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!

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.

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 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.

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.

How to recognize when you aren't in integrity with yourself

Integrity starts with yourself. If you aren't in integrity with yourself, how can you be in integrity with anyone else?

I am out of integrity with myself when I bury my truth in favor of people pleasing, don't speak my truth, and otherwise behave in a way that isn't in alignment with who I want to be.

You can be in integrity with yourself most of the time, but all it takes is one moment of weakness to put yourself out of integrity.

I share how to recognize when you are out of integrity with yourself and what you can do about it.

The Ethos of the Sacred Masculine part 3 - Know your shadows to know your wounds

We all have shadow aspects of ourselves. These shadow aspects of ourselves are informed by our trauma, by the pain we have internalized and carried from our earliest experiences to the present. We can continue to let our trauma define us, our pain to control us, or we can make the choice define us, transform our pain and discover our gold.

It takes work...a lot of work, but doing that work helps us become the kind of man someone else can feel safe around, because that man knows himself and is centered, balanced, and grounded. He is aware of his pain and trauma and although he has moments where he may struggle with it (like anyone else), he also knows himself well enough to recognize when he is struggling and do the work he needs to do to get back to balance while also taking care of himself.

 When you know your shadows, you also recognize your own toxic patterns. These toxic patterns are informed by the behaviors you learned in order to protect yourself in situations where you were helpless and didn't know what else to do. Nonetheless these behaviors can also cause pain and harm to yourself and other people. You may not intend to harm anyone, you may be doing the best with what you know, but once you recognize your shadow behaviors then you take on a significant responsibility to change those behaviors and change yourself.

It is the responsibility of any man, when they recognize their shadows, to do the work on themselves to change the behaviors, so they no longer perpetuate the cycle of toxic behavior, in their own lives or the lives of the people around them.

When you heal your shadows you heal your relationship with yourself and with the other people in your life because you start putting those relationships on your terms, instead of continuing to let them be dictated by the shadow aspects you live with. How you heal those relationships is up to you, but what's most important is that you do this work so you can also bring yourself genuine healing and release from your shadow.

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!

How Rites of Passage help men grow up

One of the challenges that men face is around rites of passage, and specifically around the lack of rites of passage that are available to them. We live in a society where meaningful rites of passage have fallen away and what has been left are empty gestures and unhealthy behaviors that don’t really convey a sense of earned masculinity to the people involved.

Getting the license to drive or being able to vote can be important, but there’s not a sense of depth conveyed with either experience. Being allowed to officially smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol is a joke given how many people start smoking or drinking before they are legally allowed to do so, nor does indulging in either vice convey a sense of adulthood or healthy choices.

In my own experience I didn’t have a meaningful rite of passage in my life that opened me to the men’s mysteries until much later in life. Even so, having such a rite of passage still brought me to a place of growth and transformation that was meaningful for my life and at the same time helped me understand how much there was and is a part of me that craves and wants meaningful rites of passage in my life. It is not enough to go through life and achieve specific outcomes and results, if we have nothing that marks those outcomes and results or marks the evolution of our being.

A rite of passage is a mark of transformation. When you undergo a rite of passage, you are experiencing an initiation where you move from your old identity to a new one. That evolution of identity is marked by specific processes you undergo in the initiation and it challenges you to face something within yourself that needs a change. It’s a change from you are, to who you can become and what that change brings with it is a change in consciousness.

Recently, at the Kung Fu studio I practice martial arts at, I took my test for my yellow belt. This test was also a rite of passage. I had to demonstrate to my Sifu that I knew the required knowledge but I also had to show him that I had learned something else, which was a level of responsibility and awareness that could tell him that I was ready for the yellow belt. At the end of the test I had my rite of passage and I felt different as a result. I had graduated from one belt to another, but I had also transformed who I was into someone new. It was a profound and moving moment that helped me appreciate how much I had changed since I had started practicing Kung Fu with my Sifu.

Each time I’ve gone through a rite of passage I have recognized that it is an initiation into mystery. The mystery isn’t always focused on the masculine, but it is always focused on developing awareness, which in turn leads a person to growing up. And that’s something that men need more than ever.

A rite of passage offers a man an opportunity to come into closer relationship with all aspects of himself, heal his inner wounds and transform his life. When a man has a rite of passage in his life he has a path to walk that brings him to meaning and purpose.

If you’re looking for that meaning and purpose, I invite you to check out my upcoming class Sacred Masculine Purpose, where we’ll be exploring among other topics, how to use rites of passage to help you discover your meaning and purpose.

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.

A creative approach to shadow work

Picture courtesy Taylor Ellwood

One of the practices I’ve integrated into my own men’s work and a practice I share with my clients is shadow work. Shadow work can come in many different forms, but regardless of what form it takes, it is absolutely essential for calling out the shadow within ourselves. A shadow is a behavior a person engages in that sabotages them. Shadow can show up in many different ways.

For example, one of the ways that shadow can show up is in how you communicate. If you make passive aggressive comments your shadow is coming out. You aren’t speaking up for yourself in a clear and transparent way.

Another example of shadow would be choosing to engage in deceptive behavior, where you are saying one thing, but doing the opposite behavior, or choosing to act on a behavior but not being honest about what you are doing. When we act on shadow behavior we undermine our relationship with ourselves as well as with the people around us.

So how do we draw the shadow out and work with it so that we can transform it into gold and improve our lives in the process?

image courtesy of Taylor Ellwood 2023

There are different processes that are available to help you work with your shadow. One of the processes I like to use involves creating a shadow mask. I have one of my shadow masks, for passive aggressive communication depicted here. I paint the front of the mask with the face I show to the world. I make the back of the mask a collage, where I share what I tell myself to justify my behavior.

I take these masks and place them in my office where I can see them each day. I reflect on them each day and reflect on how my behavior shows up each day in my interactions with myself and other people. The masks call on me to be honest with myself and honest with others. They call out my shadow behavior where I can see it and make it visible to me, even if no one else sees it.

I have a ritual planned for the masks, when I recommit myself to the sacred masculine work. In the meantime, they keep me company and call me to accounts.