Mature Masculinity Podcast: How to love your body

A lot of men hold themselves to an impossible standard when it comes to their body image. They think they need to be chiseled and lean and many struggle with the self-image they have.

In this episode of the mature masculinity podcast I talk about my relationship with my body, share my experiences around being anorexic in my twenties and talk about how I learned to love and accept body, while also taking better care of myself. I talk about why men need to take better care of their bodies in general and share a few ideas on how they can do that.

How to be present with someone else's anger

The emotion of anger can be frightening to experience, especially when someone else is angry at you! How do you handle someone else’s anger? What don’t you want to do? I share some of my own experiences around another person’s anger and how to identify healthy anger versus abusive anger.

How you get off on situation you don't like

I talk about existential kink and how you can use it to identify patterns in your life that you don’t like and yet nonetheless give you something. I also share how you can break those patterns by learning how to get off on your own discomfort and unhappiness.

Are you Abandoning Yourself?

Are you abandoning yourself to please someone else? I share how to identify if you are, and why this actually hurts your relationship with yourself and the other person.

How to Value Yourself

I discuss the importance of valuing yourself and how it builds up your confidence as a person. I share some processes around how you can value yourself better and how to recognize when you aren’t valuing yourself.

How to receive as a man

I talk about the male capacity for receptivity and how we ignore a fundamental aspect of ourselves when we block ourselves from receiving. I discuss examples of receiving and how you can become a more integrated person when you learn how to receive.

Inside beliefs and outside experiences: How to show up as a better man

One of the challenges a given person faces is how they differentiate between the outside experiences they are having and what they tell themselves about the world around them and those experiences. The inner reality is not the same as the outer reality, but it can be easy to confuse the two and as a result not fully recognize where negative messaging is coming from. Another aspect to consider is that you don’t have control over the world around you, but you do have control over yourself and how you respond to a given situation.

Think about a bad day. What made that day bad? Chances are you can point to a number of situations that occurred during that day to seemingly make it bad, and there’s likely some reality to what you observed and experienced. However at the core of that day being bad are triggers, with associated internal messages and perspectives that took your outside experiences and painted them with a particular perspective that reinforced the internal messaging.

Now a bad day is a bad day and the experiences we have in the world can and do legitimately create bad days. However its important to understand that our internal messaging plays a role in the experience of a bad day and contributes to the overall experiences that we have. When you recognize this connection, you can also differentiate between what you have control over and what you don’t have control over.

For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, you don’t have control over that. However if you have a thought or a feeling around being cutoff, you have an opportunity to re-orient those feelings or redirect those thoughts. You can choose to stew in your thoughts and emotions or you can recognize that you couldn’t control that person cutting you off but you can re-orient on how it’s a lesson about being a safe driver and feel grateful to yourself for being a better driver.

That’s a simple example, but you can apply this same rationale and process to more complicated situations. For instance, you might have a tense meeting with your manager. S/he is coming down hard on you about your work performance. You can get caught up in reactive thoughts and emotions, feeling like a victim, or you can look at the situation and consider that your manager might be also having a bad day and also ask yourself how you could change your work performance to address their concerns.

One of the most important skills we can cultivate is the skill of perspective. Your ability to be flexible and look at a situation from different points of view can help you see the difference between internal message and the actual situation. If you have a negative belief about yourself, and you are in a situation that seems to confirm it, take a few deep breaths and examine the situation. What is your internal messaging telling you? What are the beliefs contained within that internal messaging?

Consider those answers for a few moments. Sit with them and then ask yourself where that internal messaging comes from. Who is really telling you that message? Chances are the message is rooted in your past, when someone else told you something about you and also punished you in some manner. Sit with that for a bit.

Finally look at the external situation. How does this external situation trigger your inner messaging? What are the similarities between the external situation and the original situation that caused the messaging? What are the differences between the external situation and the original situation? Give yourself some space to consider those answers for a bit.

When we take a bit of time (and some breath!) to consider a situation, instead of reacting to it, what we give ourselves is the space to respond to the situation. We can choose our responses and we can also choose to re-orient our internal beliefs and in the process give ourselves a way to resolve the external situation without sabotaging ourselves because of something that happened a long time ago. We are more than our triggers and reactions and we can change them because they represent outmoded survival responses for situations we’re no longer in.

What does it mean to be responsible for yourself?

To live in your masculine energy requires taking on responsibility. But what does it mean to be responsible for yourself? I share my own journey around this topic and how taking responsibility can change the way you approach situations in your life and empower you as a man, in your relationship with yourself and others. I also discuss how responsibility lays the foundation for embracing sacred masculinity.

Why are you changing your life?

Why are you changing your life and your identity? These are important questions to consider, especially in relationship to the other people in your life. The right motivation and intent is essential when it comes to making changes in your life that will be beneficial for you and the people you choose to share your time with. Why are you changing…we’ll explore that question in today’s video.

Thank you but no: How to Set Boundaries

No is a magic work and learning how to say it and stick with is an important skill. I share why men need to learn how to say no in their own lives. Additionally I discuss why it’s important to learn how to listen and accept a no, and move on with your life. Finally we discuss self respect and how setting your own boundaries and acknowledging other peoples’ boundaries is a form of self respect.

Be better: The mantra we can all live by

One of the themes I’ve been exploring in my life is the theme of being better. By being better, I don’t mean being better than someone else, or comparing myself to other people. I’ve done all that before and its not helpful behavior because I find that it actually holds a person back from their greatness.

When I talk about being better, what I really mean is making the choice to improve yourself each day. This choice to improve yourself doesn’t mean you have to make grandiose changes. Rather it means that you pick an area of your life and you make gradual changes that help you get better. Here’s a few examples that may inspire you in your own efforts to be better.

Example 1: I started exercising each morning for 10-15 minutes. I do this each each day, focusing first on stretching and then doing a series of core exercises to help improve my core strength. I have been slowly increasing the time I exercise, and I’ve also used this morning activity to inspire exercise in the evening.

You can take a similar approach with your own physical health. Carve out a specific time of day and start doing stretches and exercises during that time. Initially you might start with 5 minutes and then work on getting to 6 minutes, gradually increasing your time spent exercising.

Example 2: I started working on my posture. My Sifu has been helping me work on my posture. I’ve been using the stretches as well as his instruction and several books to help me do specific exercises each day to straighten my posture out. Each day I spend a few minutes working on these stretches and I am noticing that I am standing taller and feeling more confident as a result.

If you want to work on your posture, have someone look at it with you and then start introducing changes to how you carry yourself. My initial focus was just on standing up straighter, but now its moved over to sitting differently, walking differently, etc. You can do the same by focusing in one specific aspect you want to change and then carry it over to another area you want to improve on.

Example 3: Reading each night. Each night I spend a half hour reading. I make the choice to slow down my evening after I finish writing by taking some time to read. It feeds my mind, gives me something to contemplate and helps me continue the work I am doing. Initially I was only reading for ten minutes and I gradually moved the time up so I was making more time to read.

Each of these examples involves making a commitment to do a specific behavior but it also involves making a time commitment. The time commitment doesn’t have to be lengthy. If you spend 5 minutes doing something that helps you be better than that’s an improvement right there. What you’ll find is that the more you do something, the more easy it becomes to commit to doing it for longer periods of time, and also applying it to other areas of your life.

Being better is really about making incremental changes. The little changes we make create the opportunities for growth and improvement that we want but they make them sustainable! Sustainable change is what enables us to create momentum in our lives around the improvement we want to create for ourselves.

How to stop being lonely when you are alone

One of the challenges that men face is how to deal with feeling lonely, when you are alone. A lot of men try to find someone to make that feeling of loneliness go away, but the best approach is to learn how to be with yourself and connect with your community. I share my own story and work around loneliness and how I have learned to be more comfortable with it.

How to maintain your boundaries as a spiritual discipline

I discuss how to set boundaries and then explore the sacred masculine mysteries of Saturn in relationship to setting boundaries. I also share why boundaries can help you become more aware of your own limits and discuss how poor boundaries allow you to get stepped all over.

How to recognize when you love someone too much

Can you love someone else too much? In this video I share why its important to balance the love you feel for other people with love for yourself and share how to recognize when love is unbalanced and can actually harm the relationships you have with other people.

How I'm using Tarot to set the intention of the day

Picture copyright of Taylor Ellwood 2023

I recently got a new Tarot deck and one of my practices around learning the deck is drawing a card for the day and allowing myself to be open to the experiences of that card, as a way of getting to know the card. I’ll pull the card, read the booklet and then contemplate the imagery of the card, asking myself what comes up in my consciousness around that card. Then I consider how best I can embody that awareness and work with it for the day.

I find that this can be a good practice to take on in any aspect of your life, including your exploration of your masculinity. Pull a card and use that card to help you focus on a particular aspect of your masculinity that you would like to learn more about. For example, I pulled the Hanged Man in the picture above and use it to consider where I was feeling blocked in my life, as well as what perspective I could cultivate to help me with those blockages.

A one card pull will provide you a variety of cards over time and I would invite you to explore the relationship you have with each of the themes of those cards in a curious and open manner. For example, you could pull the Tower card, which is a card that indicates disaster and the upending of the world as you know it. Naturally this isn’t a card people want to pull, but it invites us to explore our relationship with disaster and the upending of the world as you know it. Spending some time contemplating this kind of experience can help you understand how you would actually handle the experience and how you might use the insights of the Tower card to help you work through whatever disaster comes up.

Likewise you might pull the death card. The death card isn’t an indicator of death so much as its an indicator of transformation. Pulling the death card might be useful for contemplating our relationship with death, but it could also be useful for contemplating our relationship with change and transformation and how we handle when change and transformation shows up in our lives.

How to inspire confidence in yourself

One of the challenges many men face is a lack of confidence and self-esteem. We end up looking for it in all the wrong places, hoping that if we please other people enough, if we make them more important than anything else we’ll get liked, but this has the opposite effect. We lose the respect of other people when we become people pleasers and in the process we lose respect for ourselves. In this video I share how to inspire confidence in yourself and stop relying on other people so much.

What does it mean to be responsible for yourself?

If we want to be safe we have to take responsibility for ourselves. I discuss what it means to take responsibility for yourself and share some ideas of what responsibility can look like both with yourself and in relationship to other people.

Do you feel safe?

This is one of the hardest questions men never ask themselves, but it is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself. What does it mean to feel safe? What is safety? How do we find it in our lives? Let's go on a quest and explore these questions!

What is your Definition of Success?

Men are raised to be competitive and to strive for success, but what is success and what does it mean to be successful? Many of us live in a rat race world, always trying to get ahead, but can there be more to life that that? I bust open the myth of success and share why living a meaningful life isn’t about how much money you make or how hard you work. I also discuss what real success can look like.

How to become detached from rejection

Everyday you face rejection. Whether you're asking someone out on a date, getting an idea rejected, or dealing with criticism at home or work, you are getting rejected. If you can learn how not to take rejection personally, you can discover how to persevere and get what you really want from life and from the relationships you are in, and develop self love and acceptance in the process.