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This article gives a brief overview of the topics Contents related to the seven aspects of male hero travel. Methods, rituals and initiatives cannot be discussed further because of the short article.

The term "hero's journey" comes from mythology and refers to a collective image of the soul for a development movement inherent in man: he senses an impulse, a call, follows him and makes his way through all the heights and depths of his life/soul to get to the essence. Today, men in our cultural circle are often far beyond the middle of life before opening up to the inner path of manhood.

Identity and Visions The 7-archetypes of the male soul and the related essential aspects Healthy vulnerability/ Compassionate Father Support/ Strong Wild Man Freedom/Autonomy Warrior Decision-making power/ Will-lover Sexuality/ Love Mystic Unity/ Wisdom King Value/ Leadership/Service

1: The Heavenly One man who goes on a hero's journey encounters the reality of his vulnerability and the mystery of the wound in the first initiation. Every one of us is hurt, every man and every woman, everything is hurt, there are no exceptions. It is like an original principle that appears in everything and that determines our life and our behavior in a comprehensive way.

Most of the time, we try to hide our own injuries and protect ourselves without being aware of them. Personality and character, the so-called self-structures, we developed early in order to shape injuries and deal with them in this world. On the journey to the wound, the man also meets the inner child with his fears and needs. The injury that touches the inner core, however, goes beyond childhood injuries and brings us into contact with the superpersonal, universal principle of the wound. What does wound or wound actually mean? Injuries?

A man who's been through the healing initiation knows his pain and his injuries well. He has researched them deeply and has developed compassion for himself and all living things. He's taken his injuries to a new level and taken them to himself. They are now part of his male dignity, and from now on he does not need to hide them or call on them and demand special consideration from others.

2. The heroic journey of a man also includes the journey to his father. Men are often strongly related to the female in their orientation. It has its history, mostly in the family system. The mother was present, maybe even over-present, and the father was physically and/or mentally absent. This severely hampers the son in his search for male identity.

One of the ways of manhood is that the son opens up to his physical father, however that may look, however the father is or was. It is also independent of whether the father is still alive or not, or whether the man knows his father or not.

Robert Bly talks about the double current of the inner father the son encounters. These include strengthening, supporting and nourishing shares as well as the "axis side" of the father, his dark, dangerous and also destructive side. This confrontation with the whole reality of the Father is often a very profound and moving process. Reconciliation with his father and his male ancestors helps a man to find his male identity and strength.

Three. The third step concerns the qualities of the archetype we call the "Wild Man". It stands for the mature form of male independence, strength, attachment to the earth, savagery, and for a healthy willingness to take risks and adaptability. A man has to realize what freedom really means to him, and a man who can't be alone can't be free. A man who is not free cannot break up either. A man who cannot separate cannot connect, he cannot enter into a binding and mature relationship.

It is not easy to fully understand and live freedom, because the essence of freedom goes far beyond our concepts.

Important questions arise here: How am I addicted, how am I addicted? Men at this point of their journey without any disguise confront their immature, unfettered dependencies and addictions, explore them and distinguish them from freely chosen bonds and liabilities. It is important to investigate the dependence of a man on the female, both the mother and the partner and female reference persons.

Four. In the fourth step, a man integrates the often difficult-experienced warrior aspect: male readiness for conflict, centrality, will and determination. Often the inner image of the warrior hierarchy is associated with the destructive and injurious shadow aspect. The issues of violence and destructive power need space to be explored and clarified.

In the warrior aspect, a man examines the nature of his will and his decision-making power. Even small children use the directed willpower that we can call aggression if they want to learn to walk. They fall over and over and over and over again until they can walk. Here the natural interplay of aggression and devotion becomes clear. As adult men, we also adhere to this principle on our journey.

If a man goes his way only with a clear, directed force, he will realize that this force alone is not enough. Without devotion to the flow of life, to the "greater will", he would harden and become involved in the struggle for life.

So how am I a fighter, how am I aggressive? A man checks here where he covers or He works in the circle of men to find his balance between appropriate aggression and devotion.

It's important for a man to be able to set boundaries and make decisions. If the inner warrior is well trained, it is easier for him to hold his space and walk his way without injuring others inappropriately. "The warrior's ultimate goal is to renounce both the sword in his hand and the sword in his heart."

Five. A man on a hero's journey confronts the reality of love and explores its essence and meaning. He gains a deeper understanding of what love and love mean in his life. He recognizes that love is fed from the same source in its numerous facets. The term "lover" more represents the passionate aspect of love in the use of language. We use the terms synonymous here.

The lover wants to connect with what he loves, what his fire burns for. Whatever excites him, he finds a way to enjoy it. For this he is also ready to take creative and unconventional paths.

"How am I a sexual man? "is a question of the nature of our own sexuality. Many ideas, concepts and conventions obscure the reality of our sexual identity and sexual essence. A safe space opens up in the circle of men to address this issue. The vulnerability of male sexuality is rarely discussed, although men here are often very wounded. In the field of male initiation, this can also be seen and processed.

The distorted aspect of the lover is the "addict". It is the addictive lover in the man who strives from one satisfaction to the next. A man on a hero's journey is challenged here to explore and sober up his addictive behavior in order to advance to his essential passion.

Six. The aspect of the mystic leads us into the realm of intuitive knowledge, wisdom, spirituality and original trust. The mystic is the archetype of the essence and directly embodies the ancient and central question of our human being, of our being behind the outer form. Who am I? What am I beyond my ideas, opinions, intentions, worldview and self-image, and beyond my thinking and history? Who am I if I'm just being me? What am I touching right now? These are not philosophical questions addressed to our minds. It's about being, about consciousness itself.

In this context, a man meets the deeper plane of his being and confronts the reality of his life and mortality. He enters the "threshold" space and leaves the narrow perspective of his previous views and structures. He looks behind the polarity of the opposites of good and bad, right and wrong, guilt and innocence, life and death, understanding and not understanding. What does it mean for a man to dare to renounce the familiar way of thinking, knowing and acting and enter the space of ignorance?

Beyond right and wrong lies a land of radiant consciousness where we meet (Rumi)

Seven. The Archtype of the King represents the inner image of the mature, integrated man.

Here we come across three themes: value and dignity, authority and leadership, responsibility and service. These three aspects emerge in turn. The central issue is value.

Being of value is a quality of our soul. It is a principle of food and lies beyond what we can achieve through our actions and beyond what our destiny is. We're already valuable, from the beginning, of course. We cannot add to this, however hard we try, nor can we lose any of it. It is about becoming aware of this inner reality.

Leadership with the king comes from being of value. The contact with the inner value makes a man free to assume leadership for his own life. He is able to live his life with self-determination, instead of living with circumstances, things and foreign demands.

Leadership and service/responsibility are closely linked. The contact with the King's archetype gives a man the ability to put his original property at the service of the whole. This service comes from the original and the truth of our soul, not from any idea we have of serving.

The journey of heroes does not end, our path of development goes on for a lifetime. Only sections or phases of the journey end. There are compressed heroic journeys in which a man travels through these aspects for a certain time and experiences similar initiatives. For this purpose, a man needs an appropriate setting, where competent initiated men who have penetrated the essence of this path participate and assist him during this intensive time as mentors, therapists or experienced companions.

For compressed hero journeys there are many examples of archaic and traditional forms from different cultures. In our culture, it is helpful when, in a man's journey, initiative, psychological and spiritual levels meet, beyond any ideological fixation.

Literature Directions:A book about the men's project "The Hero's Journey of Man" was published 2015 in the Springer Science Report: "Self-Experience Man", by Andreas Schick.

Other literature on the subject:Robert Bly: "Eisenhans" S. Biddulph: "Men in search of R. Rohr:"Finally becoming a man"