#187 The Missing Initiation: Why Men Struggle to Step Into Their Full Masculinity with Oak Mountain

Beautiful.

We might talk about what those patterns were later, maybe.

What is the difference between masculinity in itself and masculine maturation?

Personally, when I think about masculinity, I would articulate it as one of the two core polar energies that are present in the universe.

So we think about yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, right? the monad, that single unified energy dividing itself into two poles.

And so this masculinity is a universal, it's instinctual, it's natural.

It's not something that is personalized, but it makes itself manifest in the material world.

And so it's more universal.

Maturation then is how that energy has been encoded in what we are as human beings.

Think about genetic lineage, think about ancestral inheritance, and how it makes itself expressed through the body, through the mind, over the lifespan of a man.

If we were explaining this to a sixth grader, how would we also give this comparison?

Masculinity is what makes your dad a man.

Masculine maturation is how he got there.

Okay.

Okay.

Very beautiful.

And what do you think is the challenge? If there is a challenge with really embodying that masculine maturation, like, is there a fear? Like, you know, is there resistance half the time? What do you think comes up for people along this journey?

The fundamental challenge in maturing the masculine energy is our cultural and deficit of rites of passage and so one way to think about it and i can owe this analogy to michael bates another beautiful man in the men's work space he said to me when we had a beautiful conversation on his show that women like women are born but men are made And this is likened to how the rites of passage arrive to a woman on nature's timing, right? With the onset of menses, there's a natural rhythm that comes forward and this beautiful awakening of that creative power of femininity comes online.

It doesn't need to be sought or crafted.

But for men, it's not like this.

And it's never been like this.

What has been the case is that boys, when they start to reach this age where two things are happening, one, they're becoming sexually mature, and two, they're entering into a developmental phase where they're needed more in deeper ways by the tribe.

These two things tend to happen simultaneously.

They are then removed from the matrix of family.

They're removed from mother.