The Ways of Friendship
I often say that if I was to start a church it would be called the “Church of Co-Evolution Through Friendship.”
One of the most important findings in the research that I did before launching the Better Men Project is that most men don’t have a healthy number of authentic friendships with other men. These findings have been confirmed over and over again. The absence of authentic relationships with men is literally killing men. Men are dying deaths of loneliness and despair.
This loneliness can also cause many men to live in such nihilistic resentment that they cause devastating suffering in the world around them.
Can you do anything about that? You are, after all, striving to become a better man. What could you do in 2023 to nurture the friendships in your life? And, if those friendships are healthy and well tended to, can you be that man that goes out of your way to extend yourself in friendship to a man that might not even know how desperately they need it?
I was already planning to write to you about friendship today. When a dear friend of mine, the wife of one of our most committed participants, shared this incredible reading with me. The reading is about transformation. But it really struck me in its reference to friendship.
Some Steps:
Make sure you have authentic friendships and you nurture them. These must extend beyond your relationship with your partner if you have a partner.
Once you are resourced with a certain wealth of friendship, extend your friendship to others that likely need it. These early stages should start with the basics of trust building. Actually having fun together. And, over time, making room to share feelings, aspirations, and challenges with each other. Here, you become the first to open the door and to take the risk. Masculinity demands your courage.
All of our truest friendships should be moving in the direction of your becoming the friend “who will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves, so that they may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a ‘raft that leads to the far shore.’"
Here is the reading that was shared:
The Way of Transformation
Those who, being really on the Way, fall upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers refuge and comfort and encourages the old self to survive. Rather they will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves, so that they may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a "raft that leads to the far shore."
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible arise within us. In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows us to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble us.
On the contrary, practice should teach us to let ourselves be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken, and battered -that is to say, it should enable us to dare to let go our futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that we may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose us, that which awaits us beyond the world of opposites.
The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious- a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces.
Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more we learn wholeheartedly to confront the world that threatens us with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.
(Adapted from The Way of Transformation, by Karlfried Graf Durkheim.)
Stay intentional about our New Year.
Saludos,
Gibrán