Reclaiming What It Means To Be A Real Man

My closest friend Paul and I were having our weekly phone visit a few days ago on New Years Day.  We shared how we had experienced and lived out the primary feeling words we had chosen at the beginning of 2013 - the feelings we most wanted to experience for the year and what activities we had engaged in to help us truly feel those words.

The sharing was powerful and very validating, as it always is when we visit - a weekly commitment we've made with each other for the last 16 years.  Being able to bear witness to each other's lives, the ups and the downs, the victories and the challenges, is extremely affirming and encouraging.

At the end of our New Years conversation, we both commented on how blessed and grateful we are to have this time set aside for deep, honest, authentic, sharing of our lives with each other.  We both know many men who simply don't have this experience in their lives for various reasons.

The Challenge of Men, Friendship, and Masculinity

As my last blog post described, I've been thinking a lot lately about the challenge we men have with intimacy with other men, in our friendships, in our professional associations (which manifests in such unhealthy ways in our leadership styles and insecurities).  Many of us have been conditioned since childhood that being a man means primarily being strong all the time, aggressive, not showing too much emotion, choosing confidence over authenticity, and being independent.

So our friendships tend to reflect that picture of masculinity.  We engage in activities - "shoulder to shoulder" rather than "face to face."  We play hard with and against each other.  We joke, we poke fun.  Our primary way of communicating is through sarcasm, trash talking, knocking the other - all in good form, of course.

When I was trying to find a picture for my last blog, and I googled "pictures of men's friendship," out of the hundreds of photos (mostly about men playing sports), there was one showing two men in a face to face conversation.

And we wonder why our culture is so biased when it comes to masculinity and what it means to be a real man.  Taking the time to share honest feelings, to talk about how life is going, to be transparent, empathetic, compassionate, and authentic expressions of need and insufficiency or inadequacy - that's for women.

Significant Research About What It Means to be a Real Man

In truth, though, more and more research is emerging to unabashedly reveal that that picture of masculinity is one-sided, limited, and insufficient to a healthy, strong life.  It's in fact only one piece (and often misused piece, at that) of what it means to be a man.

Dr. Niobe Way, professor of applied pschology at New York University, wrote a Huffington Post blog last November, explaining how the tragic child sex abuse scandal at Penn State by one of the football coaches could have happened ("Penn State and the Crisis of Masculinity").  She charts the typical process of conditioning our boys go through especially in their teen years.

And then she hits the research.  Stunning!

For example, Sociologist Kirsten Springer studied 1,000 middle-aged men, and found that those who most rigidly adhered to ideals of masculinity (such as emotional stoicism and toughness) reported the worst physical health over a 40-year period.

For example, Psychologists Joseph Pleck and James Mahalik also found that adhering to norms of masculinity such as emotional stoicism for boys and men is significantly associated with poor mental and physical health and with high rates of risky behavior and violence.

Not only is our culture's masculine norm producing unhealthiness, it also bleeds its disease profusely into the work place.

Misguided Masculinity Impacts the Workplace

What I see often when I do consulting and coaching in corporations and businesses is that this male leadership model (which tends to refer to employee development and personal growth as "soft skills" as opposed to the "hard skills" of data and financial productivity) ends up

reducing employee engagement, increasing stress, lowering employee loyalty to both cause and company, and ultimately leaving a carnage of bodies and disillusioned minds-hearts-and-spirits in the wake of these leaders.

Many male leaders are simply not getting it because they're acting out of a misguided sense of masculine strength and influence.

It's About Leveraging How We're Really Wired - Being Fully Human

The truth about men is actually counterintuitive.  Notice Dr. Way's description:

"Primatologist Frans De Waal, developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello and evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, among many other scientists, conclude that we need a complete 'overhaul' in our conceptions of human nature to account for the extensive research that underscore our deeply empathic, cooperative, and relational nature. Caring about what others think and feel is the reason why, according to Charles Darwin, we have survived as a species. Being emotionally sensitive and caring about others is not a sign of being 'girly' or 'gay' but a core element of being human, essential for surviving and thriving."

That's profound!  We need to stop raising our boys with the stereotypical masculine image of emotional stoicism, independence, autonomy, and being strong as not showing caring and compassion too much (not exercising all those "girly" qualities).

What I'm talking about is what it means to be truly human - how we as men are in fact wired, and why reclaiming this part is nonnegotiable to both the survival and success of humanity.

This is a huge health issue.  And it's also about how we as men can be most effective, influential, and successful in whatever mission we're engaged in.

My friend Paul and I, in our conversation on New Years Day, ended our time by recommiting ourselves to our regular journey of sharing, accountability, and support.  Right before we hung up the phone, we affirmed to each other what an amazing blessing it is to carve out this sacred space in which we can be real, honest, emotionally aware, and authentic.  I can't imagine not having this kind of friendship in my life.

My friendship with Paul has and is truly making me a better man!

______________________________

Looking for a Speaker?

If you or someone you know in your organization is looking for keynote speakers or workshop teachers for events in your company, congregation, or association gatherings, I would be happy to come speak on this theme or others like it.  And interested in strengths coaching?  Feel free to email me at greg@gregorypnelson.com.

PART 2, The Final Three Steps to Living in the Present Moment

How Good Are You at Being In the Present Moment? Most people I talk to these days all describe their difficulty in being able to live more deeply in the present moment.  The ability to stay present at any given time is becoming a rare art.  We get caught up in the crazy and often overwhelming demands of staying alive and what we think comprises living life.  Consequently, time flies by without us ever really having lived in the moment.  And we either get fixated on the past or anxious about the future.

My last blog post told a zen story from which emerges six powerful steps to learning how to be grounded more deeply in the present.

The Parable

A monk is being chased by a ferocious tiger through the jungle.  He breathlessly comes to a clearing and is faced with a cliff right in front of him with a rope hanging over the side.  With the tiger catching up and no more options available, he quickly grabs the rope and shinnys down along the side of the cliff until he reaches the end of the rope.  He glances up and sees the tiger baring its hungry fangs.  He glances down and sees huge, sharp, jagged rocks beckoning to him 100 feet below.  What should he do?  About that time, two mice begin gnawing on the rope above him.  Now what?

Caught between a rock and a hard place, he suddenly notices something that captures his attention.  It’s a bright red, delectable-looking strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff an arm’s length away.  Hanging on to the rope with one arm and both feet, he reaches out with his other hand, plucks the strawberry, and puts it in his mouth.  Eating it, he exclaims, “This is the most delicious strawberry I believe God has ever made and I have ever tasted.  Yum, yum!”

Quick Summary of the First Three Steps

I describe the first three steps in my last blog post:  First, notice the strawberry; pay attention to what's around you; Second, take a risk and reach for the strawberry; and Third, take it--don't just be a spectator, get involved, participate in life right now.

But if we stopped with these three steps, we wouldn't really be plumbing the present moment for all it can truly give to us.  The final three take us to a deeper, more fulfilling and satisfying experience.  Here are the next three steps the story describes the monk taking.

Step Four:  Eat the strawberry.

Had the monk simply hung there on the rope looking at the beautiful strawberry, or had he even just held it in his hand, admiring its beauty, he would have missed the most delightful potential of that moment.  He had to put it in his mouth and chew it.

I wonder how often we miss out on joy and delight by simply not partaking of what's in front of us?  We're great at analyzing and debating the pros and cons of strawberries.  We dissect the past and philosophize about the future--we're experts with this.  But could we be missing out on the deeper experience of the present, the eating of the strawberry itself?  We stop short of putting it into our mouths and tasting it.  We can talk about it until we're blue in the face, but if we haven't eaten it, we really don't know what we're talking about.

This is why sacred scripture makes this statement:

"Taste and see that the LORD is good."

No taste, no see, no good.  Without taste, everything else is only theory.

Step Five:  Savor the strawberry.

The fact that the monk, hanging on to the rope for dear life, is so present in his moment with the strawberry that he not only enjoys the taste but notices it enough to realize that it's the best strawberry he's ever tasted, shows that he has mastered the practice of savoring.

Savoring means you stay present long enough, you linger over something, that it deepens your enjoyment of it.

When is the last time you truly truly savored something?  When is the last time you stayed with an experience long enough to really really appreciate and delight in it?  When is the last time your lingering over something gave you an focused appreciation of the various nuances of delight caressing your senses in that moment?  That's savoring.

One of the reasons more of us don't savor is because savoring takes time in the moment.  We have to choose to invest more than a split second seeing and tasting something.  We linger and pay attention to what we're experiencing while we're lingering.  We develop vocabulary to describe what we're tasting or sensing or feeling.  And that takes knowledge and awareness, both of which take time to develop.

But if we practice it, we get good at it.  And consequently our delight and enjoyment and focus deepen and widen and profoundly increase.

Step Six:  Give Thanks for the Strawberry.

This is tying the bow on the gift we've just received.  Expressing gratitude.  The monk, in the throes of his culinary ecstasy while hanging precariously on a rope (with tiger above and rocks below), gives thanks to the God who could create such a marvelously-tasting strawberry.

Neuroscience research informs us that expressing gratitude is the strongest, most transformational activity your brain can engage in.  Brain function becomes more balanced, harmonized, and supple; your heart begins to pump in a much more coherent and harmonious rhythm; and biochemical changes trigger a host of healthful responses throughout your body.

Studies how us that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of other benefits:

• Stronger immune systems and lower blood pressure
• Higher levels of positive emotions
• More joy, optimism and happiness
• Acting with more generosity and compassion
• Feeling less lonely and isolated

What's so amazing about this simple practice, step six in living in the present moment, is that it in the end grounds us and anchors us to the delightful moment we've just experienced.  It seals it for us, physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It ties the bow on the gift we just received.

We could learn a great deal from that little old monk who hung there on the rope suspended between a fearful past and uncertain future.  There's always a strawberry.  So look for it, risk a reach for it, take it, eat it, savor it, and express thanks for it.

Your present moments will never be the same again!

Personal Reflections For You:

• When you notice something good in your present moment, do you take the time to taste it, to put it your "mouth" and feel it?
• Describe an experience when you truly savored something, lingered long enough to relish the flavors or delightful nuances to your senses.
• How often do you express thanks and gratitude for your positive experiences in life--whether it's to yourself, to others, or to God?
• Do you have a regular gratitude practice?  What or Why not?

The Spirituality of Stress: Gender and Sexual Orientation Inequality

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is considered one of America's leading scientists doing work on the psychosocial and physiological effects of stress on human life.  He began his ground breaking research back in 1978 by studying baboon troops in Kenya.  One of the things he noticed was how a baboon's status in the troop impacted it's physiological condition.  He noticed, for instance, that the males at the bottom of the hierarchy were thinner and more nervous in general. “They just didn’t look very healthy,” he said. “That’s when I began thinking about how damn stressful it must be to have no status. You never know when you’re going to get beat up. You never get laid. You have to work a lot harder for food.” So he would shoot these baboons with anesthetic darts and then, while they were plunged into sleep, quickly measure their immune system function and the levels of stress hormones and cholesterol in their blood.  What he discovered was stunning.  These lower status baboons were living in a state of chronic stress - they had to fight for everything and continually "bow" to those males at the top of the totem pole.  And this chronic stress, measured by Sapolsky via their blood samples, revealed that it was a profound chemistry problem that he and other specialists have shown to be true over and over again since that discovery.

Here's how a recent article in Wired magazine described it:  When there's stress like this, "a tiny circuit in the base of the brain triggers the release of glucocorticoids, a family of stress hormones that puts the body in a heightened state of alert. The molecules are named after their ability to rapidly increase levels of glucose in the blood, thus providing muscles with a burst of energy. They also shut down all nonessential bodily processes, such as digestion and the immune response. 'This is just the body being efficient,' Sapolsky says. 'When you’re being chased by a lion, you don’t want to waste resources on the small intestine. You’ll ovulate some other time. You need every ounce of energy just to get away.'

"But glucocorticoids have a nasty side effect: When they linger in the bloodstream, as they might due to chronic stress related to low rank, damage accumulates. It’s the physiological version of a government devoting too many resources to its defense department, Sapolsky says. The body is so worried about war that it doesn’t fix the roads or invest in schools. Interestingly, the effects of stress appear particularly toxic to the brain."

One of the profound impacts of Dr. Sapolsky's research was to show how even one's status in a social group led to a state of chronic stress with the related physiological symptoms being able to be clearly measured and repeated.  The long term impact was hugely negative:  increased heart rate and blood pressure, a rise in arterial plaque even when fed a low-fat diet, and more than twice as likely to suffer from heart disease and a correspondingly premature death.

Numerous studies among humans since those early primate studies have reconfirmed the powerful negative effects of stress caused by subordination in position and status.  When people have a sense of control and power over their lives, stress decreases and health increases.  When they don't, stress with all the negative effects, especially when it's chronic, impacts the entire system - and the system ultimately dies.

Here's the way Wired put it:  "The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair."

Or, it's the person who because of gender or sexual orientation feels consigned to a "lower status" in society - who feels a sense of powerless because the policies or practices of an organization and laws of the land conspire against their ability and opportunity to rise to higher levels of position and acceptance in their environment.  The tragic result of creating this state of imposed potential helplessness and powerlessness is that we as a society, whether intentionally or not, are reproducing experiences of chronic stress and sentencing such people to the risks associated with major health problems.  Inequality and prejudice do impact stress levels.

In my opinion, this makes our contemporary religious and social issues of women's ordination and same gender marriage hugely spiritual issues.  The fact that in our religious and political organizations we've developed a hierarchy of acceptance and status, denying equality in position and power and therefore rights and opportunities based upon gender and sexual orientation, means that we are also denying a quality of life with its proven and profound health benefits and longevity to some and not others.  We are ironically mirroring the baboon troops that live purely instinctual survival existences.

Isn't this in distinct contrast to the model of life Jesus described himself coming to bring to all?  "I have come that people will have life, the abundant life!"  (John 10:10)  Jesus was about lifting people up, increasing their quality of life, empowering and building up people in an atmosphere of equality and acceptance.  As opposed to the thief, he pointed out, whose sole purpose is to steal, to kill, to diminish and destroy life for others.

When we develop pyramidal hierarchies where there's an "upper" and a "lower" based upon gender or sexual orientation, and then we develop practices and policies that ensure that the value of that "status" is chronic (and then we top it off by using religious / spiritual language to justify our pyramidal laws and values), we are no better than thieves, stealing from them the abundant, free, and high quality life Jesus came to give them.

Research has also shown another tragic outcome of the state of chronic stress.  The stress response can get hardwired into our system especially when it happens at an early stage in life, making people more vulnerable to stress-related diseases and conditions.  Here's how it works:  "The physiology underlying this response has been elegantly revealed in the laboratory. When lab rats are stressed repeatedly, the amygdala — an almond-shaped nub in the center of the brain — enlarges dramatically. (This swelling comes at the expense of the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory and shrinks under severe stress.) The main job of the amygdala is to perceive danger and help generate the stress response; it’s the brain area turned on by dark alleys and Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, a swollen amygdala means that we’re more likely to notice potential threats in the first place, which means we spend more time in a state of anxiety. (This helps explain why a more active amygdala is closely correlated with atherosclerosis.) The end result is that we become more vulnerable to the very thing that’s killing us."

Meaningful and effective spirituality is about empowering ourselves and others to experience the highest quality life possible.  It's being faithful to the kind of life Jesus said he came to give freely to people - the abundant life - a life where people can become the very best they can be at every stage of life.  And genuine spirituality involves facing the structures, policies, practices, and beliefs that people put into place that are diminishing and destroying life for others - facing them and changing them.  Equality and justice are spiritual issues that impact the quality of life for all people!  To fail to address them is to diminish our own souls, our bodies, and our whole lives - for when even one person in this world is diminished we are all.  And when one person is lifted up, we all are lifted up, we all are enhanced.

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