Having backbone isn’t all about being strong and brutal and serious; it’s about being open and loving too. The Lover is our power to enjoy our life. It is the part of us that loves and is able to be loved. It’s our masculine sensitivity to beauty and our ability to relate to romantic partners, to have a robust and enjoyable sex life. The Lover sits across from the Warrior. The Warrior is the part of us that is about getting stuff done and hardens us when we need to be firm. The Lover is the part that opens up and lets the guard down to just be, enjoy pleasure, and connect with the world around us.
If your Lover Power is intact and in balance, you will hold the key to loving three essential things: life, sex, and the beauty of everything.
Although it is the ‘softest’ of the Four Powers, it is in many ways the most important because it insures that we attain the Three Keys. The Lover makes sure that our vision and purpose are not just wise, but enjoyable. It helps us to not get too serious or rigid in our spiritual practice, and gives us the ability to vision a beautiful, bullshit-free existence. Instead of a Red Road walking away from the bad, the Lover helps us forge a shining Red Path to the best in ourselves and in life.
Too many of us are frozen. Getting the Lover means thawing out our ability to be open to the full experience of life. It means waking up our senses to appreciate all kinds of beauty and pleasure. It’s about defrosting our emotional body so that we can feel deeply and express our feelings when we need to. Too many men live solely in their heads, all but cut off from their hearts. Black Road men allow themselves basically two feelings: anger and lust. On the Red Road we need to reclaim and enjoy the full spectrum of human emotions. This includes enthusiasm. If a corny sitcom on TV wants to depict a gay or effeminate man, it will usually make him super enthusiastic, as if to say that enthusiasm is un-masculine. The word ‘enthusiasm’ literally means to be filled with Spirit. We get our Lover when we allow ourselves to belly up to the bar of life with great enthusiasm and order everything.
Thawing out and getting our Lover means allowing ourselves to feel, to laugh, to play, to dance – to be fully alive. It’s the completing piece of the Four Powers model. Without the Lover the King is too serious, the Warrior is too brutal, the Mystic is too dry. The Lover gives us access to the spice of life.
It might be obvious, but a big part of the Lover energy is the power to love and be loved. I call this power ‘Russell the Love Muscle.’ I experience it like an actual muscle or power center in me that feels love. In many men, this muscle is weak or frozen. We may ‘know’ that we love something or someone. We might declare our love or demonstrate it with action. But do we really feel love?
Like enthusiasm or spirituality, love as a feeling is something more associated with the feminine realm. As men, we have a huge capacity for love. But our love is different. It comes with a dose of wanting to serve, a protective Papa Bear energy. Men are very nurturing too, but it’s a masculine nurturing energy. If we allow ourselves to feel this nurturing energy, the Lover Power will be more accessible for us. It’s not about becoming feminine or soft, it’s about waking up our deep masculine loving heart and setting it loose on our world. Start noticing your love muscle. Pay attention to what makes it flex; exercise it. Honor your masculine Papa Bear love and start to see areas of your life that need it.
As we awaken our Lover, we also need to pay attention to our need for love. We feel this in the ‘love muscle’ too. The Lover needs to love, but he also needs to be held, needs to be stroked, and taken care of. This aspect of the Lover is a tough one for many men to open up to. It is vulnerability. Some men can only access their softness after sex.
Making ourselves vulnerable can be scary. We might feel that if we open this dimension of our heart, we might be rejected, hurt, and disappointed. Some of us have painful experiences in our past that have caused us to put up walls around our hearts. These walls are for the Black Road. On the Red Road, we learn how to own and operate our hearts and use the heart’s power. Russell the Love Muscle becomes our good friend. Yes, we can get hurt when our heart is open. But we have our King’s vision, our Warrior’s boundaries, and the Mystic’s wisdom to protect us and allow us to love hard.
How strong is your love muscle? What do you love? Who do you love? In what areas of your life is it easy to love? Where is it hard?
Sex is not the only aspect of the Lover energy, but it’s a big one and one that too many men get hung up on. So let’s go there. Our sex energy, like our violent energy, is something that is hard-wired and very strong in men. It doesn’t matter if you are a poon-chasing stud or a feminist, celibate priest – if you’re a man, you have a volcanic sex drive and a basic orientation toward sexual thinking and sexual desire. A man on his Red Road needs to truly own his sexual power and learn how to operate it the same way he does his inner Warrior qualities.
A man on his Red Road needs to truly own his sexual power and learn how to operate it the same way he does his inner Warrior qualities.
It’s funny: men are so sex oriented – even sex obsessed – and yet this is still an area that needs a huge amount of work. There are many reasons why men get hung up in the sex arena. First, there’s a kind of societal thing that keeps our ‘sexy beast’ under wraps. The stereotype for an un-evolved man has him wanting to hump anything that moves. There is some truth to this. Men with healthy libidos do have a ton of sexual wanting. But it’s just not okay to express sexual desire openly in the office, on the bus, on the street. It’s not a big secret that society, especially in the US, is very schizophrenic about sex. On the one hand it’s obsessed with sex: there is sex everywhere – pictures of sexy people on every ad, and sexual stuff all over the place. On the other hand, we still have our puritanical repressed shame about sex and have a very hard time being open about our actual sexual behaviors.
Men walk around thinking about and wanting sex all the time, and most of the time we have to pretend that that’s not what we’re thinking or wanting. I read somewhere that men think about sex 10 times every minute that they are awake. Assuming this is true, how do we make that work for us instead of against us? And how do we shine the light of awareness on our sexuality in a way that makes us more powerful, rather than less powerful?
For most men, on some level, we want sex with anyone who we find attractive. It doesn’t matter if we are in a relationship or not. It doesn’t matter if the situation is appropriate or not. Baba Ram Dass, the great spiritual teacher, once honestly described his sexual mind walking down the street in New York City – filing everyone who passed into one of three categories: potential, competition, or irrelevant. That’s just how it is. It’s a primal desire that is not about our choices in life, or our vision, or what we consider appropriate or wise. Look at all of the great men who have been brought down when they acted on their wanting. The Mystic in us is often sidelined when the Lover is in its primal desire mode, but you can see how the wise counsel of your Mystic is important here.
It is very liberating if we can just let ourselves off the hook for looking. We look at butts, we look at crotches. We look at breasts,1 we imagine having sex with waitresses while they are taking our orders. A beautiful woman talks to us and our mind drifts to imagine our cock in her mouth. It doesn’t matter who they are. If they are young and attractive, we do the same thing with nuns when we see them in their habits. As we move through the world, we undress women with our eyes and are semi-constantly on the look-out for viable sex partners.
This sort of looking, this desire-driven relating has nothing to do with our respect for women or our fidelity to our committed relationships. It’s a beautiful, wild part of us. Of course I am not suggesting that we follow this part of ourselves, or make our life choices accordingly, or act out our fantasies with the waitresses or nuns. I’m just suggesting that we don’t deny our feelings, or pretend they’re not happening, or shame ourselves for having them. These energies get us in trouble when we try to deny them and let them fester in the shadows. We want to be good citizens and not harass women by staring or construction-site hooting and whistling, but there is something really liberating about letting ourselves gaze, letting ourselves appreciate women’s beauty, and allowing ourselves to feel the arousal and sexual interest.
When you get your Lover intact, along with the King, Warrior, and Mystic, you don’t have to be afraid of yourself or your impulses. Your Lover becomes a really enjoyable part of yourself.
One evening, as I rode my motorcycle into the city for a men’s group, I saw my mind do something. It was a warm summer evening and the streets were teaming with people. But I didn’t see any men. Nor did I see any old women – or children. I only saw attractive women of child-bearing age. All over the place. It wasn’t that the other people actually weren’t there; it was that my mind had tuned them out and only saw the potential sex partners. We had a very rich discussion in our group that night about ‘pussy’ and its hold on us.
Allow me to get a little ‘Robert Bly’ for a minute: As boys, we weren’t given any ritual initiation into manhood. We weren’t taken out into the woods and given a spiritual experience. We weren’t taken into a sweat lodge to have a divine vision. There wasn’t a moment when we were taken away by the old men in our community, trained, and blessed into manhood. Most of us ‘became men’ the first time we got into a girl’s pants. Or at least that experience was the most profound experience we had had up to that point in life. It was the closest thing to a spiritual experience; it blew us away and changed us forever. And from that point on, that pussy, that principle, that access to a female’s most vulnerable power spot and the accompanying attention – became our holy grail. We don’t necessarily remember the times our fathers or grandfathers taught us about life, but every man remembers the first time he fingered a girl. We’ve lost interest in the opinions of other men, and our good standing with other men; by and large, we’ve become obsessed with our ability to get laid and get the loving attention of females. If we are to transition from the Black Road to the Red, we need to rearrange this.
When we are unconscious, we will lie for pussy; we will die for pussy. We will betray our best friends and loved ones for the sake of it. Great men of every generation have been brought down by their fascination with it. We follow it into and out of marriages, and make all kinds of life decisions consciously or unconsciously for the sake of having proximity and access to it. This is true for the sexually active among us, and it is just as true for men who never get to have sex. It’s mostly a mental motivational thing. This changes a little bit as men get older. But just a little bit. I once had an older cab driver tell me, ‘The day I realized I was old was the day I realized I would rather have a good dump than a good lay.’
A huge step that every man can take is to just own up to this, recognize his love for it and his desire for it, and then put it in its place. Like everything else in our toolbox, our sexuality and our sexual desire need to be in service to our vision and purpose, instead of vice versa. Within our own psyche, in our own private inner wilderness, we can be unchained, heavy-breathing sexual beasts. But we can also learn how to keep this desire in check. We can find ways to have the excellent sex life that fits with our vision and fulfills us deeply, and then we can take care of the business that we need to take care of. When we have our sexual desire and relationship to it in check, it opens up a whole new world full of all kinds of totally unfuckable people. When we honor and master this aspect of the Lover we can stop deifying women and allow them to simply be women – we can see them as vulnerable human creatures just like us.
What is your relationship to sex and female attention in general? Have you engaged in dishonorable behavior for the sake of sex?
These days, porn is a huge thing. In 2012 the US porn industry was estimated at around $8–10 billion. When we were kids in the 1970s and 1980s, porn meant beaver magazines, Playboy, and occasionally some XXX videos. You needed a great deal of privacy to watch a VHS movie, and often you had to go rent the thing in a store. Now the internet has made porn totally available and its consumption pretty much anonymous. Also, you can get whatever you want. Any fetish, any particular style of virtual sex is available at the end of a few clicks. Many men, if not most men, these days have some kind of relationship with pornography. Of course, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with masturbating with porn, but like the other topics here we want to shed some light on it and see what it’s doing for us and what it might be taking from us.
There’s an argument that porn can be detrimental to our actual sex life. For one thing, it’s just not real. Some porn is more real than others, but at the end of the day we are getting aroused and vicariously getting off on a fake thing. The sex is often much more extreme than the sex we’re having, and it’s lit with professional lights, and usually involves giant cocks on men who are in much better shape than we are. So there is likely some kind of self-esteem issue brewing there too, similar to the kind of thing that happens to girls who are always looking at glamour magazines and comparing themselves to the supermodels in the fashion industry. And then there is the pure training aspect to it too. Usually a man isn’t exactly taking his time with a porn video. Often times the videos online are just short, hardcore vignettes. We watch the most potent thing we can find, to get in, get off, and get out. So every time we quickly ‘rub one out,’ we’re training ourselves to orgasm as fast as we can. This isn’t exactly elite training for a superior Lover. Men who really indulge heavily in porn even report an inability to get hard or orgasm without it. What we’re really hungry for can’t be gotten with an online subscription.
The other thing is that most porn is very fuck-and-suck oriented. You don’t see many porn stars kissing passionately for a long time, or goof-around cuddling, or taking time to worship each other’s bodies slowly and carefully. We have many more erogenous zones than just our cocks and balls. Porn is not going to take time to teach you about any of that. And anyway, even the fucking and sucking is usually fake in porn movies. The actors are using positions and angles that are designed for the camera. Really good sex doesn’t look very good on camera. The kind of penetration or oral stimulation that makes a woman orgasm deeply is not the sort of thing most pornos like to show. These days kids are learning how to have sex online. That’s like learning to drive by watching choreographed car chase scenes on network TV.
Aside from all that, and the bad training it might be giving us, if there is a key problem with our consumption of porn, it’s the same problem that many modern people face in other areas of their lives: we live more in our heads than we do in our bodies. We let the porn stars do all the fucking for us.
If you do enjoy porn I offer you this question: how does the sex you’re having in real life compare to the porn you’re enjoying online? Is there anything you can learn from the porn that can help you in your real sex life? Because of the vast array of things available online, porn can be a useful way to discover what turns us on, or it can give us a supplement of erotic flavors we just can’t get in real life for whatever reason. But beware of porn becoming an out-and-out substitute for a sex life. One of my favorite Zen sayings goes:
Painted cakes do not satisfy hunger.
Along with the vast amount of sex that takes place in our minds and on the internet, if we’re lucky, there is also some sex actually happening for us in real life. This is another area I find is underdeveloped in men. We know we want it, we know we love it when it happens, but we seldom take the time to make it excellent or really explore our sexual boundaries.
It’s relatively easy for men to get off. Most of us don’t need special fantasies or sex positions to have an orgasm. Most of us can do it anytime, anywhere. Unlike women, we don’t need to have a partner with any particular skill to get us off in the most basic sense. We can fuck almost anything and achieve climax. (And most men have to stop after one orgasm.) Because of this, many men get lazy and uncreative when it comes to lovemaking with partners.
Let’s look at laziness first. I believe it is our duty as men to be skilled at lovemaking. We should be able to make women come and please them in a variety of ways. With a little practice, intention, and discipline, we can learn to hold off our orgasm and ‘last longer.’ Most women need more stimulation time than we do to have their own climax. It’s also true that many women have a hard time orgasming during intercourse and need to be stroked or kissed in a particular way to get off. It’s worth it to go out of our way to learn these skills and be able to deeply satisfy our partners sexually. Learn how to be a better kisser. Learn how to give good massages, not just so you get more sex, but for the sake of strengthening your inner Lover.
Many men get lazy and uncreative when it comes to lovemaking with partners.
Men need to be more creative sexually too. It’s really good for men to explore their sexuality. What really turns you on? What are your fantasies? Aside from your cock, do you know what the ‘erogenous zones’ of your body are? We don’t need to know any of this to get off in the most basic way. I’m talking about taking your lovemaking to the next level. If you take the time to explore yourself and slow down in the kinetic sexual moment, you can learn to wake up your entire body to the lovemaking experience. Then it’s not just about your cock and balls: then you’re experiencing sex in every cell. With more indepth training, men can even train themselves to have multiple orgasms or at the very least greatly prolong the length of their orgasms.
It’s like anything else on the Red Road. If we are living our life with backbone, we’re charged with the task of making our sexuality conscious and in line with our vision. This means giving yourself a break for being sexual in the first place, and then looking at the different parts of your sex life and making them the way you want them to be and striving for a kind of excellence in that area of your life. The Lover is not a humper. The Lover experiences sex as a sacred rite.
A huge shift is when we go from a ‘what am I getting’ point of view, to a ‘what am I giving’ point of view. Little boys and guys are always hoping to ‘get some.’ A man with backbone is aware of who he is and what he brings to the table, and he carries himself accordingly.
Jizz
I have to share something here that I learned in my yoga days. Our sexual fluid – aka our jizz – is really powerful stuff. Not only can it make a baby, it also is full of vital energy. If you come too much too often it will deplete you physically and mentally. In ancient India, young students were advised to be celibate and not to masturbate while they were studying, to keep their minds sharp. It wasn’t a moralistic, ‘sex is bad’ thing. The celibacy rule came from an understanding in Ayurvedic medicine that the semen holds lots of what is called ojas. During my years of intense spiritual training, I practiced something called brahmacharya: I was totally celibate, avoided masturbating, and even took measures to avoid wet dreams for about three years. It wasn’t easy, but it gave me superpowers. It was much easier to meditate, and it gave me a tremendous amount of inner strength.
Some football coaches or military commanders know the same principle and advise their boys to abstain from having sex or jacking off before a game or battle. Pay attention to this dynamic for yourself. If you’re coming a lot and find you’re getting depleted, try eating foods like almonds, whole milk, bone marrow, and sweet foods like dates or ice cream. These foods help your body to build that ojas back up if you’re letting too much of it go.
Are you a good lover? Without shaming yourself in any way, do an honest assessment of your level of mastery as a sex partner. If you’re really fearless, ask your most recent partner for a brutally honest performance review. What are some ways that you could improve upon your skill as a lover?
Sex is not the only way that we express our sexuality. The Lover loves sex, and physical pleasure, and human loving, but equally loves any kind of deep connecting. One of the ways that I advise men to break their poontang trance is to learn how to connect to the feminine energies of the universe. Get into the feminine power of nature. Get into the wind, the stars, the woods, the ocean. There’s a deep part of us that gets fed when we allow ourselves to connect with the universe in this way. That Lover part of us doesn’t just want to enjoy women, it wants to enjoy our food and enjoy our work and enjoy good architecture and enjoy the beauties of the natural world. There is only so much female pleasure allotted to a man. There is a great freedom when we learn how to get that part of us fed by sources that are less costly than women.
The Lover is the part of us that enjoys beauty. Like our spiritual intelligence, this is a power we often give away to the women in our lives. The very word beauty has a feminine connotation, but it doesn’t have to. If your Lover is intact, you can have a really clear sense of what you find beautiful or aesthetically appealing. This goes for our appearance, our clothing, the way we maintain our car, and the way we take care of our home.
Whether it’s the craftsmanship in a fine piece of woodwork, the unique flavor of a fine whiskey, or the beauty and grace of a master machine like a car or motorcycle, when men are truly present and savoring the sweetness of something beautiful, they are getting their Lover.
Men also hone their Lover when they really take the time to appreciate art. Art means fine art like visual art and sculpture, but it also includes film, music, even quality television shows. There’s a difference between zoning out and filling your head with garbage watching some stupid TV show, and really taking the time to choose and enjoy quality content with good writing, acting, and cinematography. Same thing goes for music. Find out what it is for you. Whatever your favorite music is, try listening to it loud with some headphones, without distraction. Really get into it and discover what turns you on about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s Mozart, Hank Williams, or Slayer. The Lover loves what he loves, but he wants to love it hard.
The Lover is the part of us that pays attention to things like grooming. Do you care about your hair? Your clothes? Do you take care of your skin? In my father’s day, men would comb their hair and wear pressed clothes every day. It was a regular ritual for men to go to a good barber and get a full treatment, including a shave. You’ll find some instances of this in the metrosexual enclaves of the big cities, but most of us modern straight men tend to be slobs. We don’t take care of our skin, or keep our nails trimmed and clean. We don’t care about how we smell or if our nose hairs are hanging out. All of these things are noticed by women. But even if they don’t notice, we should. It’s not a matter of being pretty, it’s a matter of self-respect and consciousness. On the Red Road a man is aware of what he does and doesn’t do. If you choose to have dry, flaky skin and long ear hair, and that serves your purpose and vision – more power to you! But most of us, if we pay attention, can find room for improvement in our grooming department. There’s something very energizing about tuning this aspect of our manhood. It isn’t about any traditional idea of being well groomed. In my dad’s day that meant clean shaven with short hair. I’m talking about taking care of your grooming whatever style you choose.
More on Being Slobs
When you get your Lover on board, you will not only wear better socks, you’ll stop leaving them on the floor. You will learn to clean up the toilet after you use it, and also pay attention to the smells your leave around the house. It doesn’t matter if you live alone, or if you’re dating, or part of a family. Guys are notorious for being pigs when it comes to these things. Women are utterly turned off by a man-aged boy who talks with his mouth full or leaves piss on the bathroom floor. In general, let’s have some self-respect and, once again, look at what we do and how we do it. The Warrior can live in a foxhole and shit in a bucket. The Lover is the part of us that can improve our surroundings for us and everyone we share our life with.
This kind of awareness can extend beyond our domestic habits and hygiene and include the way we maintain our vehicles, our lawns, our storage spaces – basically whatever is ours to maintain. The Lover in us loves to get into our brand-new beautiful car and smell the leather seats and enjoy the clean, uncluttered newness. Where does he go months later when there’s dust on the dash and all kinds of crap in the folds of the seats? If we take care of our environments and really make it our mission to not be slobs, something in us wakes up. That something is the Lover.
What do you deeply enjoy? Be specific. What music, what food, what art do you deeply love? What can you do to enhance the enjoyment factor in your life? Make a list.
What people, places, and things in your life do you find to be beautiful? Why? Make a list of them and write a few words about each one.
Look at your grooming and the way you present yourself. Are there ways that you can take better care of your appearance? Are there ways in which you’re a slob? Are there other areas of your life or living environment that need beautification?
The Lover – our power to enjoy life. It is the part of us that feels love and other emotions. It’s the part of us that can get goosebumps when we hear a great piece of music. It’s the part of us that wants to build things for a woman that we love.
Sex – a strong man needs to really own his sexual power and learn how to operate it the same way he does his inner Warrior qualities.
Women – when we learn to access feminine beauty in nature and in other ways, we can stop deifying women and chasing them for sex and attention.
Masculine Beauty – the Lover is the part of us that enjoys all kinds of beauty. This includes the way we dress and present ourselves, and the way we take care of our homes and possessions.
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1 Here, because I am heterosexual, I am using female examples. If you’re gay, you can just apply the same ideas to desire for sex with men. Thing is, if you’re gay, you’ve probably worked through a lot of this already.