Love Note #5: The Slow Bloom: Keys to Cultivating Heartfelt Connections with Men

Dear Friends - 

I have just spent a week with 15 men in New Mexico, sitting in presence, sharing hearts, looking at the ways that men’s conditioning affects a man’s ability to connect to his heart and live and express from there. I am so touched by the courage of these men to step outside the internalized man code to enter into vulnerable places and embrace themselves and each other as they are, regardless of the cultural yardstick about what it means “to be a man.”

One of the things that comes to my heart to write about is the power of slowing down. To slow down to the pace of being, we have to step out of the frenetic pace of the fear-fueled conceptual way that we have been taught to relate to ourselves, to each other and to life. Slowing down is kindness. Slowing down allows the inclusion of aspects of our humanity that don’t have words – the realm of feeling. It allows the slow-blooming heart to unfold. It allows sensitivity to reign. It allows nothing to be skipped over. 

I don’t know if it’s the relatively fewer connections between the two lobes of the brain that male brains have, or if it’s the couple decades that most men spend learning to leave their feeling nature behind in the name of their manhood, and thus have less practice having words, but slowing down for a man to fill out his feeling world is to me necessary in helping to make a space for a man to land all the way here, open, tender, rooted and embodied.

Slowing down is not easy. Many of us are used to zooming along like fighter jets high above the terrain of the moment, the textures, the feels, the heart, and presence. In present day conversation, often we leave few gaps to abide in the threshold between thoughts. We abandon the emergent, the space of presence, the riches of connection–to self, to other, to earth, to sky. When we slow down, we feel, and when we feel, we can start to feel lost, unrehearsed, exposed without a plan, going nowhere, afraid to be mired in what might rise if we point our noticing awareness to what is alive and moving in us, right here and right now.

I find myself saying, pretty much to every man who I hold space for, we have plenty of time, no rush, take your time. I have learned that when I ask most men how they feel about something, or ask a question that involves emotional content for them, I breathe and chill and wait. I had to learn to do this – it didn’t come naturally. I didn’t realize that for many men, accessing feelings needs a shift in mode, with plenty of time for that shifting, and then plenty of time for the accessing, and then plenty of time for finding words for what is often a jumbled heap of many things, including numbness and blankness and no feeling at all.

I have been guilty of haranguing my man-loves into sharing feelings, why don’t you do it like I do, why can’t you tell me how you feel, with a good amount of blame and a dearth of understanding. And in the silences or the evasive responses, I would feel like I wasn’t respected, being listened to, and I would get triggered. Now I get it - they aren’t doing that funny stuff around feelings to torment me or withhold from me. It’s not an easy thing for many men to access their feeling natures and vulnerability on command (or demand), and certainly not in an atmosphere of blame and impatience.

Some years ago when I really started studying men’s conditioning and its effects on men's hearts (out of the love for the men in my life), I started to get that many men have a different relationship to their feeling nature than I do, and much of their past experience around feelings can include ridicule, derision, name-calling, brutalizing and being left for having the wrong feelings or shamed for not being able to produce them on demand. If there was a fundamental principle of offering a space for a man to feel, slowing down has to be it. Slowing down to the pace of being, so that what naturally wants to rise and emerge has the space to do so.

With love,
Jeannie

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