Let’s Evolve Beyond Toxic Masculinity

It is time to evolve beyond the macho jerk ideal, all spine and no heart. It is also time to evolve beyond the sensitive and caring wimp ideal, all heart and no spine. Heart and spine must be united in a single man, and then gone beyond in the fullest expression of love and consciousness. (Page 10)

It Will Never Be Finished

Most men make the error of thinking that one day it will be done. They think, "If I can work enough, then one day I could rest." Or, "One day my woman will understand something and then she will stop complaining." Or, "I'm only doing this now so that one day I can do what I really want with my life."

The masculine error is to think that eventually things will be different in some fundamental way. They won't. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, and make love with the present moment while giving your unique gift. (Page 14)

Stop Analyzing Your Partner

A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart. When you ask her to analyze her heart's emotions, it's like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It's safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening.

Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of "fixing" them. (Page 71)

You Relate to the World Through Your Partner

The way you relate to your woman's chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world. If you are the kind of man who needs everything placed neatly in its nice little box, then you will also try to box your woman's emotions. (Page 75)

You Will Get Hurt

You're going to get stamped on by the steer, you're going to get wamped by the ocean, and you're going to get hurt by your woman.

This is how you learn. You get up, dust yourself off, swim to shore, and turn and face your woman again. The only options are fear or mastery. (Page 75)

Ego Death Is the Ultimate End

Ego death, absolute surrender to the point of oneness, is the ultimate freedom.

Few men ever release themselves enough to relax in this depth of freedom because they are afraid of absolutely no stress. No stress means no thoughts, no sense of protected self, no mission to accomplish. The end of the masculine game. (Page 127)

Attraction is a Mirage

This is why women are so frustrating to you. Their promise attract you, in one way or another, perhaps many times a day. And yet, through out your life, you have learned and will continue to learn that they cannot make good on the promise. The fulfillment that seems like a woman is actually unavailable in her form. (Page 156)

Surrender to Your Internal Mission

You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. (Page 192)

Your Woman Is an Oracle, Not an Advisor

You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor.

She usually is speaking in a very tangential, but revelatory, style. She is revealing your unconscious habits that prevent your fullest awakening in consciousness. Your unconsciousness causes her pain. She won't say it that way, but that's what she is indicating.

Don't argue with her about the garage and the job interview. That's not what she's talking about, even though that's what she's talking about.

Hear her complaint as the universe giving you signs about your life. Is watching TV right now the best way to use the moment? Sometimes you need the recreation, but sometimes you are just being lazy, trying to forget the responsibilities you have created in your life.