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...]
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…]
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…]
I’m writing this post on a Monday morning, following an intense men’s weekend training I completed last night sponsored by The ManKind Project. It is called the New Warrior’s Training Adventure (NWTA) and it definitely was an “adventure” that pushed my physical, emotional and spiritual limits.
The purpose of this post is as much for me to integrate the weekend experience as it is to share what might be a beneficial experience for other men. This post is “Part 1” and gives you a context for my experience of “men’s work.” “Part 2” is more about my specific experience of the NWTA and can be read here.
In early 1990, I was very unhappy in my career as an engineer and I went back to school to become a psychologist. One of my Professors was Dr. Stephen Johnson who started the Men’s Center in Los Angeles to help support men in their growth process.
The “Men’s Movement” was very big in the early 1990s and [Read more…]
I’m writing this post on a Monday morning, following an intense men’s weekend training I completed last night sponsored by The ManKind Project. It is called the New Warrior’s Training Adventure (NWTA) and it definitely was an “adventure” that pushed my physical, emotional and spiritual limits.
The purpose of this post is as much for me to integrate the weekend experience as it is to share what might be a beneficial experience for other men. This is actually “Part 2”. You can read “Part 1” here, which began by setting the context of my previous experience of “men’s work.”
The New Warrior Training Adventure is a journey that begins on a Friday evening and ends about forty-eight hours later on a Sunday evening. Time becomes frozen in this intense experience which felt to me more like a week or even longer. The thirty men who participated with me as well as the staff for the weekend transformed from strangers to brothers as we bonded during a common experience.
I won’t describe the specifics of the weekend, as I want to respect the privacy of my fellows, but I shall certainly share my experience and growth. The NWTA draws on a myriad of male traditions, [Read more…]
I can only answer this question, “what does it mean to be a man after fifty?” from my own experience and ask that YOU will all comment and share YOUR answers as well. I hope to create a dialogue which will help me expand this “Men After Fifty” Community and Website in directions that will serve men and their loved ones.
As of the time of writing this article, I’m in my early fifties and I’ve really been contemplating what that means to me. Although much of the time I still feel like I’m twenty-five, I also must admit that I’m “over the hump” and most likely have less time left on the planet than I’ve already lived.
To be honest, [Read more…]