MY READING LIST FOR MENS RETREAT

May 14 16, 2010

Compiled by Ray Olson as Suggestions for Background Information for Teachers and Participants

Loy, David, Money, Sex, War, and Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution, Wisdom
Publications, 2008. Loy supports strongly socially engaged Buddhism, which opens our
awareness of social suffering, promoted by group-selves as well as by ego-selves. He
describes the three collective poisons, institutionalized greed (consumerism), hatred (war)
and delusion (advertising, public relations, and spin). What is a man to do? Loy stresses
the importance of personal spiritual practice, a commitment to nonviolence, and a
realization that ending our own suffering requires us to be concerned about the suffering
of everyone else as well. Loy is Endowed Professor of Ethics, Religion and Society at
Xavier University (Cincinnati).

Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors for Awakening the Sacred
Masculine attempts to integrate all aspects of masculinity, going beyond traditional
perceptions of what it means to be male, including what and how we eat, the male body,
and sex and sexuality, building towards a reverence for the self and the planet as a means
to connect with the divine within and without. In the tradition of Robert Bly, Fox accepts
that men can and do have sides to them that are largely ignored and even mocked by
popular media and mainstream culture and religion, and encourages men to explore those
sides without emasculating themselves or others. Highly recommended for anyone (male
or female) interested in more fully understanding the masculine side of spirituality and
wishing to further develop those energies within themselves.

Daida, David, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the
Challenges of Women, Work and Sexual Desire, Sounds True, Inc., 1997, 2004. A guide
for a specific kind of newly-evolving man. This man is unabashedly masculine he is
purposeful, confident and direct, living his chosen way of life with deep integrity and
humor and he is sensitive, spontaneous, and spiritually alive, with a heart-commitment
to discovering and living his deepest truth. He is totally turned on by the feminine in
people [regardless of gender - CRO]. Daida writes that all men have a mix of masculine
and feminine in them, and that they may suppress one or the other.

Fischer, Norman, Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homers Odyssey to Navigate
Lifes Perils and Pitfalls; Free Press (Simon and Schuster), 2008. In this book, Fischer
guides us to understand our own spiritual odyssey, our own hard-earned, vulnerable,
mysterious life journey, with genuine compassion and newfound understanding.
Odysseuss striving to overcome divine and earthly obstacles and to control his own
impulsive nature holds valuable lessons for people facing their own metaphorical battles
and everyday conflicts, people who are, like Odysseus, heartsick on the open sea,
whether from dealing with daily skirmishes at the office or from fighting an international
war. In his book Fischer points out the role of the god Mentes, from whom we derive our
term mentor, an important role missing in our culture, as described by Moore and
Gillette below. Fischer is a Senior Dharma Teacher and a former abbot of San Francisco
Zen Center.

Moore, Robert and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Redicovering
the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. These authors, both Jungian therapists, posit
that many, if not most, men enter their middle years life with a boy psychology rather
than a man psychology, as boys who pretend to be men. The boy psychology is
characterized by some mixture of behaviors that are tyrannical, bullying, manipulating,
addicted, know-it-all, and mamas boy. The authors attribute this fixation on both a lack
of spiritual elders in our communities and the replacement in our culture of meaningful
masculine ritual processes by empty ceremonies. The four behavioral archetypes of man
psychology, the mature masculine, are those of the books title, which overlap and
enrich each other.

Som, Malidoma Patrice, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the
life of an African Shaman, Penguin Books, 1994. Som was born in a Dagara village,
located in what is now the border between Burkina Faso and Ghana in Africa. Abducted
by a Catholic priest at age 4, he was raised in a Catholic Seminary, destined to become an
indigenous priest. At age 20, he revolted against his cruel cleric masters, escaped, found
his way back to his village and people. There, under the guidance of a spiritual elder, he
underwent a tribal initiation process. In this ritual, he and his co-initiates had to enter the
jungle naked, without food or water. They had to live off the land. The initiates were
warned that they risked losing their lives in this undertaking. Som completed the
initiation without mishap, and an elder told him, You are now a man! He returned with
his co-initiates to their village and people to celebrate their triumph. Over the years he
became a teacher, in the West as well as in Africa.