TRANSCRIPT

Not everybody's a protector. Not everybody's a warrior. Not everybody is capable of being a warrior. What does that mean? I don't mean taking someone's life. I mean, capable, because to be a warrior you have to be quite selfless; you have to know who you are, what you stand for, and you're willing to do anything to protect that.
“Nothing You Do Matters Unless What You Do Matters”
I’m Amadon DellErba and this is “Get Real or Die Trying”
Welcome to Episode 15 of my podcast. Today, I am talking about being a protector in the role as a father and as a spiritual warrior. Being a protector... Why did I want to talk about being a protector? What does it mean to be a protector? Let's start with the understanding that most of us have based upon the archetype of a protector, as a man and the evolution of man on this planet. You see at one time a man had to be, literally, a protector of his family to fend off from harm, from animals, other men, women, tribes attacking, et cetera. They had to protect from the wolves, the bears, whatever may have been primitive man, from the elements, that role through time continued, but did change as society changed, and as society advanced.
In some ways in the modern society that we live in today, we've lost sight of the role of being a protector. And I want to bridge the understanding that I personally have found, is that a protector now needs to not so much think about the physical world because we live in a world now where we don't have to worry about being eaten by a saber tooth tiger, or another person coming to kill us; not all the time, cause you do have to worry about that in some places, but not so much. And our basic needs are met. And so what are we protecting our family from? What are we protecting ourselves from? These are questions we still need to ask ourselves, then we need to take the answers and then we need to come up with a plan of protection.
But, being a spiritual protector and being a father, for me, has really changed, also, my idea of being a protector. Many people have the understanding as a man being a provider. And there are many men who are probably good providers, but are they good protectors? What is the difference between being a provider and being a protector? I don't think that we spend a lot of time in our daily life as men asking ourselves these questions, and then thinking about it.
Self analysis is important. Self-awareness is important. The reason why I brought this up is because I myself was in a situation a few days ago where I needed to be a protector. I needed to protect my family from somebody... not from their violence, not from their desire to kill, or take, or rob, or harm, but from their desire to control and from their desire, honestly, to pollute our consciousness with wrong things; to diminish the value systems that I have put in place for my family and for myself. If it's not just your significant other, your family members, if not them really in righteousness, it could be anybody who needs protection in that moment. Protection from what?
Let's talk about things in this world and day and age that we need protection from. We need protection from immorality. We need protection from the very easy, slow decay of values that can happen to any of us when we are infiltrated with wrong media, wrong content, watching the wrong things, listening to the wrong people. These seeds of wrong thinking, these seeds of demise that go against your own personal value systems in your life get planted and you may not even notice it and so you have to have a consciousness and a spiritual protection to defend that; to protect yourself from people saying things that really go against what you believe, what you value, and what you cherish. And it's okay to set that standard. It's okay to be a standard bearer. It's okay to be a protector. It's okay to not expose your loved ones to things that you don't agree with, that's being a protector. Don't expose them to the people who are spouting things that go against your family values; your truth, your honor, your integrity, your principles, your morality. Don't expose them. Protect them. As a father, I protect my children from seeing things, hearing things, witnessing things around them that I don't want them to have in their beautiful, innocent psyche. And as they grow older, I will continue to protect them, but educate them about why those things do not serve them, why those things are destructive to their souls - to the culture that I'm trying to be a part of, and live in, and grow in, and provide for my children, my family.
I think we make the mistake in our culture (especially Western culture here in America, but all over the world) that we think a good provider is a good protector. And there's a difference. A provider is not always a protector. Just because the man can make a lot of money and buy you the house, and buy you the clothes, and provide the financial stability for you and your family, or for whatever, doesn't mean he's being a protector of you. It doesn't mean he's listening to you and providing a life, and providing a culture, and a home life, and an environment, that you want to live in. It doesn't mean that he's working his spiritual pages, at all. So don't over-emphasize and put value on a man's ability to make money, because that doesn't mean he is a listener and it doesn't mean he's a protector. It just means he makes good money. There's a huge difference. A protector innately, and a warrior, is someone who has values outside of themselves. That's the absolute, they value something outside of themselves more than their heartbeat itself.
Being a warrior is being a protector. Again, the archetype of a warrior, the way we understand it is they are training, they're out there developing a skillset to protect their family. Back in the day, it was the sword, it was the spear, it was the shield. They did what was necessary to protect their family. They had to train themselves. You couldn't just pretend that you were a warrior or you’d just get killed. You'd actually have to train and have swordsmanship skills. You'd have to know how to fight. You have to know combat, and then you would therefore then be a warrior and engage in combat, engage in war, and you would protect your family. Now we live in a time where that same concept does need to be applied. The same tenacity to train yourself and to be a protector needs to be applied in a different way. I'm not picking up the spear, or the sword, or the gun, although I'm capable of doing whatever I need to do to protect my family, and is necessary to protect my family. But today it's more about training myself in the value systems and the characteristics that I want to have as a man, warrior, protector. Training myself, not in thrusting the spear, or shooting the bow and arrow, or firing the gun, but training myself in the values of integrity, honor, humility, love, vulnerability, gentleness with strength, the things that I want to embody as a man.
What is it to create a safe environment? Part of that is having a predictable, structured, reality around you. Why do I say predictable? Because I think that in our society, in our culture, we have way too much emphasis on the spontaneity of this... We have too much emphasis on not creating structure. There's too much emphasis and desire for unbridled liberty. They've associated adventure with no structure. You can have adventure in life and still have an environment with absolute structure and safeness. When my kids are in my presence, they know, and they feel safe because I have an absoluteness in my thinking. Somebody comes into my reality, into my home, into my presence, they're not going to be spewing things that I disagree with. They're not going to be infiltrating my environment, and my children's minds and hearts, or anybody around me, with something that I feel is harmful to their reality.
A spiritual warrior mentality is needed to be successful in providing a safe environment. If you don't have a family, if you don't have a wife, you can start with creating a safe environment for yourself, man or woman. You can decide what enters your reality; your consciousness. You can decide who you fraternize with, who you associate with, who you spend time with. You can protect yourself from people who take and don't give. You can protect yourself from people who are energy leeches, and there's a lot of them in the world. And that's one way that I find that I have to protect my family and myself is that I don't bring my loved ones near people who I feel are harmful in the sense that they are there to take from me. What are they taking? They’re not taking my meat or my horse, like back in the day, or my whatever it is they’re trying to steal. What they're trying to take is the positive energy and spirit and they're trying to leech off of that. They’re energy leeches. These people are hard to identify because when you don't even have the concept, you're not thinking about it. But think about it. There could be someone in your life who's like that, and you run into them. And there's a difference between someone who needs a giving, who needs to be ministered to, who needs the love, who needs the spirit, who are poor in spirit, they need to be helped. There's a difference between those people who need that, and then there's people who take, and they take from you, and they're takers and they don't give.
As a man, as a married man, creating a safe environment as a protector for my wife is not about defending her from other men, not at all. It's about creating an environment consciously where she can feel safe, feel free to express herself, and who she is in whatever way she needs to. Creating an environment where she's empowered, where she feels listened to, where she feels respected, where she feels honored.
You see men have this confusion, that being a protector for their significant other means they gotta be macho, they gotta go beat up the guy who whistled at his beautiful wife or girlfriend, or they got to prove something all the time, or they gotta be jealous and competitive, or anytime any other man gives attention or energy… That's not what being a protector is. Being a protector is creating a conscious connection to your woman that she knows you're not threatened by some other man, because you're a confident man yourself, and your love and trust that you have for one another. So you're not worried about it. You don't waste your energy and time on some other guy because he whistled at your wife. Yes, it's disrespectful. Maybe you should confront him in the right way, but do you let it get to you? Do you have to prove something to your wife and go beat that guy up? No, you don't. If she doesn't love you and trust you already, then you feel like you have to. So your relationship isn't right to begin with. Once you build the trust, once you build the respect and the honor between each other, you have nothing to prove. You're not worried about anything. You could be at a dinner party and some man comes up to your wife not knowing she's married. She's an attractive woman, starts talking with her, starts flirting with her. She's beautiful, why wouldn't he? Then you enter the conversation, oh, then he realizes that. You don't have to do anything about it. Your wife's beautiful, of course, someone's going to come up to her. But she's not a possession that you protect, you see, that's the confusion here. She's not an object that we're protecting from being stolen away. She's not ours. She isn't... I don't own her. And so I'm not protecting my wife like she's a chest of gold that someone's going to come and steal my gold because they want it. The only way this works is if she, she does love you, and respects you, and honors you. So she has no desire to be taken away. That's that simple. And if you're in a relationship with the trust and love isn't there, that's the problem, it's not the other guy, it's that. And so these are simple things, but in life we get confused, we get very confused and we do stupid things as men, and as women.
The spiritual aspect of being a protector is that you want to pursue a safe environment. I don't know how to articulate other than that, is that you have to have a consciousness of wanting to create a safe space, and people feel it, they know it because you have a standard; it's not about puffing your chest out. It's not about going around telling everybody what to do and what not to do and what not to say. It's just about a presence. How do you have a presence? How do you get a presence? By being absolute, by being committed, by being convicted, by having a belief system and things that you believe in and that you live by. It speaks for itself. People don't mess with that. And so, the more relative you are, the more weak you are. The more, “anything goes” in your life, the more, unsafe your environment is.
A woman, a child, a friend, any loved one, wants to feel protected. And you see that we have the emphasis on actually protecting and not creating the feeling of protection and there is a difference. The act of protecting (God forbid it ever had to happen) is very different than a woman feeling protected, a family member feeling protected. You see, when you physically have to protect someone, that's actually protecting someone. You have to engage in a manner and physically confront somebody to protect your loved one, then they feel protected. But if you live in an environment where they feel protected all the time, without the actual physical engagement having to take place, you're winning, you're succeeding. What do I mean by that? What does it mean to be, to feel protected? It means that they know that you have enough character, enough honor, enough strength, enough integrity in you already, all the time, to do what you need to do to protect them; that you're not going to bend. You're not going to blow like a leaf in the wind. You're going to stand by your values. You're going to speak up for truth. If somebody's trying to sway you to do something that you've committed to not do, you're not going to do it, and the trust is there. That's the safety net, that's the protection.
We all fail. I fail, but I want to get up every day, and I want the women, especially, around me as a man, to feel protected, to feel loved, to feel safe, to feel free, to be able to express themselves. And it's not because of my physical combat training. It's not because of my muscles. It's not because of my gun. It’s not because of my weapons that they feel protected. It's none of those things, and that's the whole point. It's because I'm doing the work to try and listen and then provide the experience and show the characteristics to them, and to love them, and to know... for them to know that I will do whatever necessary to protect anybody, anytime, if it's a righteous thing to do. And to get to that point takes a lot of work, and I think that's the confusion that a lot of men and women have. They think that you can just be that person. Not everybody's a protector. Not everybody's a warrior. Not everybody's capable of being a warrior. What does that mean? I don't mean taking someone's life. I mean, capable, because to be a warrior, you have to be quite selfless; you have to know who you are, what you stand for, and you're willing to do anything to protect that. People don't get to that point because they're not committed and convicted to begin with. So you have to get to that point.
Another reason why men are not capable of being good protectors is because they're insecure. And when you're insecure... and I speak from this because I have been through it, and I still go through it at times, so it's not a judgment... But when you are an insecure, man, you're not capable of protecting somebody else. You're not capable of being strong. You're not capable of caring enough about something else outside of yourself to do what you need to do to make personal sacrifices, because you're doing things to fill up your empty soul, and to feel secure because you're insecure. So you need attention. Instead of giving attention you're seeking attention. Instead of filling up someone’s cup, you're drinking from their cup. And so you can't be a protector. So get whole, get real with yourself. Heal yourself so that you can be a giver, and a protector, and a warrior to others. It's about unselfishness. Selfishness vs. unselfishness. Being other oriented; being more concerned about other people. By being more concerned about other people around you and their wellbeing, you are naturally feeling confident about yourself. It builds natural confidence. And that's the funny thing, insecure people constantly are looking to take, but all they actually have to do is start giving and they start feeling better about themselves, and less insecure.
You know, if you look at it like a... I'm just trying to think of very simple examples that most people understand, but … You go camping in your family, out in the woods.
The father, the protector, the warrior, that role... he's going to go out there, he's going to set up the tent, he's going to start the fire, he is going to get the food going. He's going to create an environment where he's taking care of the others around him. If he just pulled up and sat on the chair and said, “All right kids and wife, go do it.” That's not really the role of the protector father; of the leader. He's not really fulfilling it. Are they feeling safe? And this is a very simple example, but take that translate to anything in life. A true man, when he comes into a room, when he comes into any environment, whether it's work or play or anything, he takes responsibility to be other oriented. He takes responsibility to make others around him, feel safe and good, and to give. And by doing that, the confidence is built. I feel good when I help somebody else. So there's, there's an element to being a protector. There's an element of service, it's a selfless service to others. It's about giving, not taking.
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