Francis Weller - The Death of the Hero and The Importance of Mythology

My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought. I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.

So those are the words of my.

Guest who is joining me today.

I'm going to give you one more.

Quote by Francis Weller, who's my guest today, who says grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and smile small. There's something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused and with life force. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed, and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive. And still we move in jangled, unsettled and riotous ways. When grief takes hold of us, it is truly an emotion that arises from the soul.

All right. That gives you some insight into where we're going. So Francis Weller joins me today, who I have the deepest respect for and admiration as a practitioner. He is an mft, a psychotherapist, a writer, and what he calls a soul activist. He's a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. He is the author of the Wild Edge of Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, the the Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, which is another book. And in the absence of the ordinary essence, in a Time of Uncertainty, he has introduced the healing work of rituals to thousands of people. He founded and directs Wisdom Bridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate this wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from Western poetic, psychological and spiritual traditions. So he's been in this field for a very long time. I came across his work, a group that I am a part of, my own men's group, with a few really close friends.

Like Mark Groves, from Create to Love and Trevor Boehm and Sylvester McNutt. We went through some work of Francis from Mr. Weller, and it was quite potent and we had some good dialogues on it. And so I immediately knew I wanted to have Francis on the show. And so I wanted to have Francis on the show because this will be a part of a series that I put on over the coming months. And this series is called Living through the Age of Crisis or Living through the Age of Chaos. And over the last year, I have seen a lot of people going through crisis, living through the chaos of our times, whether it's the pandemic or the fears of censorship or authoritarian rises, or feeling lonely from lockdowns, dealing with the fallouts of loss, from jobs to relationships to the uncertainty that the future holds. And I think in these times of chaos, we need more voices that help us in navigating and sense making these times. And so I'll be bringing you some of these voices. Some of the people and individuals that I. That I learned from, that I think are potent voices that. That need to be heard.

So if you have any recommendations, feel.

Free to reach out to me @mantalks on Instagram or through the. Through the website. But these, this series, Living through the Age of Chaos, Living through the Age of Crisis, will have many of these voices. And so this is one such conversation. And we dive deep into the sort of death and diminishment of mythology in our culture, and we look at the hardening of the heroic archetype within our culture and the breakdown that that sort of suffers within masculinity, within relationships, within our mainstream culture, and how our collective is sort of struggling to find coherence or cohesion because of these mythological breakdowns. So this is, for me, a really intriguing and wonderful conversation. Francis has some great insight. So if you enjoy this, please do share it, share this podcast as much as you can, because I feel like these are the types of conversations that need to be had and need to be heard. So without further delay, please welcome Francis Weller.

All right, Francis, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.

It's a pleasure to be here with you, Connor. Yeah.

I have been a strong admirer, an unintentional or.

An unknown mentee of yours for a while now. I've been following your work for a while and really appreciate it. And I feel like there's a richness in it that I have been yearning for for a long time. And so it's been, it's been a real honor. I remember at the end of Just to. Just a fanboy a little bit before we start, just so people have a context of why I've invited you on the show. We finished going through a group of men that I work with and friends with. We went through your Alchemy of Initiation program. We finished the program and it was the last sort of session and we were having a discourse about it and talking about it and what it meant to us, and we just started sharing about our insights that we got from the program. It came around to me. The torch was in my. In my court. And I said, you know, it's the first time that I've come into contact with someone and someone's information where I kind of got the sense of. That's. That's how I would like to feel to other people when I grow up. That's the sense of embodiment and maturity that I wish and hope that other people glean and feel from me when I. When I sort of come of age. And so it was interesting because I've had a few mentors in my life who have put me into contact with that. But it was. It was interesting to have that through your work, having not ever met you before. But there's a depth to it that I really appreciate, so. So thank you. Out the gates. And with that in mind. With that in mind, we'll begin with the question that I ask everyone, which is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life.

Well, it's a story that's been told many times, but it's such a lingering, impactful moment. I was 27, had just been given a license to practice psychotherapy. I don't know why they gave me a license at 27, but they did. Not my fault. So.

But I knew I didn't know anything about sitting with people in any meaningful way. So I was smart enough at least to know that I was way too green to do anything meaningful. And I was living in Oakland at the time. So I called the Jung Institute in San Francisco, and I got a list of analysts because I knew I needed a mentor. I needed someone I could sit with and just watch them and see how they did this work. And so I called many of them, and when I talked to this one man, his name was Clark Berry, and I said, this is the man I want to sit with. So we set up a time to meet, and he opened the door, and I thought, oh, my God, this man is ancient. He's like 60 or something, you know, just so old. But he welcomed me in, and we sat down, and literally, one of the first things he said to me, he reached over and he patted this rock he had by his desk. It was a big, big rock. He said, this is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you're going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves. And then he pointed to his Clock. He says it hates this. That moment has kind of burned into my own psyche as the most important teaching I've ever received about sitting with soul, sitting with another human being and myself included, because there was this profound urgency in me to change, to fix all the broken pieces in me. And underneath that urgency was often a lot of self hatred. And what that teaching taught me of slowing down was coming back to the rhythm of soul, to the movements of soul. And it granted me a quality of patience with myself, which was kind of the gateway into compassion for all those parts of me that I hated. And everybody I've sat with. I think I've told almost every single person I've sat with that story because they all come in with that urgency to change, to be better. And a lot of what drives that sense of needing to be better is there's an anxiety around not being welcomed unless I get my shit together. Can I say that on your podcast?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Worse things have been said, for sure.

You know, there's this anxiety that if I don't get it all together, I won't be welcomed. By bringing that perspective in, you won't welcome yourself until you begin to slow down and begin to really listen to what the wounds and the sufferings of your soul are saying to you. So that moment with Clark, God bless him, profoundly changed how I've been moving through the world. I've been trying to follow that rhythm ever since that moment with him.

Almost 40 years ago.

Yeah, we do seem to have obsession almost with time in our Western culture.

And speed.

Tracking time. Yeah. And speed. Yeah. Well said.

You know, we are a manic culture. It's one of the reasons why there's so much depression in this culture. It's the soul's refusal to match that rhythm. You know, the soul is saying, I. I will not match the machine rhythm. I will bring you to your knees. I'll stop you in your tracks right here until you begin to listen back to the rhythm of soul.

Yeah. I'm curious from your perspective of how important. You know, again, this is part of a series that I put together called Living through the Age of Crisis. And it seems like we're living in this very interesting time where people are struggling with a lot of mental health, and there seems to be just a tremendous amount of chaos within our culture. And yet it seems to be getting met in some ways by a resurgence in alchemy and shamanism and, you know, exploring soul work. And it's. It's a very interesting sort of paradox. And so I'm curious if you can maybe just for the listeners out there that hear soul work and. And either don't have a context for it or a container or. Or a reference point, or maybe it's like, what is soul? You know, soul work? What is this? If you can just sort of give some conte.

What you mean by soul work and why in our modern times, there seems to be many different forms of this resurgence of soul coming back into our mainstream conversation and specifically within our therapeutic modalities.

You know, I think that soul and the idea of soul work matches the territory that we are being taken into. You know, this is a time of dissent. We're being drawn downward through crisis, through trauma, through, you know, the unexplored territories of uncertainty, the loss of the ordinary. In some ways, we're living in what we could call an age of endings. And that's a frightening idea. We're entering what I call the long dark. And that's not going to be met with ego psychologies or even ideas of transcendence arising above them. This is a time that requires the modalities that are kind of familiar to soul, which are about, like I say, going down. It's about descent, it's about grief, it's about loss. It's about finding your way in the dark. This is not a time of, you know, competencies and, you know, strength and confidence. That's not where we are. We are definitely in a time where things are corroding and eroding in front of us by necessity. You bring in this idea of alchemy. Alchemy had these beautiful metaphoric systems of understanding, you know, the inevitable stages that we all encounter that are seasonal. There's a seasonality to these. They're not. That's not a progression. That's one of our fictions in Western psychology is that there's this kind of progression from, you know, broken and torn and ruptured to perfection. Ain't going to happen. I've never seen that. Almost 40 years of working with people. But what alchemy says is that there's a state.

Called the nigredo, the blackening. And this is an essential state that precipitates soul work, because the nigredo is called the subtle dissolver. When things begin to dissolve in front of us, it's like nature. Nature is not always blossoming or fruiting. There's times of dissolution, there's times of decay, there's times of death, times of fallowness. Well, why wouldn't cultures and psyches have the Same rhythms, because they were shaped in the same modalities as nature is. We're not apart from nature. Psyche is nature. Nature is psyche. So we also go through periods of negrego, of blackening. I'm sure you've had your own times in the underworld, right? Everybody does. Every human being does. And that's. We think that we're supposed to climb back out of that, you know, in a heroic sense. But these times are necessary. So here we are culturally, and we're watching the decay and the dissolution of white supremacy, of gender supremacies, you know, masculinity above all things. We're watching the decay of economic injustices, political injustices. So these things have to decay. They have to break down. And that, again, brings us into the territory of soul work and alchemy and.

Grief and vulnerability and kind of a learning to see in the dark. There's a different kind of quality of light in the dark. In alchemy, they call it the soul niger, the black sun, where you see through different eyes. You see through the eyes of the heart. You know, it's a. It's a different quality of presence that's being asked of us right now.

Yeah, I mean, I've. I completely. I completely agree. And I think that, you know, right now seems to be this time where people are being asked to, as Jung would say, face the shadow, you know, go. Go into the. The dark recesses of the. Of the Persona and the personality to understand how they're contributing to this sort of collapse culturally. I want to get into.

The. Talking about mythology and the role that mythology has played. But I'm. I'm curious, before we move into that, of how you feel modernity and this sort of tireless and incessant need for new and progress has played into our mental health and to our soul health in a way.

Well, quite abusively. I mean, the. The one dominant archetypal image we have in this Western culture is the hero, the heroic ideal. And the heroic ideal stresses competency and strength and success and progress, always getting better, always improving. I can't tell you the number of times somebody in my office will apologize for regressing. I don't think I made any progress this week. And I say, oh, thank goodness. I'm glad you failed miserably at that agenda. But there's a weightiness to this oppression of always having to be better. You know, spiritually, psychologically, physically. This improvement ideal.

Like I say, strangles us. It's very oppressive. So, you know, people come in and they Want to get better, which is understandable. We're suffering, we're in pain, we're depressed or addicted or anxious. Of course you want to see change, but it may not come at the same way that we figure it's going to come. So this heroic ideal demands of us that we fix the problem, that we somehow.

Bring in our tools to improve them and make them shiny again. Whereas soul says, no, that's not the program. The program is to go out and meet these, what I call the outcast others. The parts that have been banished because they, they limp or they drool or they, you know, they don't look right. They're weak, they're needy, they're dependent, for God's sakes. They, they lack confidence. Well, we have to get rid of those, right, because they don't fit the heroic ideal. But in reality, that's where we find soul. The old idea is you always find soul at the margins. You find it in what's been discarded. Even in alchemy, they say the soul work begins in the putrefactio, the putrefied, neglected, abandoned, rejected parts of the soul. That's where the work begins. I love that idea that my soul work can't begin until I begin to include these others that don't fit. I mean, I remember going to therapy in my late 20s and the first words out of my mouth to my therapist was, oh, well, I want you to help me get rid of some parts of me. As if it was their fault that I couldn't fit into this culture. And of course I couldn't with them, because it's a heroic culture, it's a confident, muscular culture. But these parts of me that I wanted to get rid of, they were the redemptive parts of me. They are the ones that actually brought me back into community and into vulnerability and into connection. Because we all share those. Those are the commons of the soul. We all carry parts that limp and are weak and are needy. That's how we're designed. But that oppressive ideology of the heroic and what I would say, the ideology of individualism, they have done tremendous damage to our psychological health and well being.

Do you feel like there is. I'm not really too sure how to word the question, but do you feel like we're going through some period of time right now where we're sort of getting over the obsession and the sort.

Of.

Fan nature of the hero, Like Western culture seems to be just obsessed with this heroic mythological archetype and everything has to be pigeonholed into it? Especially masculinity. I mean, masculinity in many ways in Western culture. I mean, all I do is work with men. And a lot of the times what I see is, exactly what you're describing is that we've been given this version, as you talked about, this one dimensional version of masculinity that teaches men that there's somehow strength in suppression. And what we lose is the richness of being able to learn from these other parts of us. So is part of this entering into the nigredo as you talked about, letting go of this hero archetype that we have been so gripped onto? Or where does that fit in the time that we seem to be going through?

I think that's the invitation. But the invitations aren't always taken up. I mean, clearly Covid and the economic crisis and the cultural crises that we're going through with race issues and gender issues, all the things I mentioned, they're showing the poverty of that ideology. We could go into a whole thread here, maybe we will. That the ideology of individualism actually creates a profound sense of emptiness inside of us, because the individualism creates a circumstance where I need no one else. And I also can't show the vulnerability of myself to another human being. So in a sense it creates a radical sense of solitary confinement. And I'm sure you've seen that in many of the men you've sat with, just how lonely we are, how isolated we have become because of this ideology.

So these circumstances are kind of showing the poverty of that. And like I said just a moment ago, that's the invitation to begin to dismantle the armature of individualism and the heroic ideal, what James Hillman called the Hercules complex. But there's also, we're seeing culturally efforts to try to reinforce those ideologies through more might, more strength, more emphasis on control and domination and intimidation and bullying. We're trying to, you know, some portions of the culture, and you see this every time there is a time of dissolution, there's a frantic push to reinforce, to uphold the old structures even while they're collapsing. So that's kind of what's happening. We're seeing a breakthrough in many ways into a new method of interconnectedness, inter being, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. And at the same time, watching this reinforcement of old methodologies of separation and domination, my prayer is that there's enough of us gathering to loosen that one bit by bit. So its collapse is more graceful than it is catastrophic. That's my prayer anyhow.

Yeah, I mean, well said. I think the fear that most people have is that it's not going to be a graceful fall of this archetype because the heroic figure in some ways seems to have been hijacked or. Yeah, I mean, I can't think of a better word, sort of hijacked by the narcissist in some way, you know, by this bolstering chest beating version of I'm the hero and I'm here to save you. And everything that I say is right. There's a really great TV show, I think it's on Amazon prime called the Boys. And it's interesting because there's these heroes and it's a very interesting take on modern day, the modern day hero archetype. And there's these heroes that have superpowers, but what you very quickly start to see is that they are sort of valueless and they've realized that they're sort of gods amongst men and that they can kind of get away with anything that they want. And so the hero, very quickly, you can't just sort of tell whether or not the hero is the villain or not in the show. And I feel like we've entered into that place sort of collectively as a consciousness where, because we've pedestaled this hero archetype for so long.

In our collective unconscious, the hero sort of has this arrogance and narcissism to it. And I'm wondering if you can speak to that. Like, is that, is that something that you see?

Do you, do you agree with that.

And how do we address it? Because I think most people want to fight against that, that archetype right now.

Well, that's what happens when the mythological ground gets fused with individualism. In a sense, the hero mythologically was always in service to community. It wasn't about the individual. It wasn't for me that I did what I was doing. It was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater good. The hero would go out and wrestle things and fight things and try to return with something that could bless and benefit the whole. But when individualism kind of, kind of supplanted that, the myth kind of coalesced around the individual. And now it's all about me, what I can get, what's in it for me. So the myth is still there, but it's been perverted, it's been mutated into kind of an extension, kind of an exaggeration of individualism on steroids. So it becomes very much about the individual. This is where, you know, mythologically or in a Living culture. Initiation was meant to play a role in tempering that narcissism that you'd go through initiation. Not by choice. No one chooses to go through initiation. You're taken through initiation. It's not something I say, that sounds cool. I'll do that. That's the last thing you want to do because it is so difficult. And sometimes you don't come back from initiation in traditional cultures. But the idea there was that the initiation was a way of tempering the individual and preparing them, ripening them for their position as a guardian of the community and as, in a sense, wedded now to the community and to the land itself. That's a beautiful mythological ground. That initiation was meant to break me open to the widest aperture of identity, Whereas individualism kind of collapses us down to the singularity of it. That's really kind of where we're at. We've lost that mythological ground and the initiatory grounds that living cultures have maintained for thousands and thousands of generations. To keep this alive, we have to have a living community, which requires healthy individuals, and healthy individuals require a living community. There's a beautiful symbiosis between these two, a lovely synthetic relationship between those two. And when the individual begins to become more sequestered into his own isolated self, you watch the decay of community at the same time. And that's where we are too. We talk about community all the time, but it's abstract rhetoric. You know, where's the community? I mean, we have little filaments of it here and there, thankfully, but that robust quality of an intact living culture, that's. That's hard to find.

Would you say that.

Some of. I mean, I think the answer is yes, but I'm. I'm curious if you can just sort of define the. Or. Or unpack a little bit, the difference between an uninitiated and initiated man and what that looks like. Because I feel like in. In many ways, in our culture, we've stripped traditional initiation away from men.

And.

And what I see is a lot of men, a lot of men's shadows, the rejected parts of themselves, sort of creating a. A form of initiation. Right? It's like we don't have these spaces or places to take us into to go through initiation. And so we sort of self collapse and self destruct and create our own form, you know, through infidelities or divorces or whatever the case may be, because we haven't. We haven't met initiation. And so I would love for you to define, if possible, like, what uninitiated men looks like, or even just defining what the initiation process looks like for men specifically or just in general.

Sadly, it's not hard to find the display of uninitiated masculine behavior right now. It's on display most every single day. It's characterized by exceedingly high degrees of self interest, self preservation, defensiveness, and unwillingness to act on behalf of the commons. I mean, it's hard to blame the men because that's the conditions that they were conditioned by. Most of us have been conditioned primarily through neglect and through trauma. And that's what I call initiation, traditional initiation, a contained encounter with death. So, you know, a.

Culturally held initiatory process would be a contained encounter with death, because there has to be some kind of encounter with death. Otherwise, there's no initiation. And they would oversee that. By bringing these various elements together, there'd be a community based.

Rooted in the sacred, guided by ritual, held by the elders for an extended period of time and in a particular place. When those elements are gathered together, you create a container for the dissolution of the identity of the initiate.

That was the purpose of initiation, was to kind of dissolve the identity of the initiate and to recoalesce it and like I said before, into a wider and much more coextensive, or what would be a good word, a composite sense of self. I'm part wind, part turtle, part watershed, part moon. That's all of me. That's all of who I am. So when the land base gets threatened, for instance, like in South America or in Africa, and you're coming onto a traditional cultural land base, they fight to the death for that protection of the land. Because the land and their soul are. Are fused. They are synonymous. We do it out of moral obligation at times, which is great, but it's not the same. You're not doing it because that's me.

You're attacking my body with your oil rigs and your fracking. There's still a separation. So in an uninitiated man, it would be somebody who still feels a quality of disconnect between what's happening out there and what's going on in here. There's a sense of dislocation between those two realities. That's why initiation becomes so critical at this time. Now, we don't have formal initiations in our culture very much at all. But I often say, and you've probably heard me say this in that series you referenced before, initiation is not optional. So what does psyche, what does soul do? In the absence of formal initiation to consistently take Us to the edges of our ripening. And there are multiple ways that psyche does this. You know, through our encounters with what I call the predator. This energy, mythological energy in the psyche that in myth and fairy tale is portrayed as the giant or the troll or the demon or the dragon. Some energy that requires us to kind of encounter our own commitment to a larger life. And on this side of the gate, which is where uninitiated people live, the questions are all about me. How am I lovable? Do I belong? Am I good enough? Do I have enough? What's in it for me? The questions are all self referencing. And initiation takes you through that gate to the other side, where the questions become communal. How are the children doing? Are the salmon returning? You know, how are the waters? What do we need to do this winter to prepare? The questions are not about me anymore. And there's too few of us asking those larger questions.

It's all about the self referencing questions. Again, not to blame us for that, but that's where we are. But that's what that energy that we encounter. And then there's through our wounds and through our losses and through our suffering, those are all invitations to ripen. And then those times of Negreto when we're pulled down into the underworld, and then the last one is through love. Rilke said that love is the great inducement to ripen. The final work for which all other work has been but preparation. So there's many ways in which initiation keeps preparing, showing its face to us. But like I said, in this series, you know, the invitations can be sent, but we still miss the bus. You can still choose to refuse. And again, look at our culture right now. There are many seemingly adult men, in particular, white men in particular, who missed the bus. They did not get out of the damn thing and say this. My life isn't about me me. My life is about how do I ripen and mature sufficiently so I can contribute to the well being and the continuation of the community for the generations to come. And that's, that's really what, you know, initiation is meant to do. Did we get close to your question? I can't remember. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think definitely, definitely, definitely. I mean, you, you managed to unpack a few different other aspects to it that I, that I definitely wanted to explore.

Okay.

You know, I think it's interesting because a lot of the, A lot of what I see in, in men is this, this idea that it's almost like many of us are waiting for initiation to Come to us, you know, through the form of rock bottom or through the form of complete collapse or self destruction. And I like what you're saying is that, like, you know, whether you like it or not, initiation is going to come. It's just it. It may come in an invitation that you can pick up and. And embark on that path, or it'll come in a more sort of assertive way, shall we say, which I've experienced, you know, I've experienced the invitation to like, okay, you know, initiate here, mature. Do this work. This isn't about you. And I've ignored, ignored and continue to hide and sort of play in this adolescent version of myself or masculinity or whatever the case may be, and eventually get to the point where life sort of steps in. And every time that I wait for life to step in, it's always. It's always more assertive than if I had taken up the invitation previously.

But I guess my question in that awareness is, is that a byproduct of the sort of, like, malnourished masculinity that we have in our culture? Like, it seems like a lot of men are craving a more mature version, but it seems to be quite sparse around us.

There are very few models of that walking around.

So it's hard to see the examples of what it might look like to emulate a ripened human being. I mean, I've been very fortunate in the mentors I've been able to.

Be connected to. And one of the things that's so crucial is the negotiation with the question around authority and power. When you feel isolated and disconnected, which is kind of the conditioning for men, there's a quality of shame that accompanies that. But somehow there's a feeling that I should be part of something larger, but I'm not. So is there something inherently wrong with me? And shame makes our relationship to authority very questionable. So then we exaggerate it into authoritarian. We exaggerate it into power. Over. And this is again, one of those really core pieces of initiation is the ripened relationship to power and authority. How do you carry that? Jung had a phrase once that just really struck me. He said, I think it was something like, where love reigns, there, the will to power is absent, where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Now, what I think he's meaning by that is that if you choose either polarity, you create a shadow in the other. So a lot of us became nice boys. You know, I was a very nice boy. I don't know if you were Connor, but a lot of the men I worked with for a while, yeah, we become very nice. So what Jung is saying is if you choose love, even a facsimile of love, then power goes into the shadow and we become passive aggressive, manipulative, sarcastic, critical, or in more egregious ways, we become bullies, you know, intimidation, threat, domination. And if we choose power, which a lot of us have also done as men, then our love goes into the shadow and we become cool, detached, distance, you know, non committal, unavailable. But I think what he's saying is that we need to be able to hold these things in dynamic tension with the other. Love without power is sentimentality. Power without love is domination, is coercion, is force. Love with power is compassion. Power with love is justice. It's protection. That's service. They ripen each other. And that's really the mark of a mature human being, is knowing how to negotiate. And when I led men's initiation for many years, 17 years, which was a year long process of taking these men through, a process of kind of decloaking the old identity of masculinity and introducing them to a more ripened sense of masculinities. What was their style meant to look like? What was their form of expression? And one of the things they had to really work with was how do I hold love and power as a mature ripened man?

How does my love become potent? And how does my love, my power, become relational?

That's really beautiful. That's beautiful. Because right now power is rarely seen as a relational dynamic. It's almost always used as a way of pushing away, separating and creating distance rather than using power as a relational tool. I mean, certainly there are examples, Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa. These are all forms of potent people. But through love, power wielded through love. Nelson Mandela, I mean, so many people we could point, you know, point at and say, that's a ripened expression of authority and power. It's in service too, tempered by, by affection, by love.

I like that. I like that. It brought to mind a quote by Oscar Wilde. He said, everything in life is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power. And it's a good, it's a good reminder that there's this, you know, that, that love and power don't need to be mutually exclusive. Right? No, I think, I think it's one of the challenges for us as men is to be in the presence of both of those polarities, you know, and I've I've worked with a lot of the nice guys. I've also worked with the men who are not the nice guys, you know, and men who I remember in. I run a few groups and it's just a small group of, of eight men. And one of the. I've had all, all sorts of guys, you know, different backgrounds in those groups. And in one of the last groups that I ran, we were doing. I was walking the men through an exercise and I was doing one on one work, shadow work with, with a few of them. And one of the guys was a Navy seal, former Navy seal. And I walked him through a little bit of the, of the process and he came out of it and he had gotten a little bit of emotional and, you know, immediately sort of shut that part of him down. And I asked him, I said, what was that experience like for you? And he said, honestly, I would rather rush a machine gun nest than do what you just brought me through. And I thought, what a testament to our attachment to power. I would rather be in power and, and be in that space, then move into the, to the sort of like vulnerable openness of love and expression. And it seems like we as men have sort of been pushed into these corners, you know, that the masculine has sort of been pushed and compressed into these very forms a small real estate of masculinity which is so much broader and bigger than, than what we have given it credit for and how we've portrayed it and mainstream culture. And I'm wondering, which is one of the reasons why I brought you on the show, if that's an extension of this collapse of cultural mythology or if you even feel like there is a collapse of cultural mythology. Because I've sort of been playing around with the idea that we've strip mined myths and mythology in our modern culture and compressed them and we've sort of sucked out some of the nutrients and people aren't given the psychological benefits that older mythologies used to have. Right. Our unconscious mind works in symbolism and archetypes and mythologies and, you know, all these different aspects that, that are incredibly nourishing for the psyche, but we seem to have. Have compressed these things down. So maybe I'll just pause there. Do you feel like our mythologies are being collapsed or compressed and how do you see that showing up in modern culture?

I think the psyche is naturally polytheistic and we've been giving a monolithic mythology.

We have one God, we have one image Jesus, or we have one image, the hero. And so we go from a Richly imaginistic.

Portrayal. I mean, if we all go back deep enough into our own ancestral lines, like I come from the German Norse tradition, there are many gods. You know, Odin was a seeker, not so much of power, but of wisdom. Thor was more into the power thing. And, you know, but there's Loki, there's the trickster, there's, you know, there's all these different expressions that give me complexity rather than singularity. Now, the hero reduces us to, again, to that one distorted archetypal image.

So we're kind of depleted.

We're robbed of that rich tapestry of imagination that, again, psychically, we feel something is missing. And we feel, as James Hillman would say, the psyche is polytheistic. There's many gods, there's many ways of expressing the soul. Not a single one. But that's what we've been given now as a singularity, kind of a. I guess the way I've been saying it, we've been given a single image. And whenever you're given a single image and you identify with that single image, you create a shadow immediately in its opposite. So you create the hero, you create the warrior, you create the soldier, and you create something in its opposite, which is, you know, what we're seeing also with a lot of the vigilante thing and, you know.

The invasions, the use of military for coercion and for intimidation. And those are all parts of the underside of that singularity, of that one archetypal image. So if we can really listen to our dreams and our imaginations, we will begin to see the revelation of other images, other ways of being that are there. And again, I don't like using that term, masculinity, because it's, again, it's so confining, rather than saying masculinities. That's why if you look at most traditional cultures, there's multiple images of what that masculine could look like. And it almost invariably included something that involved woundedness and depth and descent. Not always just, you know, that Apollonian rising sun, you know, God. But there's also Dionysus. There's Hephaestus, the one who limped. There's, you know, there's all these different iterations, and we need that right now. We need multiple ways of imagining. Your style, My style. I remember when I first began to lead the men's initiation work. I was working with two other men, and they were, in my mind, men. They were tough, they were confident, they were strong. You know, one was a former, you know, heroin addict, motorcycle riding, spent time in prison the other one was a cowboy from Montana. You know, shit kicking, you know, tough. And then there's me, soft, little old me. I didn't belong in that group. I wasn't tough, I wasn't strong. I didn't fit the image. And we sat together Monday after Monday, trying to get to know each other. And I finally began to understand that my style was absolutely necessary. That without my style, they were fiery men. I'm a water man. Water has its own power, its own authority, its own necessity. Without the water, we would burn down. We burned down the whole culture, which is what's happening right now. We need more compassion. We need more affection. We need more wisdom born of relatedness, that love dimension in relationship to power. We need to infuse that again. So coming to trust my own style of masculinity was very, very important to my own work. And sitting with a lot of men who are trying to be that John Wayne caricature who needs no one, who's always successful, triumphant, in control, invulnerable, like your Navy SEAL guy. I'd rather.

Get hit with the machine guns than have to confess. Can I share one more thing? I don't know how we're doing the time, but, yeah, we're good. Another passage from Jung which was also one that truly struck me. He said, there appears to be a conscience in mankind that severely punishes the man who does not somehow and in some way cease to confess and prove himself at whatever cost to his pride and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of being a man among men. It severely punishes the man who does not cease to defend and assert himself and instead confess himself fallible and human. I mean, that's the hardest thing for us to do with that heroic mantle laid on us, is to confess ourselves fallible and human women. But unless we do that, we are absolutely cut off from the living experience of being a man among men. That is the solitary confinement of most of us right now. We can't admit defeat. I mean, look at our president right now. Cannot admit defeat. Impossible. Not even in his imagination to say, I lost another man. Cannot confess that fallibility. That's sad. That's a tragic man like Lear.

Yeah, I mean, I agree entirely. I think we.

I mean, there's many things that you said in there that we could branch off into. I don't know if we. Unfortunately, we don't have the full time to kind of dive all the way into all those. But, you know, I think it's interesting because in many ways I like, I explored a lot of these, I mean, unintentionally, the different forms of masculinity. You know, I did construction to put myself through opera school, right? Just like, very paradoxical, right? Would ride motorcycle, would ride my sports bike to yoga class and meditation class with the spike mohawk on my motorcycle helmet, you know, these big 2 inch metal spikes. And so I kind of explored the different, the harsher side, the, you know, the harder side, the machoistic side and the softer side, and kind of got to see the full spectrum of masculinity, but all the while sort of embodying exactly what Jung was talking about in that quote. You know, not being willing to confess, confess my own vulnerabilities, my own challenges, my own sufferings. And, you know, Jung talks about confession being sort of like the first step in the therapeutic process of being able to just have those parts of ourselves be witnessed. And for me, that was the, the aspect because I wasn't willing to reveal those things or confess those things. That life sort of brought me into initiation and, and force my hand. You know, it's like, okay, it's time. It's time for you to initiate. Yeah. So I, I really appreciate everything that you're saying, and I, I wish that we could have a much longer dialogue. Maybe I'll have to have you back on a show for, for a longer dialogue, but for the, for the individuals that are listening to this, that resonate with this idea of initiating ourselves and beginning on that journey of, of maybe not seeking initiation, because that, that might be a bit of a paradoxical concept, but where can we already find it? Like, where do we start to look for the seeds of initiation within our own life?

Well, first I would say we don't initiate ourselves. I think we are taken to those edges repeatedly. And like the ones I just mentioned, if you really begin to look at your life not so much psychologically, but mythically, which is very freeing, by the way, because when you look at ourselves psychologically, we see ourselves as exceptions. That my wounds make me different than you. But if you read it mythologically, my wounds connect me to you. Myth creates a context of connectivity, whereas a lot of our psychological introspection. I was always looking for the things that makes me different than you, that I have to somehow fix that. So if we approach it mythologically, we look at our lives and all of the things that have happened in our lives, the things we struggle with, those voices that are Inside of us right now, probably at this very minute, saying, you can't do that. It's not okay for you to say what you feel or what you need. You can't show your vulnerability. That voice is the voice of that opponent, that predator. It's right there asking you to claim the life that's waiting for you. That voice is saying to you, what do you have that can get you past me? And it's a voice that basically keeps trying to intimidate you into a smaller and smaller circumference until you finally disappear. Suicide, in a sense, is the ultimate victory of the predator. No one would even miss you. If you're gone, who cares? You didn't matter anyway. That voice is there for many of us continuously. We read it as my own voice, personally. Psychologically, if you read it mythically, you know you're in the presence of another. And in the midst of the beauty of these myths and these fairy tales is that that other never shows up as human. It's always a non human presence. A dragon, a demon, a troll. It's some other creature. So the myths are telling us it isn't you, it isn't personal, but it's a necessary opponent to activate and generate your own conviction to your own life. That's an initiatory threshold. That's the beginning of your animate life to take on that confrontation. Problem is now, in the absence of community, you can't do it alone. You're going to lose that fight if you do it alone. And again, that's the consequence of this solitary confinement of individualism, the heroic ideal. I have to do it myself. Well, you can't beat this thing by yourself. I was teaching a year long course with my friend Melodoma somme some years ago and we were doing a weekend on the Predator. And we were about to go into this intense ritual process and I asked, okay, is the predator up for anybody? And all these hands go up, you know. I said, what's it saying? And one young man said, well, mine's saying, all right, now we're going to see who's more powerful. He said, no, we're going to see who has more friends. That was a brilliant, brilliant retort. If we stay in relationship, we have enough to get through this thing. But we have to again confess that this voice is there, that this energy is there. It's trying to intimidate, dominate, frustrate. It's the opponent. It's its job. It's its job. You know, when you read the fairy tales, when the young man leaves the kingdom to go on this journey. It's not a free ride. It doesn't go all the way. Oh, there's the treasure, you know, there's what I'm supposed to. No, there's always something there that you cannot negotiate with, you cannot bargain with. You've got to go through it, you know, the nice boy cannot get through that thing. We need to ignite the internal fire to take this thing on. So that's one pathway. The other one is our wounds are incredible imitations to maturation and ripening and initiation. I was giving a lecture series.

Two years ago called Living a Soulful Life and why It Matters. And it's I think the second. It was a 10 week series and the second week was on the necessary wound. And I went to bed the night before the talk. And in the middle I was awakened at 5am with a sentence that said, your wounds are the unripened seeds of initiation. So wow, that's good. I like that. So I had to quickly weave that back into the lecture that I was giving. But our wounds are the unripened seeds of initiation. We see them as marks of shame, their commentaries on our own defectiveness and our own flaws. But what if we could imagine them as the unripened seeds of initiation? That if I could work with my abandonments, my betrayals, my loneliness, my addictions and my depressions, what if I could see them as the invitation to some kind of initiatory.

Experience? Wow, that's mythological thinking again. And then through those times when we're going along and suddenly we find ourselves in the darkened territory, these moods come upon us that sometimes last. I had a series that lasted 18 months. It was a long, long winter of that time in the Descent. But I trusted it. I trusted that where I was being taken. I still couldn't tell you to this day why or what happened. But it was a time when I was living in the twilight. I was living outside of the daylit world. And all I can sense out of the return was that something was broadened in my depths, that I could sit with more grief now and more depth in my encounters with culture and with community and with individuals. So some work was being done not by me, but some work was being done in the depths. And then the last one, like I mentioned before, through love. That's been the hardest initiatory place for me because my wounds of shame made love exceedingly dangerous. You can't expose the defects, the shame, the contempt, the self hate. You just can't expose that. So I developed a really wonderful Persona. I was called the Golden Boy in graduate school in my early 20s, and I fooled a lot of people. But I often say I was like a church statue, beautifully posed. The robes flowed beautifully, chiseled nicely. But inside it was cold, dead plaster.

Cold. And inside, because I couldn't let anybody in, I couldn't risk that vulnerability. I couldn't confess myself. Well, eventually, because of the pressures of the wounds and soul, I had to. Otherwise, I wouldn't be sitting here with you today. I would not be here. So I had to confess myself and found myself in the incredible embrace of men and women and others who, much to my amazement, loved me. And I could finally begin to let that trickle in bit by bit. To now I feel like I'm a man well loved. Holy shit. Who would have thought that, right? So there's many, many invitational moments.

To. If we can again see them, if we can see them for what they are, these are invitations to that, ripening, to that initiatory threshold. We just have to find our way and our courage to step across and into the unknown where we might become.

Immense again, which was our birthright.

Wonderful. So. So well said. I think such a good place for us to. For us to pause the conversation for today. And I think we've given people lots to think about. So if people are wanting to learn a little bit more about you and your work, we'll have your links to your sites in the show notes. But just where would you like to direct people? Where can they find more about you and your work?

I think the easiest place to go is to my website, FrancisWeller.net that's where the programs are offered, the calendar and. And if you're interested in listening to these various programs, that's the place to find them.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me. And for everybody that's out there listening, don't forget to man it forward and share this episode with someone that you know will enjoy this conversation. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. Join me next week for another inspiring conversation with another inspiring individual.

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