It’s a measure of men’s oppression that, 50 years on from the flower of the women’s movement, we still don’t have a proper men’s movement in this country.

And it’s an uphill battle, a much-harder one than women have, because privilege is both invisible-to and stoutly-defended-by the holders thereof.

It’s an uphill battle because women actually TALK to one another, and men have been deeply conditioned to be isolated lest they really feel the desolation of their position and remove their neckties, those symbols of bondage to the established order.

It’s an uphill battle because women already FEEL their disempowerment, but facing disempowerment is the last thing a conventionally-socialized male wants to do. He has neither tools nor support for it.

But it IS happening, in fits and starts, as the women’s movement itself matures. My generation is for the most part hopeless, but the emerging generation is doing it and doing it authentically. I am hopeful.

The big problem with Tony Robbins’ programs, the “Landmark Forum,” and most of the motivational programs out there is that they’re based in false (egoic) will.

You get the pep talk about “possibility” (often from a presenter with an exaggerated aura of self-confidence), some inspirational platitudes, and some exercises to expose your mind’s issues around self-worth, success, and the like. But there’s a LOT of reinforcement from the group — like, where everyone applauds and there’s this jacked-up enthusiasm in the room as the “induction” takes hold (and yes, having studied hypnotherapy, I will say that the Landmark Forum set-and-setting does fit the criteria for an hypnotic induction) — and all of it plays to your self-representation, i.e., your ego.

False will is unsustainable and ultimately exhausting. Based in what’s unreal in you, it has no actual substance, but is supported by things outside yourself, e.g., group membership (“follow ups”) that have no real intimacy or community. The contrived euphoria fades, and requires a transfusion.

What’s missing is a sincere and authentic inquiry into your unique purpose in human incarnation and how to align with it in 3-D (concrete reality) and 4-D (mind).

That is properly a task of the spiritual path. You can’t subscribe to someone else’s, and you can’t get it from psychics or spirit guides. It is a direct revelation of your own deep substance, and you only hear its voice in the interior silence of your ego’s cessation.
This is the only place from which an authentic vocation can be “sourced” and which truly supports your soul-unfoldment instead of what is “reasonable” or what others think.

What often happens, though, is that when the egoic pattern of false will collapses through its own inertia and unsustainability (sometimes surfacing as a crisis of some kind) a person goes back to the motivational program for a recharge instead of staying-with the ambiguity of not-knowing “what to do” and what to tell friends & partner. This is actually an investment in NOT growing, and one often won’t get the right support from a program or trainer that has not done that work themselves.