Initiating the masculine of today’s men can happen in two ways. One is through making amends on what their addiction to power have caused. The other is through the willingness to surrender to the feminine. Join archetypal psychotherapist Gillian Pothier as she explains why men need to stop asking what it means to be a man.

 
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Initiating the Masculine with Gillian Pothier
 

Checking on your goals and your desires: Is your desire just to get through the last 31 days of this year to start anew or do you want to start anew right now? I’m very excited to be here with my good friend Gillian Pothier. Just excited to see where the show goes around the concept of initiating the masculine. Gillian is one of those people I met and instantly felt that je ne sais quoi, that feeling of connection and intimacy and long-knowing. It’s just been a pleasure getting to know her and I’m really thrilled to have her on her first podcast here on Tuff Love. Welcome, Gilian.

Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.

We’ve had lots of conversations and I’m really excited to see where this improvisational conversation goes. Gillian believes that inside the heart of all men is both wolf and king. She proudly stands in the massive advocacy, the wholeness and the potency of men in the masculine psyche. She works unconventionally with the archetype of king to initiate and return men to their true nature. Gillian is trained as an archetypical psychotherapist and chooses to remain unlicensed. She has used her additional experience with the multitude of mythological somatic neurological modalities. In her practice, the King Maker Sessions , Gillian creates a diverse array of practices and principles to catalyze psycho-activating initiatory encounters for men. There is a lot in there to discuss. The title, Initiating the Masculine, I believe you came up with that, maybe you could just give a synopsis of what that means.

Initiation, the word itself, means either to begin something new or to be admitted into a secret, perhaps over ancient times like a secret club or niche. It’s often via ritual. To my mind, initiation has these components. It has a ritual or it has some experiential often somatic aspect and that has a before and after state. There’s a state of consciousness of who we were, who our identity was before the initiation and then who we become after the initiation. We experience this throughout our lives and I think, quite frankly, very differently as men and women. Our culture, and when I say that I mean specifically to the West and specifically American culture, is radically lacking in initiatory encounters for people, particularly men. We end up having this watery sense of selfhood that doesn’t have these potent demarcations of, “I went through this experience, this is who I was prior to this experience and this is who I am claiming myself to be now.”

That experience, those threshold states allow for tremendous activation of possibility, of a new sense of identity, of an opportunity to begin again. I use a strange term to describe this. I look at this as an archetypal technology, a way that we can bring something that’s been part of our human selfhood for as long as our race has been alive; this idea of before and after states of identity that are articulated through initiation. We’re lacking in our organic development as individuals, that this process of individuation sometimes needs to be administered. We have to create consciously, through ritual, through consensus and through permission and agreement and negotiation an experience of creating an initiation.

There’s a lot of writing about this as well I’ve seen. In tribes, there’s often initiation of boyhood into manhood. For me, as a Jewish person, a person who grew up Jewish and identify as Jewish,