Sam Eager was a thinker, scholar, and writer of life-changing books together with Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Creativeness (1986), Your Mythic Journey (1990), and Fireplace within the Stomach: On Being a Man (1991). He was additionally a mentor, buddy, and colleague. The April 4, 2025 obituary in The New York Occasions, headlined: Sam Eager, Thinker of the Males’s Motion, Is Useless at 93.
“Solely males perceive the key fears that go along with the territory of masculinity,”
Eager was quoted saying and the obituary went on to say,
“His message resonated: His e-book Fireplace within the Stomach was a greatest vendor.”
The article went on to say,
“Mr. Eager, who described himself as having been ‘overeducated at Harvard and Princeton’, fled academia within the Nineteen Sixties for California, the place he led self-help workshops and wrote greater than a dozen books.”
Sam and I lived in the identical space of northern California and have been each in long-standing males’s teams, which I wrote about lately, “Why Becoming a member of a Males’s Group Could Be the Most Essential Resolution of Your Life.” In my e-book, The Warrior’s Journey Residence: Therapeutic Males, Therapeutic the Planet, I stated,
“The acceptance of weak spot and energy is an important a part of the warrior’s journey residence.”
In his e-book, Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam Eager provides a powerful description of this section of a person’s hero’s journey:
“This isn’t the enjoyable a part of the a part of the journey. It’s spelunking in Plato’s cave, feeling our manner by the illusions we have now mistaken for actuality, crawling by the drain sewers the place the forbidden ‘unmanly’ emotions dwell, confronting the demons and darkish shadows which have held us captive from their underground haunts. At this stage of the journey, we should make use of the warrior’s fierceness, braveness, and aggression to interrupt by the rigidities of previous buildings of manhood, and discover the darkish and taboo unfavorable feelings that make up the shadow of contemporary manhood.”
One of the vital trustworthy and revealing points of the trendy male shadow that we talk about and discover within the teams that Sam and I have been concerned with is our ambivalence in the direction of girls. In my most up-to-date e-book, Lengthy Stay Males! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Males, Shut the Lifespan Hole, and Supply Hope to Humanity, I shared Sam’s revealing insights in part I titled, “Males Really feel Engulfed by WOMAN.”
I stated,
“I’ve identified Sam for a few years, and I consider he gives insights into why males are the way in which they’re that may assist us higher perceive males’s starvation for ladies, together with our anger and worry of ladies.”
In Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam says,
“It was gradual in dawning on me that WOMAN had an awesome affect on my life and on the lives of all the boys I knew. I’m not speaking about girls, the precise flesh-and-blood creatures, however about WOMEN, these larger-than-life shadowy feminine figures who inhabit our imaginations, inform our feelings, and not directly give form to lots of our actions.”
In case you knew Sam, who was tall, handsome, and profitable, you may be as stunned as I used to be when he shared the deeper reality about his life.
“From all outward appearances, I used to be a efficiently individuated man. I had set my profession course early, doggedly caught to the self-discipline of graduate college by a few years and levels, and by my mid-thirties was vigorously pursuing the lifetime of a professor and author. Like most males, I used to be devoting most of my vitality and a focus to work and occupation.”
I may determine with Eager’s early expertise. My very own life trajectory was comparable as was “the remainder of the story.” Sam continues saying,
“But when the textual content of my life was ‘profitable unbiased man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All of the whereas I used to be advancing in my occupation, I used to be engaged in an infinite battle to seek out the ‘proper’ girl, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a very good marriage.”
Sam went on to say,
“I agonized over intercourse — was I ok? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I all the time potent? What ought to I do about my needs for different girls? The extra troubled my marriage turned, the tougher I attempted to get it proper. I labored at communication, intercourse, and all the things else till I turned self-obsessed. Divorce lastly broke the symbiotic mother-son, father-daughter sample of my first marriage.”
Sam’s story is like my very own and that of hundreds of thousands of males. After we are engulfed by WOMAN, we’re out of contact with our true selves. We venture all our hopes for a lifetime of ardour, pleasure, and which means on to this or that girl, however it by no means works out as a result of we’re actually eager for the legendary WOMAN of our goals. But, we regularly deny the fact and the facility that this legendary feminine determine exerts in our lives.
“I might guess,” says Eager, “{that a} majority of males by no means break away, by no means outline manhood by weighing and testing their very own expertise. And the only largest cause is that we by no means acknowledge the primal energy WOMAN wields over us. The typical man spends a lifetime denying, defending towards, attempting to regulate, and reacting to the facility of WOMAN. He’s dedicated to remaining unconscious and out of contact together with his personal deepest emotions and expertise.”
It took a very long time for me to grasp my anger and worry of ladies and to start the journey of changing into my very own man. Sam’s experiences and his phrases have helped me.
“We start to study the mysteries distinctive to maleness solely after we separate from WOMAN’s world,” says Eager. “However earlier than we will take our go away, we should first turn out to be aware of the methods during which we’re enmeshed, integrated, inwombed, and outlined by WOMAN. In any other case we can be managed by what we haven’t remembered.”
So long as we’re managed by what we haven’t remembered, we are going to proceed to hate and love girls, to starvation for them and in addition be afraid of them, to the touch them tenderly and in addition wish to harm them. We don’t all must break up to separate ourselves from the maintain that WOMAN has on us, however I do assume that we must be in a males’s group the place we will, within the phrases of one other buddy and colleague, Robert Bly,
“Males must be with different males with a purpose to hear the sounds that male cells sing.”
My very own males’s group lasted 46 years. My spouse, Carlin, says that one of many fundamental causes we have now had a profitable 45-year marriage is as a result of I’ve been in a males’s group for 46 years. I might add two further phrases of knowledge. First, it ought to be famous that my spouse has additionally been in various girls’s teams over time, which I consider have helped her take care of her personal points in addition to contributing to our profitable marriage.
Second, most males get themselves to a males’s group as a result of somebody cares sufficient to information them to 1. I used to be fortunate to have discovered Sam’s books and gotten mentoring from older males. Different males discover a males’s group as a result of their wives, girlfriends, or different caring girls have advised, (or generally extremely advised, as in “if you happen to don’t get in a males’s group this relationship is over”) that we go.
Sadly, my males’s group got here to an finish final yr. 4 of the seven members have died and the group wants greater than three to be viable. I consider I’ve not less than twenty good years forward of me and I’ve quite a bit I’d prefer to share with different guys. I’ve put the phrase out and have gotten various responses, however I’m nonetheless speaking with males who want to be a part of. I describe what I’m in search of right here. Have a look and attain out if you happen to’re .
Sam Eager will all the time be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit could also be flying. Thanks, my buddy.
