How To Become An Alpha Male: Lesson 10: I Second That Emotion

Honestly, I think I'm taking my Alpha Male for a bit of a joy ride, so to speak. That is, I'm taking my Alpha Male and asking him to see things in a slightly new way. I'm asking all the best Alpha Males to follow me down a road, take a little ride to a new way of thinking, a new way of living and a new way of loving. Of course, only the really evolved Alpha Males will even consider getting in my red convertible to take this ride, because they know if they let me take them for a ride to the beach, they won't come back the same way. In fact they'll never be the same. They will want to keep living that luscious day at the beach again and again and again. So I suppose I'm asking them to let their skin get a little burned, to let their hair down, let the ocean ring in their ears. I want them to lay back on my blanket and feel something. Feel something good. Feel something great. In fact, I just want them to feel ANYTHING.

If you play at being an Alpha Male long enough, you stop feeling, or worse, you really only feel a very few emotions -- like anger and sometimes fear which many men express as anger and sometimes love or lust which many men express as anger ... I'm sorry, I just had to say it. Seems like early on when men are boys they are told somewhere along the line that expressing anger is somehow manly but nothing else is. This is a shame -- rather like living in a world with only one color -- flaming red.

On my blanket, one Alpha Male at a time, I'll remind them of the ecstacy of feelings they enjoyed in that garden of boyhood carelessness they may have forgotten. They will feel longing. They will feel sad. They will feel relaxed. They will feel happy. They will feel young and free and funny. They will feel everything and best of all, they will name the feelings. We'll have a langourous language lab -- I'll write the words in the wet sand with a stick for them. They'll nod their heads when they read, "g-r-i-e-f" and "p-r-i-d-e-f-u-l" and "u-n-c-e-r-t-a-i-n" and "t-e-n-d-e-r" and "l-u-s-t-y" and "a-m-b-i-g-u-i-o-u-s" -- they will be excellent students all.

And at day's end, like every kid after a day at the beach, they will be spent. They will be full of the subtle colors of those emotions, changed forever in every way. They will return to rule whatever roost they rule, these Alpha Men, but return with a heart full of feeling, a heart that lets others in more easily, lets others out and off the hook more quickly with generousity and forgiveness, and lets them love with a finesse and a passion they had not imagined. Not a weaker heart, as they were warned against as boys, but a stronger, wiser heart that will sustain them and warm those around them, draw others to them, help them lead us all down a path they have trod and are no longer afraid to take.