Sam Eager was a thinker, scholar, and creator of life-changing books together with Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Creativeness (1986), Your Mythic Journey (1990), and Fireplace within the Stomach: On Being a Man (1991). He was additionally a mentor, good friend, 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 Fireplace 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 not too long ago, “Why Becoming a member of a Males’s Group Could Be the Most Essential Resolution of Your Life.” In my ebook, The Warrior’s Journey House: Therapeutic Males, Therapeutic the Planet, I mentioned,
“The acceptance of weak spot and power is an important a part of the warrior’s journey dwelling.”
In his ebook, Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam Eager offers a powerful description of this part 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 via the illusions we’ve got mistaken for actuality, crawling via 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journey, we should make use of the warrior’s fierceness, braveness, and aggression to interrupt via the rigidities of outdated buildings of manhood, and discover the darkish and taboo unfavourable feelings that make up the shadow of contemporary manhood.”
Probably the most sincere and revealing features of the fashionable male shadow that we talk about and discover within the teams that Sam and I had been concerned with is our ambivalence in the direction of girls. In my most up-to-date ebook, Lengthy Stay Males! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Males, Shut the Lifespan Hole, and Supply 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 provides insights into why males are the way in which they’re that may assist us higher perceive males’s starvation for girls, together with our anger and concern of girls.”
In Fireplace within the Stomach, Sam says,
“It was gradual in dawning on me that WOMAN had an amazing affect on my life and on the lives of all the boys 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.”
If you happen to knew Sam, who was tall, handsome, and profitable, you could be as stunned 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 college via 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 might determine with Eager’s early expertise. My very own life trajectory was related 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 seek out the ‘proper’ girl, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a very good 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 every little thing 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 thousands and thousands of males. Once we are engulfed by WOMAN, we’re out of contact with our true selves. We mission all our hopes for a lifetime of ardour, pleasure, and that means on to this or that girl, however it by no means works out as a result of we’re actually eager for the legendary WOMAN of our desires. But, we frequently deny the truth 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 cause is that we by no means acknowledge the primal energy WOMAN wields over us. The common 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 know my anger and concern of girls and to start the journey of changing into my very own man. Sam’s experiences and his phrases have helped me.
“We start to study the mysteries distinctive to maleness solely once we separate from WOMAN’s world,” says Eager. “However earlier than we will take our depart, we should first turn into aware of the methods wherein we’re enmeshed, included, inwombed, and outlined by WOMAN. In any other case we might be managed by what we haven’t remembered.”
So long as we’re managed by what we haven’t remembered, we’ll proceed to hate and love girls, to starvation for them and in addition be afraid of them, to the touch them tenderly and in addition wish to harm them. We don’t all need to break up to separate ourselves from the maintain that WOMAN has on us, however I do suppose that we have to be in a males’s group the place we will, within the phrases of one other good friend and colleague, Robert Bly,
“Males have to be with different males with a purpose 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 further phrases of knowledge. First, it ought to be famous that my spouse has additionally been in quite a few 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 recommended, (or generally extremely recommended, as in “for those who 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 12 months. 4 of the seven members have died and the group wants greater than three to be viable. I imagine I’ve not less than twenty good years forward of me and I’ve lots I’d wish to share with different guys. I’ve put the phrase out and have gotten quite a few responses, however I’m nonetheless speaking with males who want to be a part of. I describe what I’m in search of right here. Have a look and attain out for those who’re .
Sam Eager will at all times be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit could also be flying. Thanks, my good friend.