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, pal, and colleague. The April 4, 2025 obituary in The New York Instances, 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 ebook 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 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 had been each in long-standing males’s teams, which I wrote about just lately, “Why Becoming a member of a Males’s Group Could Be the Most Vital Choice of Your Life.” In my ebook, The Warrior’s Journey House: Therapeutic Males, Therapeutic the Planet, I mentioned,
“The acceptance of weak spot and power is a vital a part of the warrior’s journey house.”
In his ebook, Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam Eager offers an impressive description of this part 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 method via the illusions we’ve got mistaken for actuality, crawling via 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 via the rigidities of previous constructions of manhood, and discover the darkish and taboo adverse feelings that make up the shadow of recent manhood.”
Some of the trustworthy and revealing facets of the fashionable male shadow that we focus on and discover within the teams that Sam and I had been concerned with is our ambivalence in direction of ladies. In my most up-to-date ebook, Lengthy Dwell 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 mentioned,
“I’ve recognized Sam for a few years, and I consider he presents insights into why males are the best way they’re that may assist us higher perceive males’s starvation for ladies, together with our anger and concern of ladies.”
In Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam says,
“It was gradual in dawning on me that WOMAN had an amazing affect on my life and on the lives of all the boys I knew. I’m not speaking about ladies, 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 a lot of our actions.”
If you happen to knew Sam, who was tall, handsome, and profitable, you could be as stunned as I used to be when he shared the deeper fact 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 via 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 might establish with Eager’s early expertise. My very own life trajectory was related 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 countless wrestle to seek out the ‘proper’ girl, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a superb marriage.”
Sam went on to say,
“I agonized over intercourse — was I adequate? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I at all times potent? What ought to I do about my needs for different ladies? The extra troubled my marriage grew to become, the more durable I attempted to get it proper. I labored at communication, intercourse, and all the things else till I grew to become 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 tens of millions of males. Once we are engulfed by WOMAN, we’re out of contact with our true selves. We mission 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 ability that this legendary feminine determine exerts in our lives.
“I’d 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 one largest purpose is that we by no means acknowledge the primal energy WOMAN wields over us. The common man spends a lifetime denying, defending in opposition to, making an attempt to manage, and reacting to the ability 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 know my anger and concern of ladies and to start the journey of turning 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 are able to take our go away, we should first turn out to be acutely aware of the methods by which we’re enmeshed, integrated, inwombed, and outlined by WOMAN. In any other case we might 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 ladies, to starvation for them and likewise be afraid of them, to the touch them tenderly and likewise need to harm them. We don’t all need to 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 are able to, within the phrases of one other pal and colleague, Robert Bly,
“Males must be with different males with the intention 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 essential causes we’ve got had a profitable 45-year marriage is as a result of I’ve been in a males’s group for 46 years. I’d add two extra phrases of knowledge. First, it ought to be famous that my spouse has additionally been in various ladies’s teams through the years, which I consider have helped her cope with 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 ladies have recommended, (or generally extremely recommended, as in “in case you 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 12 months. 4 of the seven members have died and the group wants greater than three to be viable. I consider I’ve at the very least twenty good years forward of me and I’ve lots I’d wish 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 part of. I describe what I’m searching for right here. Have a look and attain out in case you’re .
Sam Eager will at all times be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit could also be flying. Thanks, my pal.
