WAKING UP: Men Reclaiming Our Inspiration

Would the boy you once were be inspired by the man you’ve become? – Nic Askew

This 12-meeting study and process group for men will explore the pathway to discovering our masculine gifts, and offering those gifts through our relationships, families, friendships and work. The group will be a place of refuge, challenge and acceptance where members will engage with new ideas about relating to ourselves, our partners and families, and our work in the world. As a process group, we will look at our interactions within the group as a reflection of our interactions with the world. As a working group, we will support each other in identifying and working through the challenges which keep us from living our lives more fully.

The primary work in meetings will be the focus on consciously finding our right relationship with ourselves, our lives, and each other. We will look at physical, spiritual, emotional, sexual, and psychological ways of offering our gifts to the world, and pathways to doing that. The group will do a small amount of reading each week from writings by David Deida, Rick Belden, Chogyam Trungpa and others to open up new areas for exploration of our full role in the world. We will explore mindfulness, and use this skill to explore barriers to true engagement with ourselves and our world.

This group will be comprised of six members and two leaders. All members will commit for the duration of the group. (It is understood that absences are unavoidable at times.) During the group, the leaders will offer experiential training on what is needed to develop and maintain an effective on-going, self-sustaining group. If there is interest, the foundation of this subsequent group will be established from interested men in the group with the support and consultation of the group leaders. After the initial stages of the new group, leaders will be available in a consultative capacity as needed.

Details
When: 5:30 – 7:00pm on Wednesdays beginning August 31 and ending November 16
Where: Sol Associates, 3400 Kerbey Lane
Group leaders: Steve Milan, LCSW and Rupesh Chhagan, LAc
Cost: $50 per session payable at the start of each month. Discount available if paid in full in advance. If finances are the only barrier to joining, please contact us to discuss accommodations based on need.

Please call Steve at 589-5164 or Rupesh at 917-3404 to sign up or to get more information.

Signing Up: Anyone interested in participating must meet with Steve or Rupesh once before the group starts to assure that the goals of the group are clear, and that this group is an appropriate venue for this work. There is no cost for this meeting.

This is a great opportunity for men in the Austin area who are ready to explore the possibilities of deeper relationship with self and others in a safe, supportive environment, and I’m honored that some of my work will be included as a resource.

My poem “reverie” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle. This one is just about a month old, although I actually started it in January 2010. Started it, got stuck, forgot about it, and then picked it back up and finished it about 18 months later. Very unusual for me to do that. Usually, if I don’t wrap ‘em up within a day or two, the moment passes and that’s the end of it.

I’m always looking for her. Always. I seem them everywhere, but not her. Did she already pass through my life and I missed her somehow? From a purely statistical standpoint, I know that if I counted up all the relationships, love affairs, dates, crushes, friendships, random encounters, near misses, and failed attempts, those numbers alone would lead me to the conclusion that I should have found her by now.

The numbers, oh the numbers. Much of the time now I feel like there isn’t room for even one more woman in my head, much less my heart. Where do I put them all? Every woman I’ve ever wanted, touched, felt, loved is still with me, even the ones I think I’ve forgotten. I add to the list every time I’m in the grocery store. “I want her and her and her …” But I don’t really want her and her and her. I never did. I want the only one I’ve ever wanted. I want her.

A week or so ago, during one of my drawing sessions, I found myself drawing one page after another of old girlfriends. Some of them anyway. It would’ve taken a lot more time than I had that morning to draw a page for all of them.

I suppose it would actually be more accurate to characterize the subject of this drawing as a near-girlfriend than as a girlfriend. That “girlfriend or not” line was more than a little fuzzy more than a few times with more than a few women. In this particular case, the fuse was lit and all engines were firing but the rocket never left the launch pad. The mission was aborted (not by me) before takeoff due to extra-relational complications (not mine).

Every time I hear the old Cars tune “Drive” (which was big at the time as well as apropos to the situation) I think of her. Kinda wish I didn’t. Not a great outcome for me. Most of ‘em weren’t. The next one was a helluva lot worse.

Today’s poem on video, “wild cactus dancer”, is from part three (“intimacy and illusion”) of my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within.

It didn’t take me a long time to write this one, but it took me about fifteen years to get ready to write it.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Today’s poem, “fused at the wound”, is from part three (“dance of the unloved child”) of Iron Man Family Outing. This is a poem that seems to resonate very strongly with a lot of people, men and women alike, perhaps more than anything else I’ve written so far.

While preparing this post, I stumbled across a transcript of a video I made a couple of years ago in which I discussed this poem. Both the transcript and the video have been unpublished up to this point. The video was made with a webcam on my old PC and the quality is not too good, so it’s not likely I’ll ever use it. But I think the transcript is worth putting up as a companion to the more recently recorded video reading of the poem that I’m posting today.

Here’s what I had to say about this poem:

The stuff that was going on in my home as a child, the dynamic between my parents, between myself and each of my parents, was not good training, not a very good education for me as I went into adulthood and attempted to form my own intimate relationships, my own partnerships with women. Things really didn’t go well, and they went spectacularly unwell a lot of the time.

And so this is one of the poems that I’ve written about a situation where I was living with a woman. I really loved her; we loved each other. It started out great, but it was going south and both of us knew it and neither one of us wanted to admit it. And neither one of us knew what to do about it either. Sooner or later somebody was gonna have to go. But at the time I wrote this, we were still in that state where the decision about who was gonna go first was undecided.

And typically for me, I’d rather let the other person go first ’cause I wanted to be the good guy. I didn’t want to be the one that walked out, the one that gave up, although I certainly acted as if I didn’t want to be there a lot of the time, which is a good enough reason for somebody else to leave. But I just didn’t want to be the bad guy. I’d grown up with a man who was, that I perceived as, a bad guy. My mom basically did everything she could to reinforce the belief that he was the bad guy, and I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to be the one that ruined everything.

So anyway, this poem is about that uneasy state when both people have realized that this isn’t gonna work out but nobody’s ready to go yet.

I guess the additional aspect of what was going on here was that I had started my healing process, I had started to recover, but it was still very early in the process and the relationship was not moving in the same direction that I was moving in personally, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

As I said, I had strong feelings for this woman, but the whole premise of the relationship, the way that I entered it and what I thought it was all about and what I thought I was supposed to do, I had realized that was false and that it wasn’t going to work. But I still wasn’t at a point where I knew what to do instead.

So that’s basically where things ended, unfortunately. I guess fortunately for her, and I guess for both of us. I mean, she moved on and she went to somebody else and has a very nice family now and that’s what she wanted. And I went … I went somewhere else. I went somewhere where she didn’t want to go and didn’t need to go. So it worked out the way that it should have.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

Having read the book, I can’t think of a higher recommendation than this: I sure wish I’d had this book, or one like it, when I was a young man. Even at the “advanced” age of 53, I feel like I’ve gained something from reading it. It’s also reminded me of how fortunate I am that some of the poor decisions I made and risks I took while stumbling through life as a teen and a young man didn’t have far more severe consequences for me, and potentially for others, than they did.

Hafter’s commitment to the welfare of boys and young men, and to helping them make smart choices during their formative years that will not come back to haunt them later in life, is evident on every page. He is clear, direct, real, and wise, a compassionate pragmatist and a knowing, straight-talking, much-needed voice of experience that so many boys and young men lack in their lives.

Ideally, every boy and young man would have a mentor like Hafter, but we’re not there yet. For now, we’re fortunate to have a book like this one to offer as a resource to the many boys and men who desperately need a source of caring, practical masculine wisdom and guidance that talks like men talk, neither puts them down nor idealizes them, and pulls no punches when it comes to exploring the realities of choices and consequences they will face in life. I hope this book finds the large audience it so richly deserves.

For more information, visit http://growingballs.com.

(PDF version)

knock me out
I mean you
knock me out
I mean you
crank me up
I mean you
scare me baby but
I’m alive and I can
take it.

(PDF version)

silver blue moon

alone …
together …
alone …
together …

waves lap the shores of a silver blue moon
too soon to tell if I will love you

but time knows the answer.

(PDF version)

Material from Iron Man Family Outing and Scapegoat’s Cross will be used in the group as follows:

The group will do a small amount of reading each week from writings by David Deida, Rick Belden, Chogyam Trungpa and others as a starting point for seeing our full role in the world. We will explore mindfulness, and use this skill to explore barriers to authentic engagement with ourselves and our world.

I’m honored that some of my work will be included as a resource and encourage men in the Austin area to consider what they might gain from participating in this group experience.

For full details about the group, click here. For additional information, contact group leader Steve Milan.

Update (09/19/10): The start date for the group has been postponed two weeks. It is now scheduled to begin on September 29. Contact Steve Milan if you’re interested in finding out more.

a single thought

a newspaper rustles
a ball bounces
and I think of you
because that’s all I have now
well
have ever had of you
a thought on my brain
you gave me no more
so I left
and here I lay
with another man
in his bed

and it was only a few months ago
you were inside of me
and we talked about having babies

Trisha Freeman

Did you feel it? Bam! A little shot of reality, personal and true. Very tight, not a wasted word, and so real it hurts. This is the kind of poetry I like the best.

“wild cactus dancer”
“last trip to the doll house”
“shadow world monsters”
“how far down”
“secret children”
“waterfall”
“out of body”
“the day my father died”

I hope this new preview format with additional excerpts gives everyone a better sense of the full scope of the book and the material within. The preview page for Scapegoat’s Cross is located at http://rickbelden.com/new_book.

stubborn and impatient
breasts like perfect teardrops
voracious wounded heart
swinging from man to man.

my love for you was animal fierce
and gravity absolute
heart love
brain love
beast love
soul love
you had me all the way
my life was bound to yours
every cell in my body
ate and drank and wept and slept with you
you swept through me like a blizzard
I wanted no one else.

I knew you before I knew you
we gave birth to one another
we howled together on hillsides in the dark
we flowed out of volcanoes hand in hand
burning everything in our path
merging and cooling
into lakes of glassy black diamonds.

I would’ve stood in the sun for you
until I burst into flames
I would’ve stood in the wind for you
until I was blown to pieces
but it wasn’t enough.

someone put a little black hole in your heart
I thought I could fill it up
I tried but I couldn’t
you needed more than I could give you
you could never believe that I loved you
no matter what I said
no matter what I did
you never knew
how completely
I adored you.

(PDF version | Video version)

* “thrashing”
* “meat for the machine”
* “bottom line guilt trips”

Warning:
“meat for the machine” is a very raw, super intense take on dysfunctional sexual relationship.

Parts one (“reflection / refraction”) and two (“male / female”) of the three-part “Iron Man Family Outtakes” series are now complete. Next up: part three.

Material from Iron Man Family Outing and Scapegoat’s Cross will be used in the group as follows:

The group will do a small amount of reading each week from writings by David Deida, Rick Belden, Chogyam Trungpa and others as a starting point for seeing our full role in the world. These writings have very different takes on the journey, and we will work with their ideas to find our own path.

This is a great opportunity for men who are ready to explore the possibilities of deeper relationship with self and others in a safe, supportive environment, and I’m honored that some of my work will be included as a resource.

For full details about the group, click here. For additional information, contact group leader Steve Milan.

Update (05/26/10): I received an email from Steve Milan this week announcing that this group is full and he is now in the process of forming a second. Here’s the message from Steve:

I’m again happy to announce that our first summertime Living Fully As Man group which I announced two weeks ago is full and we had some additional interest, so I am looking at adding a second group (co-led this time by Shelley Imholte, LMSW) …

Our second group will start in one or two weeks depending on how long it takes us to get enough participants. This second group will take place from 7:30 until 9PM, also on Wednesday nights. It will be 9 or 10 sessions long with the final meeting on August 4th …

I have led a similar group in the past with Shelley, and she is quite a courageous woman and talented therapist. She was well accepted and appreciated by the group members, and the work was astounding.

Please contact group leader Steve Milan or co-leader Shelley Imholte if you’re interested in joining the group or need more information.

As a man in his early 50s who’s been single for a long time, I’ve encountered an enormous number of women who are frustrated by their lack of success in finding a “good man.” I’ve also found that many of these women (and I’m talking about women who are independent, intelligent, and capable) have ridiculous expectations that many men simply cannot satisfy.

Women who are 5’2″ are “looking for a good man” who’s at least 5’10″. Women who make 50K a year are “looking for a good man” who makes at least 75K. Women who make 75K a year are “looking for a good man” who makes at least 100K. And so on.

Many of the single women I’ve met who are “looking for a good man” have also demonstrated an almost pathological degree of self-centered behavior. I recently had a 45 minute phone conversation with a woman I met through a dating website. It was our very first call. She talked about herself the entire time and never asked even a single question about me. When I ended the conversation, she wanted to know if I was going to call her again. When I said no, she sounded disappointed and confused.

I wish I could say that the experience was unusual, but it wasn’t. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times in the last ten years that I’ve had a prolonged “conversation” with a single woman who talked non-stop about herself the entire time, without missing a beat and without showing even a flicker of interest in me beyond my role as a receiver for her egocentric broadcast.

I’ve also noticed that many of the women I’ve met who just can’t find a “good man” are quite comfortable going on about what rotten, useless idiots men are. One single woman I know would positively light up with enthusiasm, bordering on joy, when telling me about getting together with her female friends (married and single) to laugh about the moronic antics of their clownish, clueless husbands and boyfriends. I cannot recall, nor can I imagine, ever getting together with any of my male friends to laugh it up about how stupid and deficient the women in our lives are. Nor would I want to.

This same woman plowed through bodice-ripper romance novels as fast as she could turn the pages and once asked me if I thought she should get back together with an ex who’d previously cheated on her twice. She considered me boring and once told me I was “abnormally sensitive” (not a compliment). She also told me I was obviously unable to commit to a relationship because I didn’t have any plants or pets in my home at the time, one of many “facts” about men that she frequently cited from the “Venus and Mars” school of self-help books she regularly read along with the romance novels.

I agree, and always have agreed, with what Kellen said in her post:

A good man needs a good woman to stand beside and work with him to build their life together.

What I want, what I’ve always wanted, is a partner and a peer. Two equals who work together, as individuals and as a couple, for the betterment of both. And I’ve always assumed that women wanted the same thing. However, I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion, based on my inherently limited experience as one person, that there are an awful lot of women out there who believe a man’s function in a relationship is to take care of and entertain them.

The profiles I see on dating websites consistently emphasize three qualities that women in their 40s and early 50s are seeking in men: security, excitement, and fun. You must be successful. You must love your job. You must be financially secure. You must be in great shape and a good dancer. You must wine and dine. You must be well-traveled and available for frequent vacation trips to multiple destinations, domestic and international. You must be sensitive when she needs you to be and “manly” the rest of the time. You must defer when she feels like making decisions and “take charge” when she doesn’t. And of course, you must be at least 5’10″ to satisfy the requirements of even the most diminutive heightists. (The average height for an adult male in the United States is 5’9″. I’m 5’8″.)

In the real world, many good men are not 5’10″. In the real world, many good men demonstrate their capacity for commitment every day by doing jobs they don’t like because they don’t have, or don’t know, another way to make a living. They’re not in great shape and they’re trying to do something about it, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. They live quiet lives and they can’t dance worth a lick. They’d love to enjoy expensive meals, expensive clothes, expensive concerts, and expensive trips here and there, but they’re trying to live within their means and save some money for a retirement that may never come.

In the real world, good men have financial issues, health issues, family issues, emotional issues, you name it … just like women do. They’re pressed for time. They’re stressed at work. They’re doing their best just to hang in there sometimes. They want to do better, to be better, and they’re trying. They’re works in progress … just like women are.

For those of us who are unable to make ourselves taller, richer, more “successful” or more “interesting/exciting” the prospects can appear rather dim. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of “good men” are simply taking themselves out of the game these days for that very reason. I know I have. I’ve been trying to get back in there again, but it sure hasn’t been going very well so far.

Do I sound frustrated? I am. I know there must be single, attractive, available, self-aware, self-possessed women out there, maybe lots of them, who don’t fit the profile I’ve been describing in this post, but for whatever reason, I’m not meeting them. I’m still hoping to find one, but optimism is wearing thin as the years (and the one-sided conversations) wear on.

Addendum: Shortly after I wrote this post, a trusted female friend advised me that I should list my height as at least 5’9″ on dating websites because all of the single women she knows assume that men are lying about their heights in their profiles. Therefore, listing my true height (5’8″) would lead these women to believe that I’m actually shorter than I am.

So in order to appear attractive, I have to lie, because the women looking at my profile will assume I’m lying. I wonder if women assume men are lying about their incomes as well. And who knows what else.

This is insane. Is this really how men and women want to interact with one another?

Thanks to my friend Jack Kammer for encouraging me to publish this post.

BEING MAN (click here for details)
Group leader: Steve Milan, LCSW
Group Co-Leader: Shelley Imholte, LMSW

LIVING FULLY AS MAN (click here for details)
Group leader: Steve Milan, LCSW
Assistant leader: Rupesh Chhagan

Material from Iron Man Family Outing and Scapegoat’s Cross will be used in both groups as follows:

The group will do a small amount of reading each week from writings by David Deida, Rick Belden, Chogyam Trungpa and others as a starting point for seeing our full role in the world. These writings have different takes on the journey of being, and we will work with these alternative perspectives to find our own path.

These groups are a great opportunity for men who are looking to move forward into deeper relationship with self and others, and I’m honored that some of my work will be included as a resource.

there are four volcanoes nearby
in various stages of eruption and
pre-eruption.

one of them has a restaurant atop the crater
people are still there eating.

I can’t believe they haven’t left yet.

(PDF version)

temptation + obligation (firetrap dream #2)

I’m sitting between two women
the woman on my right is my girlfriend
the woman on my left is a friend of hers
her friend is incredibly warm + sexy.

we’re sitting on top of a bus
the bus is parked on the side of the street
we’re watching people come back from fighting the fire
it’s like a parade.

her friend starts
coming on to me
flirting with me
she asks me what my birthstone is
she tells me
how attractive I am
how much sexual power she feels around me
she begins to kiss the side of my face
her lips are warm full + soft
I like it.

my girlfriend starts to get upset
in her usual restrained way
I’m really leaning on her + now
her friend’s really leaning on me + I feel like
this isn’t fair to my girlfriend at all.

(PDF version)

(PDF version)

I watched the empty branches
sway and wave at me
in the cold blue sky
clear blue and still
like the eyes I still love
eyes I remember
from this life and others
eyes I remember
and won’t see again.

(PDF version)