1 Be Sensual
First of all, get in touch with the Lover within you by fully engaging with everything your senses have to offer you and simply taking more time to really enjoy the things which bring you pleasure.
You can do this in simple ways: increasing the time, attention and energy you put into connecting with nature, enjoying the taste of good food or wine, savouring the glorious experience of making love, and enjoying other sensual experiences such as having a massage.
And you could, for example, schedule time to be with your partner or children, making sure that you are fully present with them so you can truly share the experience. You might also choose to spend time with yourself or indulge your own inner child in some way.
Being sensual means appreciating what your senses offer you, and being fully open to receive and enjoy those sensual experiences.
2 Be Open To Healing Work
Being fully present in your life is an important way to moderate the endless cycle of using external events or substances to feel better. However, as any addict can testify, it’s not a remedy for the Lover’s pain and neediness. Sure, going out for a gourmet dinner and savouring every bite may be a sensual experience which puts you more in touch with your lover energy, but to move comfortably in and out of your Lover archetype by choice, you will certainly need to heal the emotional wounds which lie deep in your shadow unconscious.
This is the province of the wounded inner child. And every single one of us carries, to a greater or lesser degree, wounds in our inner child. Perhaps some of these wounds are so early and so profound that they cannot be completely healed. But unless you do some work on them they may continue to run your life for ever.
In fact you can pretty much assume that any issues you may have with addictions, neediness, excessive stoicism, endless grief, poor relationships, lack of self-love, inability to love others, inability to play, and a lack of joy in your life (among other challenges), require two things.
First, you could do some healing work on the emotional wounds of your inner child. Second, you might like to find ways to develop a strong internal Sovereign who can hold the wounds of your inner child. These are, after all, wounds in your Sovereign’s Kingdom and you, as Sovereign, are responsible for holding them.
This is essential, I believe, because some inner child wounds seem to be too primal, too deep or too early to ever be healed completely. While the pain can be soothed with emotional process work, sometimes what’s also needed is an internal parent or leader – the Sovereign in you – who is strong enough to hold that part of yourself and comfort it.
If you feel your energies in these areas are out of balance you can work on your emotional wounds in appropriate workshops and bring them back to a healthy balance, especially around the development of Sovereign energy. You can see more details of these possibilities in the resources section of this book.
3 Dive Into Your Shadow
Are you ready to dive into your shadow unconscious to explore what happened to you in your early years, and to do the essential work of reparation and healing? Are you willing to do this for your own sake and for the sake of your loved ones?
It may mean diving into the ocean of grief inside you to mourn your losses – not only the things you had, but also the things you never had but desperately needed (unconditional love, for one).
It may mean some therapeutic work on the inadequate parenting or lack of love that you experienced in childhood.
It may mean healing the wounds of loss and separation.
Many of us know the painful experience of significant people dying during our childhood, or of being separated for some reason or another from those we loved, long before we were old enough to cope with that experience. (Boarding school “survivors” are well acquainted with such experiences.) And even when we were older we may still have experienced losses from which we have never recovered because we have never grieved.
Your sensitivity, sensuality and compassion as well as your ability to connect with others, with yourself and with Planet Earth all reside in the Lover quarter. So to be fully present in any relationship, to be fully present in your life, and to be able to give and receive love freely, sure in the knowledge that you can love others and they can love you in return, you may well need to do some healing work in your Lover archetype.
And given that you’re prepared to do this deep work, all the other aspects of your Lover archetypal energy will become more powerful and profound. Your life will seem brighter, richer and more colourful, more stimulating and joyous, more of a life to be lived.
4 Indulge Your Sensitivity
The Lover within you is very sensitive and needs to feel the “softer” things in life for you to experience your humanity fully. First and foremost among these is a sense of connection and love, or appreciation and affection, from others. Find these and you feed your Lover. However, there are many more ways to give the Lover within what he needs.
You might choose, for example, to listen to beautiful music that moves you, to dance to joyous music that energizes you, to cry to sad music that helps you touch your grief and start to mourn your losses.
You might choose to arrange a surprise date with your partner, wife or girlfriend, or bring her flowers. You might choose to write her (or him) a love letter or simply to tell her that you love her truly, madly, deeply. After all, those things are what the Lover inside all of us wants to see, hear, and experience.
If you know a young baby whose needs are being met and who is truly loved try this: next time you see the child, cuddle him or her and see how this feels. You may feel his or her innocence and purity and you may sense the baby’s connection to something bigger than himself. The same energy remains within you to this day and it needs to be taken care of.
5 Emulate Others Who Embody The Lover’s Qualities
You may find it helpful to emulate men whom you admire and who embody the qualities you wish to develop in your own life. You can watch films and read biographies of these men (and women) to learn more about the qualities you would like for yourself.
But what if all of this emotional “stuff” doesn’t come naturally? Well, this is probably a great opportunity to practice the old adage: “fake it till you make it”. Simply act passionately, act with enthusiasm, act as though you already know what it means to be truly sensual. Show your emotions as if you are really feeling deeply. Go to concerts and really listen to the music. Study art with enthusiasm and passion. Enjoy a sudden, unexpected embrace with your lover, partner or wife. Play uninhibitedly and enthusiastically with your kids. Taste and savour every morsel as you eat. Dance like your life depended on it. Make love as though you were going to die tomorrow. In other words, simply be passionate about your life and all that it offers. For, as David H Wagner says in his book Backbone: The Modern Man's Ultimate Guide to Purpose, Passion and Power, “The Lover loves what he loves, but he wants to love it hard.”
6 Learn To Love Your Inner Child - And All Your Other Parts Too!
How often have you heard the words, “Love yourself”?
Surely, that shouldn’t be too difficult?
Sadly, it all too often is.
The problem is that many of us internalized a model of love from our parents that was less than perfect. A model of love that may have ranged from good through adequate to downright inadequate, unkind and uncaring, none of which remotely represent unconditional love.
The way you were parented as a child in the world by mum and dad is likely to be the way you now look after your own inner child. So if parental love wasn’t big in your childhood you may need to learn how to love yourself better. (If you don’t yet have children of your own this will help you be a better father when the time comes.)
Start by imagining what a real child in the world wants – mostly, attention, affection, love and respect.
If you can give those qualities to your own inner child, perhaps by spending a few minutes every day talking to him, he’ll
soon respond by blossoming into an active part of your personality. Unfortunately that can lead to endless trips to the adult equivalent of the sweet shop or candy store, together with self-indulgence on a grand scale and a lack of responsibility as well. So what you’ll need to do then is to start setting clear and firm boundaries around the behaviour of your own inner child. You’ll only be able to do this if you carry sovereign energy strong enough to hold those boundaries.
On a practical level your inner child is the source of your innocence, your fun, your play and your laughter, not to mention your sexuality and sensuality. Looking after this part of your inner world is vitally important to your well-being as a man who can enjoy a long and happy life. If you don’t know how to look after your inner child, how to love him, hold him, and bless him, I strongly recommend that you get some help. For example, take part in a workshop where these things are explained, demonstrated, and made real.
Of course, loving yourself isn’t only about loving your inner child; it’s also about loving all the parts of yourself.
Many people carry a harsh inner critic which manifests as self-denigration, lack of self-care, even self-harm in the more extreme forms.
You might be overtly self-harming in some physical way. But self-harming also includes covert self-harming in the form of behaviours such as eating too much, not getting enough exercise, drinking too much, taking drugs, not getting enough sleep, staying in abusive relationships, and eating things that aren’t good for you. In either case it would most likely be helpful to have a look in your shadow bag to see what might be behind this behaviour.
This work allows you to look at the parts of yourself which you pushed into shadow long ago – no doubt for some very good reason. You can get those parts of yourself out again and look at them in the light of today. You can explore your emotional wounds and Archetypal energies, heal them, restore balance, and so begin to fully express every aspect of yourself in all your power, magnificence and glory in the world.
And since how you look, your appearance, is a powerful symbol of self-love, you can do a few simple things right now to set out on the road to fully loving yourself. Start by simply caring for yourself better: dress better, groom yourself better, and be proud of your appearance and your environment.
The Boyhood Form Of The Lover Archetype:
The Oedipal Child
All the boyhood archetypes are “immature” simply because the boy is the “immature” form of the man. However, these boyhood archetypes are essential to our development into a healthy and emotionally balanced adult man. They map out a natural pathway from boyhood to manhood. At the same time they are powerful and wonderful energies in their own right!
The boyhood form of the adult male Lover archetype is the Oedipal child.
The Oedipal Child generates our passion, our wonderment, and our appreciation for the world around us – and the people in it. In its fullest expression this boyhood archetype has a deep sense of the oneness and interconnectedness of all things. Moore and Gillette suggested that the root of this energy is a sense of connectedness to Mother energy. As I understand it, this is not so much represented by a boy’s real mother as by the idea of the Great Mother or the goddess Mother Earth, a nurturing mother seen in the myths and legends of many people over many cultures.
Sure, this is an idealized relationship which probably represents the idealized form of the connection between infant and mother after birth. But it is also a relationship which carries the essence of our spirituality, our connection with the world around us, and our relationship with Mother Earth. She takes the role here of the archetypal model of our ideal nurturing and supportive mother. At the same time our internal feminine archetype, our Anima, is mixed in with our vision of our own birth mother and the feminine energy in which she carried us and out of which she gave birth to us.
All men have to move away from the feminine so they can grow into, embrace and embody the masculine. This is, in fact, the work of every man, young or old, who wishes to grow fully into his masculine energy and live out his birthright as a man.
Unfortunately there are many men in our society who have, for one reason or another, never fully separated from “mother” in one form or another. These men may continually strive to reconnect deeply with the feminine or persistently search for the masculine world they intuitively know they should be inhabiting.
Challenging though this may be, it is not the whole story. For when a man carries the shadows of the Oedipal Child into adulthood, things can become really dysfunctional.
The Shadows of the Oedipal Child
As always, the shadows can manifest in inflated or deflated form.
The inflated shadow pole of the Oedipal child is the Mummy’s Boy. But why “Oedipal”?
As you might happen to know, Oedipus was a Greek king way back when who “accidentally” killed his own father, King Laius. It was quite understandable that Oedipus didn’t recognize his dad, really, since Oedipus had been taken away from his family at birth and put on a hillside to die. Fortunately a shepherd rescued him and raised him to manhood. Unfortunately he was then able to fulfil his destiny and kill his father.
It’s a long story how they got themselves into this pickle, but what it amounts to is that a prophet (a cunning Magician, no doubt) had told King Laius (a weak King, it would seem) that his own son, Oedipus, would grow up to kill him. Somewhat unsurprisingly Laius tried to prevent this by killing the boy first. However Oedipus, as we know, survived and killed dad instead.
Unfortunately events then took an even worse turn, because Oedipus somehow managed to marry his own mother, Queen Jocasta. Still, as Robbie Burns said, the best laid schemes “gang oft awry”.
As you might easily imagine, things didn’t go too well after this, particularly when the awful truth was uncovered. The Kingdom was blighted and Oedipus was eventually cast down.
It’s an amusing legend, no doubt the kind of story the Greeks liked to tell each other, but for our purposes the real message comes directly from Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipal myth: boys see their fathers as a rival for their mother’s affections. And at some level boys want to remain firmly in the embrace of the feminine, a loving and glorious union we experience first in the uterus, and later at the breast.
If separation from mother and identification with the masculine (for which read Dad) doesn’t happen, then the boy’s inflated connection with the feminine and his perspective that mother is the goddess is only going to lead to him getting hurt.
You don’t have to be a devotee of Freud’s interpretation to see that there could well be truth in the general idea of a boy needing to give up the feminine and join the world of the masculine.
Moore and Gillette suggested that the Don Juan syndrome, a term they used to refer to a man’s endless search for the perfect woman (really the immortal goddess), represents the inflated pole of the Oedipal child, the Mummy’s Boy, at work. He finds what looks like the ideal woman, then discovers she is flawed, casts her aside, and moves on to the next. He has not yet learned that perfection does not exist outside his unconscious mind.
Interestingly, they also suggested that heavy use of porn was an unconscious attempt to find the goddess among the endless parade of female bodies available in porn. Who knows if this is an interpretation too far, but there is a certain quality of softness – or perhaps more accurately a sense of his failure to fully embrace the masculine – in a man who’s still inappropriately attached to the feminine during adulthood. He shows a reluctance, somehow, to do what it takes to form a truly mature relationship with a woman and step fully into the masculine world.
The other shadow pole of the Oedipal child – the deflated pole – is the Dreamer.
This is state of isolation, of self-absorption, of inactivity, and of relationships with intangible things such as ideas, dreams, concepts, and creativity. It looks like depression, but it could simply be another kind of search for unification with the idealized image of
the feminine. Or perhaps this is another representation of the grandiosity of the Oedipal child who seeks to possess mother completely so he can stay united with her for the rest of his life.
In Summary
The Lover archetype is the part of us that softens our Warrior with mercy, our King with compassion, and our Magician with tenderness.
The Lover’s energy is primal, driving us to seek connection with others from the moment we are born. Unmet, unsatisfied, this desire for connection controls us with addictions and unboundaried desires.
We’re all wounded here to some degree, and without a strong Sovereign to hold the boundaries in adulthood this archetype can rule our lives, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
The emotion associated with this archetype is grief; grief for what we had and lost, or what we should have had but was never present in our lives.
The healing work you may need to do for your Lover’s wounding is to shed the tears of grief you’ve never expressed, and develop an internal Sovereign strong enough to care for and protect your own inner child.
Chapter 5
The Sovereign Archetype In Men:
The King
Back in 1990 Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette suggested the most repressed archetype in men was the Lover. Whether this was ever true is open to debate. But nowadays one thing is certain: the most repressed, and ironically the most important, archetype in men is the Sovereign, or King.
The strength of your Sovereign archetype gives you the power and potency to be a powerful decision maker, the leader of your world, and the head of your Kingdom – whether that means your family, your business, the world over which you have influence, or simply your own life. Your sovereign energy is what makes you King in your own Kingdom.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 13
