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 Hearth 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 together with the territory of masculinity,”
Eager was quoted saying and the obituary went on to say,
“His message resonated: His ebook Hearth 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 had been each in long-standing males’s teams, which I wrote about just lately, “Why Becoming a member of a Males’s Group Might Be the Most Essential Determination of Your Life.” In my ebook, The Warrior’s Journey Residence: Therapeutic Males, Therapeutic the Planet, I mentioned,
“The acceptance of weak point and power is a vital a part of the warrior’s journey residence.”
In his ebook, Hearth within the Stomach, Sam Eager provides an impressive 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 approach by the illusions we’ve got 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journey, we should make use of the warrior’s fierceness, braveness, and aggression to interrupt by the rigidities of outdated constructions of manhood, and discover the darkish and taboo detrimental feelings that make up the shadow of recent manhood.”
Probably the most sincere and revealing points of the trendy 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 girls. In my most up-to-date ebook, Lengthy Dwell Males! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Males, Shut the Lifespan Hole, and Provide Hope to Humanity, I shared Sam’s revealing insights in part I titled, “Males Really feel Engulfed by WOMAN.”
I mentioned,
“I’ve identified Sam for a few years, and I imagine he affords 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 girls.”
In Hearth within the Stomach, Sam says,
“It was sluggish in dawning on me that WOMAN had an amazing affect on my life and on the lives of all the lads 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 a lot of our actions.”
In case you knew Sam, who was tall, handsome, and profitable, you is perhaps as shocked 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 faculty 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 power and a spotlight to work and career.”
I may establish 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 impartial man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All of the whereas I used to be advancing in my career, I used to be engaged in an countless battle to search out the ‘proper’ lady, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create an excellent marriage.”
Sam went on to say,
“I agonized over intercourse — was I ok? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I at all times potent? What ought to I do about my wishes 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 pieces 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 tens of millions of males. Once we are engulfed by WOMAN, we’re out of contact with our true selves. We challenge all our hopes for a lifetime of ardour, pleasure, and which means on to this or that lady, but it surely 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 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 one largest motive is that we by no means acknowledge the primal energy WOMAN wields over us. The typical man spends a lifetime denying, defending in opposition to, making an attempt to regulate, and reacting to the ability of WOMAN. He’s dedicated to remaining unconscious and out of contact along with his personal deepest emotions and expertise.”
It took a very long time for me to grasp my anger and worry of girls and to start the journey of turning into my very own man. Sam’s experiences and his phrases have helped me.
“We start to be taught 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 develop into aware of the methods wherein we’re enmeshed, included, inwombed, and outlined by WOMAN. In any other case we will likely 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 likewise be afraid of them, to the touch them tenderly and likewise wish to damage them. We don’t all must break up to separate ourselves from the maintain that WOMAN has on us, however I do suppose that we should be in a males’s group the place we will, within the phrases of one other buddy and colleague, Robert Bly,
“Males should be with different males to be able 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 primary 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 might add two extra phrases of knowledge. First, it must be famous that my spouse has additionally been in a lot of girls’s teams over time, which I imagine 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 typically extremely advised, as in “should 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 yr. 4 of the seven members have died and the group wants greater than three to be viable. I imagine I’ve at the least twenty good years forward of me and I’ve quite a bit I’d wish to share with different guys. I’ve put the phrase out and have gotten a lot of responses, however I’m nonetheless speaking with males who want to be part of. I describe what I’m on the lookout for right here. Have a look and attain out should you’re .
Sam Eager will at all times be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit could also be flying. Thanks, my buddy.