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 unlock the door to your own cage

One of the ways men are socialized is to lock their emotions and thoughts in a cage, the cage they construct to protect themselves from the world. The problem with this cage is that it keeps everyone out, and the man locked in. It creates an isolating experience that can numb a man because he doesn’t know who to let in or trust, and he doesn’t feel like he can let anyone in.

I remember feeling that way in my own life. I had put walls up around myself and I would only let someone in so far, before I shut them out. I couldn’t share my emotions or have uncomfortable conversations. I shied away from getting into conflict, because I just wanted everything to be harmonious, but at the same time, within myself there was a tempest of emotions and thoughts I wasn’t being honest with myself or anyone else about.

In that kind of situation, it can feel like you are inside a cage. That cage is partially of your own making and partially a consequence of patriarchal indoctrination which convinces boys and men that in order to fit in they have to lock their emotions down. It’s hard to live in that cage, because it makes us small and traps us in a place where we can’t relate to other people around us. It’s a cage that can ultimately kill a man, because it locks the man down from the full expression of his being.

Even though we are in the cage, we have the power to do something about it. We can let ourselves out of the cage we’ve locked ourselves in. That’s sounds simple enough, but actually getting ourselves out of that cage can take some work.

I remember the first time I really allowed myself out of my cage. It was when I was attending a men’s circle for the first time. I had never attended a men’s circle before and I was nervous. If I shared what I was going through and what I was feeling, would the other men make fun of me and put me down? Still I made myself go. I wasn’t the first man to speak that night or even the second or third, but as I heard each man share their emotions and what they were going through I felt like the door to my cage swung open. I wasn’t alone.

I knew I could step out of that cage. I knew all I had to do was speak up and share what was going for me and I could take my first step out of that cage. So I did it. I spoke up and shared some feelings and experiences and even though it was scary in the moment, it was also liberating. I took my first step out of that cage that I had built around myself.

I didn’t share everything in my heart that night. It took me a few months before I got to that point, but when I finally, fully opened up in a men’s circle I felt supported by the men that were there. None of them judged me for my mistakes, my emotions, my thoughts or everything else I had been keeping buried within me. They just listened and heard and witnessed me. It was freeing.

If you’re feeling locked up in a cage within your own life and you don’t feel like you can let anyone in, I want to encourage you to join a men’s circle. There is something really empowering about sharing your space with other men and letting them bear witness to your truth. Men need each other to unlock the doors of the cages we’ve constructed about ourselves. We need to know we’re not alone and know that we can share who we are without having to filter it. We’ve been taught to filter who we are, but being part of a men’s circle can help you stop filtering yourself. It can help you rediscover the genuine person within.

How I'm learning to love being single

I recently became single again, and just as with the last time, I wisely committed myself to being single for at least 6 months, if not longer, because I knew I needed to make space to grieve for the relationship, process anything else that came up, and also rediscover myself outside of being in relationship with someone else.

I’m finding that I’m really enjoying being single. In my twenties and thirties I was filled with a sense of desperation. I had to find my person, or people, because being single meant having to be with me, and that wasn’t something I wanted. It wasn’t the healthiest attitude to have toward myself, but I think a lot of people filled with self loathing operate in a similar way. We try to find a panacea for the condition of our lives, little realizing that the true panacea is only found within.

This isn’t to say that relationship doesn’t have its purpose. It surely does and it can be transformative, nurturing and healing to be with someone else. It can also be a lot of work. Relationships have their place in our lives and hopefully we find that person or people who we can joyfully engage with and learn from, conflict with and grow wiser in the process.

But there is something joyful about being in relationship with myself as well. This latest iteration of singlehood has become an adventure for me, especially as I’ve reached out to my different communities and connected with them even more deeply.

So often if a person is single, its treated as if being single is a state of being that ought to be avoided, because you’ll be lonely. But being single doesn’t have to be that way. I am single, but I don’t feel lonely. I can pick up the phone and talk with someone or text and know that someone is around. I can go to events around town and see someone I know or meet new people and enjoy the experience. Or I can take myself on a date and appreciate the opportunity to do something fun with me.

Embrace being single. It can be an adventure. It can be an opportunity to fall deeply in love with the one person who will never be out of your life: Yourself!

Why men struggle with being wrong and what we can do about it

One of the books I’m reading is Man Enough by Justin Baldoni (Affiliate link) and in the book he talks about the social dynamics around men and how men put on a performance around being right, because of the pressure they feel around being right. What really fascinated me is that he shared an insight that men often put on this performance, not so much because of women, but because they feel like they have to be right in front of other men. He also shared another point, which is that men also are hard on themselves when they don’t seem to have a direction they are going in with their lives.

I considered both points that he made and I found myself agreeing with him. I have no problem admitted I’m wrong about a given topic and in fact I’m more careful about what I say now because over the years I’ve learned how little I know and how much I hope to learn. And I’ll acknowledge that the performance a man puts on can still be done with all people in mind, but there is this tendency that we men have to measure ourselves against each other while simultaneously seeking reassurance that we’re enough from each other.

It’s a game that doesn’t serve anyone.

And I see it as well with the tendency to need a direction. At the job I’m leaving the manager I’ve worked with his has pushed his vision onto all of his workers and tried to get us to conform to his direction. He tells us he always want us to be growing, without considering that constant growth leads to cancer and that sometimes what we really need is to just be in the role we’re in and take measurement of what its getting us. The constant grind of needing to have a direction, when its provided by someone else, is exhausting.

We men can be and often are wrong and that doesn’t make us flawed. It makes us human and allows us to step down from the pedestal we’ve been put on that says we have to be right, successful and have everything figured out. We don’t have to have anything figured out and when we let go of the performance and step out of the shell game, we might just listen better and connect more meaningfully with everyone around us because we no longer have to take up space and show that we’ve got it all figured out.

Right now I have a sense of purpose and meaning and its providing a few directions to go in, but I can also stop and take in the sights and let go of direction, of the push to be somewhere doing something. I can just be with myself and consider what that really means for me. And instead of saying something about a topic I don’t know much about, I can listen and take in what others are sharing. I can learn and let go of the need to appear a certain way.

I can be a man without all the answers or solutions, or anything else. I can be.

How to turn your fragility into agility

Recently on my substack, I wrote an article on my Substack on how to recognize and work with Male Fragility. This article was prompted by reading a book called Grappling: From Fragile to Agile, where the author explores how fragility shows up in men and discusses ways we can become more agile instead of fragile. I’ve been reading this book while exploring my own areas of fragility so that I can become agile when I encounter them.

So what does fragility work look like?

Becoming agile with fragility involves recognizing the blind spots you have in your life that occur because of the way you’ve been socialized. Our socialization creates a bubble around our lives that can keep us from recognizing the experiences of other people, because all we can see is our own frame of reference. When you recognize the socialization and the bubble it creates, you necessarily will get really uncomfortable with what you see, because of how it may make you uncomfortable with yourself.

We have to lean into that discomfort. This is not easy to do, but it is necessary, if we want to grow as people and as men. For example, if I am looking at my fragility around being a heterosexual male, I necessarily need to get real with how my socialization as a heterosexual male causes me to ignore the realities of the experience that other people have faced where their sexuality and identity around sexuality hasn’t been accepted and welcomed because of how society at large is oriented toward that particular sexual expression. This is slowly changing, but this change is expedited when people who have fragility are willing to confront their own fragility and become agile because they can accept their discomfort.

Accepting our discomfort also means getting curious about other peoples’ experience, without expecting those people to educate us. We need to educate ourselves, which means we make the effort to learn about other peoples’ experience, listen to what other people are saying, and otherwise discover for ourselves what we don’t know.

If you’re a man reading this article, you likely have areas of your life where you are fragile. Maybe it’s around race or sexuality or spiritual beliefs or whatever else, but it behooves you to examine the areas of your life that you feel fragile around. Otherwise you are keeping yourself in a place that feels comfortable, but comes at the cost of awareness of other people. You can’t solve their problems and they aren’t looking for you to solve their problems. What is desired is awareness and ownership and a willingness to face what’s underneath our fragility, which is often the fears that we aren’t acknowledging around our fragility. Those fears come in the form of awareness that other people often make accommodations to keep some people happy or feeling safe at their own expense because of how we are socialized.

We become agile when we confront the aspects of ourselves that don’t want to see outside the bubble of our lives. If I never look outside that bubble, I might be in a for a rude awakening that I need to have so I can be fully present with the realities of what other people experience. Agility is acceptance of our own discomfort around the realities of life and our willingness to grow, learn and acknowledge the experiences other people have that are different from our own experience.

3 tips for becoming present with your emotions instead of stuffing them down

One of the challenges that many men face is around becoming present with their emotions. I can relate to this challenge because for a long time I stuffed my own emotions down and even when I began to experience and express my emotions, I still struggled with being fully present with them and expressing them in an appropriate and mature way. I think this is really a human challenge, but men struggle with emotions because we’ve been systemically taught to repress our emotions and not express them.

It is possible for anyone to learn how to express their emotions with sensitivity and awareness of the emotion and of the other people who are involved, but it requires some practice and work. The following three tips can be helpful for anyone who is working on becoming more present with their emotions.

Tip 1: Your emotions are not your identity - When you’re feeling an emotion it can seem overwhelming, especially when it seems to take up the entirety of your being. It’s important to remember that your emotions are not your identity. They are responses to experiences you are having and they are important to acknowledge but they are not who you are. When you recognize that an emotion is not the entirety of your being, it can help you be present with it and also accept that it is just one facet of the experience you are having in the moment.

Tip 2: Take deep breathes and go slow with what you express - It’s really easy to get flooded with emotions. When that happens it makes it harder for you to be present with the person you’re with because you’re feeling those emotions so intensely. A practice that I have found helpful is to take deep breaths and to also make sure my feet are planted on the ground so I’m fully present with what I’m feeling in the moment, and at the same time paying attention to what the other person is saying. Another practice I’ve sometimes found helpful is to actually do a physical activity such as pushups because the physical exercise is giving me an outlet for my own emotions while allowing me to take in what the other person is saying.

Tip 3: Taking breaks can be helpful in both the short term and long term - When you are feeling emotions, sometimes the best choice you could make would be to go for a walk and take a break from the immediate experience. This doesn’t mean you’re running away, but it does mean you need to communicate that you need a break so that you can separate out your emotions in the moment from the overall experience. You still want to acknowledge those emotions and one of the most important ways you can do that is to be honest about what you are feeling.

What tips would you share around becoming present with your emotions? How has becoming present with your emotions helped you communicate and show up better?

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.

The bear in the forest meme

I discuss the bear in the forest meme and share some thoughts around how men’s awareness around their own entitlement and relationship with women needs to fundamentally change. This meme is an indicator of that need for change.

Why should I do Men's Work

Why should a man do men’s work? What is the benefit of working on yourself? I answer these questions and more as we explore why men’s work can be so important to your overall well being and the health of your relationships.

What is men's work?

When you hear the phrase men’s work, do you wonder what that phrase means? In this video I’m going to discuss what men’s work is and share why it’s so important, especially if you want to improve your relationships with other people and create a meaningful and purposeful life.

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.

How to handle falling apart

Sometimes we fall apart emotionally. In this video I share how to handle those moments when you fall apart and what you can do to put yourself back together. I also discuss why this is normal for men, but that what we need to change about it is being open with people we can trust, who we feel safe with, instead of bottling everything up within ourselves.

The Relationship between Anxiety and self-worth

I used to never allow myself to acknowledge that I felt fear or anxiety. I had been taught early on that I wasn’t supposed to show fear or worry or anxiety, even though much of the time I felt and still feel those emotions. I discovered that the more I pushed those feelings down, the stronger they became, and the more overwhelmed I felt by the circumstances that were generating the fear and anxiety I was feeling. Eventually I learned that it was better to acknowledge those feelings, but also find a way to separate my identity from them.

Feelings and emotions are not who we are. They are part of an experience that we may be having in a given moment. It’s important to make this distinction because it is very easy to over identify with a given emotion or feeling. The feelings of fear and anxiety can cause you to question your self-worth when you overly identify with them because you start thinking that this is who you are. When I have experiences of fear and anxiety there a few practices I do which have helped me separate myself from the feeling and experience while also addressing it.

The first practice I do is acknowledge the fear and anxiety I am feeling and I give myself permission to feel it. So often we don’t give ourselves permission to feel these emotions and when we give ourselves that permission it liberates us to be authentic and real. We need to be authentic and real with ourselves about these emotions and how they are effecting us if we are going to do anything with them.

The second practice I do is breathing meditation, where I will breathe and meditate on the emotion. I will use the breathing meditation to help me dissolve the internal tension around those feelings. This allows me to discover the underlying message underneath that tension and work through it, instead of continuing to listen to the fear. When I breathe, I slow down my breathing and I use that to help me regulate my emotions. This gives me some space to work with those emotions.

The third practice I do involves regulating my life through good habits. This means adopting healthy habits that help me improve my life and at the same time allow me to turn my fear and anxiety into tools that aide me. For example, I practice Kung Fu when I feel anxious because doing so gets me out of my head and into my body and this helps me stay more present with myself in a way that turns also those feelings into resources.

The final practice involves taking on an attitude that I am not a victim in my life. I may not have control over my environment, but I have control over myself and that includes my emotions. I can purposely make the choice to work through those emotions, or I can let those emotions controls my reactions, but either way I am making a choice. By taking this perspective and applying it to my emotions, I have helped myself take charge of those feelings and used them to help me make more conscious choices.

My sense of self-worth has greatly improved by implementing these practices into my life. Fear and anxiety can make you doubt yourself, but when you turn them into resources you can make them into allies that help you live a more meaningful life. If you need help with any of this, reach out to me for a free sacred masculinity coaching session and let’s see how I can help you work with your fear and anxiety.

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.

The Relationship between Sadness and Self-Worth

When I feel sadness or grief about a situation or a person or event that sadness is come from a place of loss. I feel like I am losing something and I am attached to what I am losing. Sadness can carry judgement with it. I have sometimes felt sad about a situation or person and felt judgement toward myself, thinking “if I had just been this way or done this thing, this would be different.” Sadness can be a form of resistance, an attachment to outcome that hasn’t occurred, and an effort to hold on. It’s a feeling and we need to accept it and also understand how it sets us up to hold on long after we need to.

Sadness can also be related to how someone made us feel. When that person is no longer in our lives or the relationship has changed, it can feel like we’ve lost something essential. The validation that other people bring into our lives can feel good and be addictive. In the wake of losing a relationship, it can be easy to get into a rebound relationship where you try to fill in the gap in yourself because are sad about the loss of the relationship, but also the validation that came with the relationship. The key is to actually embrace the feelings that are coming up so that you can work through them and change your life.

I got into a rebound relationship a few months after my divorce. It was absolutely one of the worse choices I could have made because I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. I was clingy, needy and hurting and I let my sadness and hurt dictate my choices instead of recognizing that I needed to use them as fuel to help me grow as a person and as a man. I was in the rebound relationship for a year and at the end of it I hit bottom and I realized I had to make a different choice. I had to become present with my sadness and hurt and everything else I hadn’t been dealing with in my life. I knew if I didn’t make that change, I would keep making the same mistakes.

One of the first lessons I learned is that I needed to validate myself. I started learning how to love and value myself. I made changes in my life for myself instead of for someone else. And I started letting go of the grief I had been holding onto, because I recognized it wasn’t grief for the person who had left me, or who I had left. It was grief around the changes my life had gone through and the loss of control I had felt around those changes. I wasn’t grieving for who I lost, but what I lost and that realization changed everything for me around sadness. When I was feeling sad, I was feeling sad about what I lost and that was keeping me from embracing the new opportunities I had available to me.

Loving myself allowed me to recognize that validating myself had to come first and that any changes I made couldn’t be made to get someone back or impress someone else. I had to make the changes for me and they had to be changes that allowed me to grow into authenticity and integrity with myself. It also allowed me to let go of my sadness and find joy in my life as it is, on my terms, instead of continuing to base it around someone else’s terms.

Sadness is a normal feeling and has its role and place. Grief allows us to process and work through something that has happened, but what grief also represents is a fundamental recognition that something has changed and we have lost a feeling of control that we were attached to. Embracing this understanding can help us work through the grief and accept the reality of the situation.

How do you handle sadness and grief? What do you do allow yourself to process and release those emotions?

The Power of Ritual in Men's Work

I discuss why men need ritual in their lives and how ritual can create meaningful and purposeful rites of passage that transform men's consciousness.

What is a "real man"?

What is a “Real man?”

I’ve heard the phrase real man thrown about as a way of trying to define masculinity, but I think its a phrase that shames men because it creates this pedestal that they are trying to live up, instead of actually discovering what it means to be a man in relationship to being themselves. So what is a real man? A real man is…

A man who is in touch with his emotions, cries like a man and is able to share his moments of vulnerability with people he trusts.

A man who is honest with BOTH his intentions and his actions, who follows through on his word and takes responsibility for his choices, while making space for how people respond to those choices.

A man who listens to his deepest desires, his mission and purpose and finds a way to follow through on them in a way that honors himself and the other people in his life.

A man who cultivates awareness of himself and others, recognizes the impact of his actions as well as the intent and is able to learn and improve himself.

A man who is willing to do his inner work, father his inner boy, and hold himself accountable, even as he holds other men and is held by other men in accountability.

A man who is in touch with his sacred essence and revels in it. A man who isn’t ashamed to be a man, while also acknowledging that men need to do their work and transform who they are in relationship with themselves, the people in their lives and the world around them.

A real man can also be a father, son, uncle, nephew, grandfather or grandson, self identify as a man, and be involved in a variety of activities, professions, etc., without overly identifying with any of them.

Are you a real man? No one else can tell you that…but being a real man, whatever that may be isn’t about adhering to toxic notions of masculinity. A real man is a man who recognizes he is part of this world and recognizes he wants to leave the world better than how he came into it.

Images of self love can be masculine too

The other day I was writing another article and I did a search stock images of self love. What I found fascinating was that almost all of the images of self-love were of women. I found only one stock image that was free that had a man in it and even then that picture wasn’t showing the man expressing some form of self love and appreciation to himself but rather expressing love to someone else.

One of the tools of the sacred masculine is the tool of self love. On my own journey into men’s work I found that this tool was essential for helping me heal and embrace myself. I used to loath myself for being a man, because of how masculinity had been modeled to me by my dad, as well as the opinions expressed about it by the women in my life. I only started to really heal this wound when I started to love myself. I recognized I needed to change my attitude and perspective toward myself and discover what healthy masculinity looked like.

Men, and people in general, need to embrace self love. But men may find the idea of loving themselves particularly hard to adopt because we’re taught that men don’t feel. The truth is that men do feel, but they’ve been taught to bury their emotions. Burying your emotions just cuts you off from yourself as well as other people. Self love counteracts that numbness and teaches you how to connect with full intimacy and awareness of yourself and other people. It’s not a cure-all but when you start loving yourself you also start recognizing how much of yourself you’ve given away to other people and you start reclaiming it and creating healthy boundaries for yourself and others.

Self love is also a potent antidote to the heartache of breakups. Breakups are hard in general, but for men they can be particularly hard because of how much men wrap their identity up in the relationship. In my upcoming class Beyond the Breakup we explore how self-love can help you heal from the pain of your breakup and all the other relationships that didn’t work out. When men learn to love themselves it changes how they approach relationship, because they aren’t coming at it from a place of needy insecurity. They’re coming at relationship from a place of awareness and love for themselves, which enables them to hold better boundaries with other people.

A man who loves himself has a better sense of who he is, what he wants and what his mission and purpose is. He also knows he doesn’t need to go through life alone and through self love he starts reaching out and connecting with other men to create a brotherly bond where each man supports the other men. Men need to have healthy relationships with other men because it teaches them that they aren’t alone and that other men can relate to the challenges and struggles they are going through.

If we’re going to change how we show up in the world then we need to start by learning how to love yourselves. One way to model that is to show images of men expressing love for themselves in a way that’s affirms the importance of validating themselves. Men need to know it is healthy to value and love themselves. We haven’t been taught that, but more than ever we need to learn it.

How to recognize and release shame

The feeling of shame is a feeling that can root itself in your body and prevent you from being present with yourself. It is a feeling that you can struggle with, because it is a feeling that says you are bad. I discuss how to recognize shame and what to do to release it from your life.

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.