is the Mother's womb preparing a man for rebirth. It is the Void, which is feminine, where loss is experienced and transformation happens in the feminine fertile darkness. A man who goes through initiation to his rebirth has found the deep feminine in himself and the world. He has found the life force directly. He can then search for a partner for life not for life from a partner.

The Call of Relationship

A newly married couple said, "What shall we do to make our love endure?" Said the Master, "Love other things together."

Most often a man's relationship with a woman as life partner is a man's most challenging and satisfying experience of the blessings of community and human connection.

Many men are driven to initiation after being triggered by the loss of a lover. Most men also find the fruition of their initiation in the intimacy of a love relationship. It is only after a man has started the process of his inner work that he is ready to find a partner. It is only then that he will start to realize that he will be called to a life partner as he is called to a life mission. He will learn that his partner will be part of his return, and that relationship is a sacred part of his journey.

A man who is initiated will not see his beloved primarily as a mother object or need her to be one. He will start to see her as a partner on a life path. In this sense she becomes a confidante, teacher, witness, sharer of the joy of life, a partner in mission. As a man is open to his call he is open to his beloved. Through love he is open to being transformed by the beloved, just as he is called to share from his own initiatory wisdom.

If a man does not feel he can learn from his beloved, and be changed by her witness, he has not found the initiatory lesson of humility. Healthy love means being willing to be changed by the beloved. A man who feels there is little to learn from his beloved has to check his own ego for remnants of patriarchal thinking. Probably this man's partially uninitiated ego is getting in the way. He has not separated from negative father voice that chides him into ignoring and demeaning anything feminine, anything that appears to lack worldly power. He has not learned to listen humbly for truths beyond his own opinions. The primary community of a love relationship presumes that each partner has truths that enrich the other, and each has a caring that heartens the other.

Two initiated people are ultimately called to each other to specifically help each other's mission. There is an intimate connection between a personal initiatory call and the call to love relationships. The mystery is to realize that a love relationship is not just about the two partners and their own comfort. The completion that men and women yearn for happens in their shared spiritual connection and the connection to community that their mission calls them to.

The completion of a love relationship happens when two people come together to create another entity. For most couples the first fruit of their creativity is their children. Though many men and women have not been led through initiation before having children, most couples will learn the challenges and possible joys of a love relationship that grows beyond itself. If a couple can grow through initiation, alone together, they will find that upon their initiatory return they will feel a deep desire to be creative together in serving the community beyond themselves. They will want to create together in ways that neither could do on their own. This is part of the mystery of return.

Often each partner learns to love and respect the mission of the other, sharing in its pain and joy, witnessing to the secret struggles and hidden accomplishments. Sometimes their missions becomes one, and each is called to serve the same people or the same cause. Love always tends toward unity. The mystery of a love relationship will always bring a couple to a deeper unity that opens up to the larger community. The two will learn to love the same things together, as they learn to love each other. The two will love the same things together because they are called to the same things together. This is when the relationship truly becomes sacred.

A Woman's Gift

A man will find that a woman will call him to connection. He will call her to honor her individual spiritual path. Two and one are both honored and balanced.

A woman from some innate place will see the joy of meaningful connection. From deep within will come an archetypal call to form community, especially the deeply personal community of a love relationship. This is why for a woman, even from the beginning, a sexual relationship is a loving connection, very personal, even embodying commitment. Commitment and community come from the same word and the same feminine place. Men have much to learn about sexuality, commitment and community from initiated women.

This natural connection is why women have more of a sense of compassion, a sense of the emotions of the other, much earlier than men. There is a sense of the other and a sense of the whole. Women come by this more naturally, starting with their innate mother energy. Men need to come by this through initiation, as the ego learns to feel beyond itself.

A man will tend to misunderstand why a woman needs to relate in words about her day and her thoughts about the day. He will tend to see the world as a problem to be solved and will go about trying to solve his partner¹s problem. He will wonder why she is talking about things that do not need his attention as warrior and fixer, protector and provider. He will not realize that his wife is trying to connect and form a community of two, to have a common sense of each other and enjoy a common understanding. He will not realize that to her that sharing is the connection and the solution.

Michael Gurian explains this sense of connection from a physiological viewpoint in his fine book What Could He Be Thinking?. Women have much more of a hormone called oxytocin. This is really a feminine hormone related to nurturing and emotional connection. It is present significantly in mothers when dealing with children. It rises in a woman when she feels connection, creating a sense of warmth and trust. It explains some of the archetypal yearning of women for relationship.

Men can have some sense of the woman's need for connection from their own experience of oxytocin. For men oxytocin spikes during sexual orgasm. Men are driven to connect through sexuality because of oxytocin. So a man's sexual drive is related to a woman's drive for connection and emotional intimacy.

Through a women and initiation a man can learn, as Malidoma did, that the emotional connection itself is spiritual. The connection needs no follow up. Just as he didn't want to come back to this reality, a man finds that the connection is more real than anything this side has to offer.

Sexually a woman can teach a man that sexuality is about an emotional connection, a heart connection, and a joyful way to bring two people closer on many levels. Sexuality is a way of joining life forces. Many uninitiated men will join for ego purposes or for a one way sense of comfort. Women can teach a man to raise sexual energy to the heart place where the joy lasts after the hormones recede. A woman can teach that sex is about a journey of deep discovery that can only happen within a committed relationship, that is within a sacred connection of the heart.

A woman will tend to see the love relationship itself as the end of the journey, the culmination of return. She witnesses to the power of the love community wherever love appears. She witnesses to the connection of love and spirit as the end point of all community.

The Gift Of Men

An initiated man can give a woman the witness and support to find her individual spiritual path. Where she will want to do it all together, to be a two, a man will witness to the equally important path of al-oneness.

Every human being must find his or her own psychospiritual direction. All human beings must go alone into the wilderness of their own soul and find the answer to their deepest yearnings. One person cannot live off the happiness or energy or vision or identity of another. To be sure children need to temporarily borrow the energy and wisdom of adults in order to grow, but this is not meant to be a permanent state.

Initiation first means separation. A man witnesses to the solitary path after leave-taking. He witnesses to the solitary quest for the mystery of personal identity. He witnesses to the naked truth of having to face death alone. He witnesses to the hope of finding the call within the initiatory space of his own soul. A man can teach a woman about this sacred separation.

An initiated man will not put relationship ahead of his first duty. He realizes that if he is not clear about his call and connection, he will not find the energy or joy to be a good partner. He needs to be a whole one before he can be a vibrant two. He realizes that one comes before two. He is witness that Spirit must always be first.

A man also witnesses to the common mission of a couple. He sees a community of two, his love relationship, reaching out to the community of many. He experiences the partnership as two people who love each other standing shoulder to shoulder, ready to serve the world beyond personal relationship. He has a feeling of intimacy and closeness in working together like a team. He gets a sense of closeness and satisfaction in teamwork, the give and take of moving together because each has learned and respected each other's moves.

Often, a man will naturally need more solitude than a woman, still feeling a connection while being alone. He will reverence his inner initiatory call by going within regularly to check whether he is indeed living his call in the everyday. He will be drawn to ways to mirror his initiatory experience in solitary activity. Solitary meditation and prayer will echo his initiation and give him the energy to return. John Gray's example of men needing a cave is a perspective on this initiatory need for solitude.

This mirroring of initiatory activity naturally pushes a man back into relationship with a beloved, as initiation pushes a man back toward his community. This dance of movement away and then return is the most comfortable way of intimacy for a man. An initiated woman will realize this natural movement and trusts in her man's return. Michael Gurian calls this male style of relationship intimate separateness. A woman can learn to find her own initiatory space through this witness.

Because a man sees the sacred in the form of mission and service he will tend to see love for his beloved in terms of doing for instead of being with. He will try to make the beloved's life more comfortable and safe. He will also put his energy into creating a space, some say holding space, where his partner can continue to find her own mission and direction. He will provide for her what he needs for himself, an enduring initiatory space, a sacred space. His innate sense of protectiveness will be transformed from protecting and comforting her physical life to protecting her soul space.

Symphony

There are men who have more of a connection to the relationship style of women. There are women who have more of a connection to the relationship style of men. Sometimes, using the terms masculine and feminine energy can illuminate the idea that men and women, through relationship and initiation, need to find a balance within themselves between the masculine and feminine way of relating to each other and to life.

If men will take their relationship seriously they will see their partner as one of their teachers. Through this learning a man will incorporate the feminine into his own life. An initiated finds that the God within is as much feminine as masculine. If a man cannot see his lover as a teacher, he is either uninitiated or with the wrong partner, or both. Respect for women, especially a woman life partner, is a litmus test for how far a man has gone on his initiatory path.

Healthy relationship prepares for initiation. Healthy initiation prepares for relationship. For a man, both entail the meeting, humbly, of the feminine in all its guises. Both entail respect for the feminine as teacher and even guide while holding to the masculine balance. When feminine and masculine are balanced the result is like a symphony. The masculine is the melody, the naked line of direction and story. The feminine is the harmony and counterpoint, creating joy and fullness, reminding that the story is about creating a loving and joyful community.

All chapters of Toward Manhood are archived.

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