I grow sad every time I am reminded how our culture shapes and spits out emotionally impotent men. They seem to keep popping up all the time. I meet them in person and in the personal narratives I listen to when I sit with women friends. Most of the men who seem to me to be emotionally alive are gay.
It is a strange evolutionary twist that for millennia the culture has preferred and been dominated by emotionally impotent men. The culture obviously leans to something other than male emotional depth and presence, allowing that aspect of our humanity to be assigned primarily to women.
It has certainly been part of my own struggle, to put aside emotional shallowness and timidity, and lunge into my own emotional depth, scattering the traces of that untidy free-fall where ever I go. It takes shedding protective layers, yielding to naked vulnerability and surrender of an abundance of control to probe my emotional core. Becoming emotionally alive is not easy or consistent with being feint of heart.
For me, becoming more capable of focusing concentration has allowed me to relax my mind and allow all the feelings to come out of hiding. Without the jailer-mind in control, the feelings rise to the surface more easily. Without limiting myself by cultural forms and constraints and a notion of how things must be, my emotional life is free to move about. Without my grasping for predictability and a certain future, my inner life is able to breathe and surface.
I have much to do, but I am thrilled to be able to caress the uneven texture of my life without regret, to be comfortable with my emotional nakedness without looking back, to be able to hear and respond to the resounding heartbeat of the universe.