It Takes BALLS To Face The Issues Of Midlife & Beyond!
I'm Dr. Adam Sheck, and I'd like to welcome you to the "Men After Fifty" Community! Living for more than half a century on this planet is a rite of passage and I wanted to create a place where we can share our wisdom and experience to help each other and to help those who matter in our lives. As true for many "men after fifty", I've had a number of careers over my … [Read More...]
What Do You See?
I read a beautiful poem on aging recently, posted on the Internet as coming from an old man in Australia who died in a nursing home with nothing to his name but this poem in his pocket.
It’s a beautiful poem and VERY appropriate to the Men After Fifty blogsite. HOWEVER, it has also been attributed to a “crabby old man” in Florida as well as a “crabby woman” and a host of others. It is yet another urban legend.
Since I’d like to give credit where credit is due, I did a little Internet research and discovered that it was written quite some time ago by a disabled veteran named Dave Griffith who writes a LOT of poetry and titled, “Too Old Soon”. You can enjoy his work at his website.
Let me know what feelings and thoughts are inspired by the poem below:
What do you see my friends, what do you see? [Read more…]
I LOVE Women Over 40!I’ve got to confess: I LOVE women over forty! I know you’ll think I’m a freak for defying my evolutionary instincts and not joining the rest of the boring crowd in going for the hot, anorexic, airbrushed, implanted girls in vogue these days. Feel free to mock me if you’d like.
Pretty much, I have always loved them. I love ALL women, it’s just how I roll, but over forty – the BEST! I’ve had sex with them, I’ve married them, I’ve had children with them – NOT necessarily in that order!
As a psychologist, analytically I can trace it back to my mother issues. Like Freud might have said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s your MOTHER!”
Mine was strong, independent, and had a crazy sex life [Read more…]
Midlife Crisis: Marry Your Yoga Teacher?The idea of the midlife crisis is certainly something that we men face at some point in our lives, usually in our forties or fifties, making it a very important subject for the Men After Fifty blogsite.
As we enter and begin to face the second half of our lives, we men have the opportunity to face our mortality and this brings up existential issues. What have I accomplished in my life? What do I have YET to accomplish? What might I NEVER accomplish? What will I leave behind? What kind of person have I been and what kind of person do I WANT to be? Does my life have meaning?
Some men “act out” on the way to facing these questions and we have the stereotypes of men buying the red convertible, having affairs, getting involved with younger women, perhaps all of the above. And you can also marry your yoga teacher!
Now I’ve never met Alec Baldwin nor his lovely yoga teacher bride and [Read more…]
Can We Balance Warrior and Lover in Relationship?While assisting a recent Tantra workshop, I experienced the strong difference in my body between when I embody the Warrior and when I embody the Lover archetypes. It was SO pronounced and uncomfortable a difference, I felt the need to write more about it and how it might impact us all in our relationships and in our lives. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, I give a very basic explanation of the four masculine archetypes in my post, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Four Mature Masculine Archetypes.
Of course, during a Tantra workshop I expected to open up my heart, be fully in my body and to activate the Lover archetype. Not exactly an earth shattering epiphany, now is it? I felt open, loving, spiritual, connected, soft, vulnerable and available.
However, as an assistant of the workshop, I also had responsibilities to see that a safe environment was set for the participants. Unfortunately there were a few snafus with logistics at the ocean view hotel we stayed at. To take care of these issues, I had to put on my Warrior armor. “This is DOCTOR Sheck, I’d like to speak to the hotel manager, …”
Immediately I could feel a different energy move through me. [Read more…]
Divine Apologies Bore Me!While I can feel the sincerity behind them, I really have become bored with the series of “divine apologies” that have been circulating around some of the Internet spiritual and tantric communities and the additional apologies that they have inspired. To be honest, it all makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit! I know that’s not “mature”, yet it’s the truth or at least MY truth!
It doesn’t quite make sense to me. The Divine is the Divine. It’s ALREADY perfect by definition. Apologies from the Divine feel not only superfluous but actually blasphemous. I’m not a great Judeo-Christian, yet it does seem like taking the name of the Divine in vain, wouldn’t you agree?
So on the spiritual plane, there really IS no need to apologize.
On the human side, okay, sometimes makes sense. I’m ALL for forgiveness and making amends. Forgiveness is that spiritual AND psychological tool that allows us to surrender the past and projections into the future and be fully present right now! It is the tool for connecting to the Divine in the Eternal Now! I got that, I totally buy into it.
However, I grew up in Brooklyn (before it was cool and popular) and [Read more…]
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Four Mature Masculine ArchetypesMy purpose in this post is to give a context to other articles I am writing on the Men After Fifty blogsite for those men unfamiliar with the concepts of the masculine archetypes. It is by no means comprehensive. It is simply a “quick and dirty” summary of the four mature masculine archetypes set forth in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
The concept of archetypes was developed by Dr. Carl Jung, a pioneering psychiatrist of the twentieth century. The archetypes are “innate, universal, psychic dispositions”. This is a fancy way to say that deep inside each of us, are these psychological instincts which provide us with potential paths to express different aspects of our lives.
Just as physically we have inside us the capacity for language, waiting to be stimulated by our environment, we have these psychological capacities as well. We have the seeds insides ourselves for expressing our masculinity, our femininity, our capacity for parenting, for organizing into a society and for so much more. [Read more…]
Should A Man Be The Man On The First Date?Having recently reentered the dating pool, I am reexamining (a lot of “re’s” in this post) the rules for dating. I’m wondering if in the year 2012 we a truly an egalitarian society or if we even really want to be, at least when it comes to dating?
As a “man after fifty”, I was raised to view women in a certain way and instructed to open doors, pull out chairs, stand up when a lady enters the room, etc. And of course, it was also inherent to pay for the first date, and many more dates to come. And as the father of an eighteen year old daughter, I have done my best to be conscious of how she viewed me treating women in an effort to model how I’d like her to be treated by men, so that she would have an expectation of being treated well, with respect and dignity.
And yet as my daughter was becoming a young lady and beginning to date, I also felt sorry for the teenage boys who had to pay $30 minimum for a movie and dinner and that was cheap (I also felt for their parents who subsidized this). To my daughter at least, going “dutch” seemed reasonable given no one that age really had that kind of money consistently. Of course, sometimes they snuck into the movies through the back door 🙂
So, I wondered what the latest positions were on this in the “grownup” world. Doing a little bit of Internet research, I noticed a 2009 [Read more…]
Pumpkin Pie Can Help Your Sex Life!Believe it or not, research from the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center shows that the smell of pumpkin pie arouses men. In a study of 40 odors, the smell of pumpkin pie combined with lavender increased blood flow to the penis by an average of 40 percent.
In addition, consuming pumpkin seeds, which are high in zinc, may increase testosterone production and be helpful with erections. The study was performed on men ranging from 18 to 64.
Other smells that give a strong response in men are vanilla and strawberry. Vanilla creates a strong reaction in older men and a strong response to strawberry is given by men who rate their sex life as most satisfying.
In another study, women responded the best to the smells of Good & Plenty candy combined with cucumbers.
So, what are you waiting for, start experimenting and let me know if pumpkin pie can help your sex life! Leave me a comment with the results!
The Good Old Days
My daughter, Alana, turned eighteen earlier this month and four days later I watched her be sworn into the Air Force and get on a plane for Air Force Boot Camp in Lackland, Texas
They say it’s harder for mothers than for fathers to deal with a child leaving home and becoming an empty nester. I’m not sure that I agree. While my ex-wife has probably shed more tears than I have, the bond between father and daughter is a very special, very deep one. And I’ve had my share of tears as well.
She’s my baby and always will be. I can still remember cutting the cord on the day she was born. Actually I remember having to cut it TWICE because the thing was so tough! And my daughter is tough, so I’m really not worried about her being okay in Air Force Boot Camp or in the world.
She’s sweet, kind, friendly, smart, beautiful (it’s all true, not a father’s bias, I swear) and TOUGH. It was HER decision to join the Air Force, but more [Read more…]
Have I ever met Steve Jobs? Not in person. Yet he had a profound impact on my life, as he did on so many. And his death touched me, impacted me, saddened me.
He was a MAN! Probably not a perfect man, yet a man. He lived his vision. He was true to himself. He didn’t compromise. He didn’t settle. He pushed himself and those around him to live full out, to live their greatness.
Everyone knows how he dropped out of school and started Apple in his garage. How he was thrown out of his own company, replaced by a soft drink manager. How he picked himself up, continued to live his vision, got his company back, and then brought it out of near bankruptcy to become (at least now) the largest company in the world. He created, innovated, had a family and children and had interesting taste in clothes.
I remember as an undergraduate at MIT [Read more…]