Triumphant: The Journey to Healthy Manhood (eBook)

A. Moriel McClerklin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
198 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-7886-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Triumphant: The Journey to Healthy Manhood, is a non-fiction self-help and inspirational book that addresses the path men must walk to achieve mental and emotional well-being, personal growth, and success. A. Moriel McClerklin shares personal experiences and stories from the lives of other men, to provide a thought-provoking, motivational, and insightful guide for men seeking happiness, love, and prosperity. Triumphant is a great book to read and an excellent gift for family and friends.

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This book is about manhood-healthy manhood! What is healthy manhood? Healthy Manhood is about men making wiser life choices, relating to people in a more positive way, being authentic, acting with greater integrity, living from a deeper set of values, expressing the best qualities of themselves, and thus, finding success and true contentment in life. This book is about the journey to healthy manhood. It contains insights into the personal evolution a man must go through in this particular epoch of human history, with the unique challenges and opportunities it offers men. It describes the problems that men face in today's society and outline steps men must take to live a fulfilling, prosperous, and triumphant life. In today's world, people are challenging the old patriarchal and chauvinistic definitions of manhood, and discarding many of them as outdated. In their place, new definitions of manhood are being written, and rightfully so. Yet, during this period of transition, men are struggling to maintain their footing on the paths of masculinity they're walking today. In fact, all the signs suggest that today's men, young and old, are facing a deep crisis of the soul and spirit, as they try to navigate the challenges of these times. Hence, new maps, guideposts, and guides are needed to help men blaze new trails on their pilgrimage through life. This book is such a guide-shining a light on the paths that men must walk to live a meaningful and fulfilled life. It offers insights from the firsthand experiences of the author and the lives of men he's known or encountered. It's the wisdom from his journey and their journeys. For those men seeking a more positive and powerful expression of manhood, Triumphant: The Journey to Healthy Manhood is a must read.

Textauszug

Introduction:

The Call from the Depths

A deeper self is calling out to men to be known and embraced by them.

—A. Moriel McClerklin

Although I haven’t always lived the best example of myself or fulfilled my highest potential as a person, I’ve always felt a compelling desire to be a better man. Regardless of the weaknesses and shortcomings that may have beset me throughout my life’s journey, I’ve constantly heard the commanding, demanding, exhorting, and encouraging voice of a greater man calling out from inside me. In some moments, the call of the greater man inside brought me to tears from the shame of all the ways I knew I wasn’t measuring up to the man I could be. At other times, the call of the inner man was my strength, enabling me to push through the obstacles and hardships I faced as I climbed to higher aspects of my being.

Yes, I’ve heard the call of something deep inside me, and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard. I don’t think I’m the only man who’s felt the inner pull of a higher, healthier self. Rather, I believe all men share this same constant, inner urging to become someone better than we are. Every man has this calling from deep within, propelling him to express a more humane, mature, and saner version of himself. In fact, I assert:

A deeper self is calling out to men, to be known and embraced by them. The quest to answer this call is leading men to search for a deeper expression of their manhood.

Robert Augustus Masters, in his book To Be a Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power, affirms this deeper calling for men:

There is a deeper life for men, a life in which responsibility and freedom go hand in hand and level upon level, a life in which happiness is rooted not in what we have, but in what we fundamentally are.14

Some men have already heard this call from deep within themselves. They feel an inner nagging and pull upon their manhood—compelling them to grow, evolve, and change for the better. For other men, their struggles have caused them to tune out the call of their higher selves. The cluttered sounds in their head keep them from hearing the inner call, or they’ve become numb to the tug of their souls. Some of us are so busy earning a living until we don’t have time to stop and hear the voice trying to lead us on a triumphant path of manhood.

However, if you’re reading this book and haven’t felt that pull or heard that inner call, just keep living. At some point, through the challenges, the heartaches, the disappointments, the setbacks, the mistakes, the guilt, and the shame, you’ll sense it and feel its tapping upon your soul. And when you come to sense this call—a pull from within, don’t fear it or run away or hide. Instead, face it and allow it to draw and lead you, for it’s the call from your center—your greater self.

Living from A Center

Every man has a higher self, a center, or inner space he must discover and then live from.

One of the greatest discoveries I made on my journey as a man was learning whatever state my life was in, or whoever I’d allow myself to become, there was always a greater man inside me. Plainly, the manhood potential inside me was always greater than the man I was in any moment. However, before I could mine the inside and extract my best qualities, I had to come to understand this truth:

There is awesome potential in every man. Every man is wired for greatness and heroics. Every man holds treasures inside himself to offer to the world. To tap into higher dimensions of ourselves and live our true potential, we only need to acknowledge our ability to grow and change for the better. Undergoing such transformations require us to connect more fully with our center.

What does it mean for a man to live from a center? Living centered requires a man to move beyond his ego self and connect fully and authentically with his deeper self. Although there are many ways to define and describe the ego, I want to characterize the ego as the mental construction of our selfhood and self-identity. Our egos are the voices in our head that define what we believe about who we are, primarily because of influences in our environment. For men, our ego self is the man we look to express because of social norms or examples from other men.

Gold, diamonds, platinum, or other valuable minerals are rarely found on the surface, but deep within the earth. Reaching and extracting them requires digging and working. Seeing our manhood through our egos is like searching the surface for gold. Much of what we’ll find is only what society, or our upbringing, or the influences of others cause us to believe about ourselves. The self-identity we gain from such things can never reveal our true potential.

Can you imagine the man who was told as a boy, “You’re just like your sorry dad,” and who internalize that view of himself, creating a great future for himself? I grew up in the sixties in the south. Can you imagine a Black man gaining a clear sense of the richness of his manhood looking through the cultural lenses of a racist framing of Black manhood? I wouldn’t have discovered the beauty or value of my life listening to such voices. Sadly, many of us men are trying to determine the possibilities of our lives by looking outside ourselves, or by listening to the voice in our head that’s been shaped by external factors.

Expressing Our Authentic Self

We must transcend the ego or the voice in our head, and define our manhood from the inside-out instead of the outside-in. Through understanding the man calling out to us from our depths, we can connect to the real men we are on the inside. To say it another way, through living centered we can express our true or authentic self. Diane Mottl defines authentic this way:

Being authentic means coming from a real place within. It is when our actions and words are congruent with our beliefs and values. It is being ourselves, not an imitation of what we think we should be or have been told we should be.15

Mottl goes on to further explain living authentically:

If we truly believe in living an authentic life, then we must continually learn about ourselves, challenging old beliefs, sorting through our baggage. It is about learning to face fears and doubts, to be able to reach deeply within ourselves to find out what makes our heart sing, our spirit soar. It is finding where our authentic self feels the most alive, free and unburdened—and then having the courage to live from this place.16

Mottl’s definition is helpful for understanding the path to authentic living. Walking the authentic path means not accepting all our past manhood programming. It entails not living based on false notions of what it means to be a real man and digging deeper inside ourselves to understand how to live a meaningful and fulfilled life.

Living authentically also requires us to develop the emotional maturity to admit to our faults and flaws and work on making changes so we can live out the best and highest expression of ourselves. Additionally, we must be able to create healthy paradigms, align our values and actions, develop self-control, engage in self-care, and learn healthy ways to love others. That’s why I’m addressing these issues in this book.

The Journey Inward

Living authentically requires men to become skilled at journeying inside ourselves. Most of our remarkable stories about men involve a journey. However, that journey is not the movement from one physical place to another, but from one dimension of ourselves to a higher dimension. Our journey is not one that can be measured in miles traveled, but in our personal growth and maturity.

The hero’s journey we celebrate are stories of men facing trials, navigating through perils, and fighting demons without and within along their triumphant journey through life. These men are our heroes because facing their travails produced inward changes that allowed them to express the noblest and highest aspects of their manhood.

This journey to deeper and healthier dimensions of ourselves is worth celebrating, for this is the true journey of our manhood. Of this inward journey, Christopher Harding, in Wingspan: Inside the Men’s Movement declared: “It is this idea of the journey inward, every man an explorer and hero as he faces his inner self that suits us as men today.”17

Many ancient societies understood that men could only reach their highest states by successfully navigating through several life stages (making shifts in dimensions of ourselves starting at boyhood and continuing through to mature manhood). Some...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.8.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-5439-7886-X / 154397886X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5439-7886-5 / 9781543978865