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 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.

The price of patriarchy

I just finished reading Bell Hooks book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (affiliate link) and it was thought and emotion provoking read. What it made me really consider was the price of patriarchy on men, and how this has shown up in my life.

Even though I’ve never considered myself an advocate for patriarchy, I see how much it, in some ways benefits me, and other ways disempowers me. As a man, it benefits me because patriarchy prioritizes men and the way men take up space in the world around them. On the other hand patriarchy also disempowers men because of how it isolates us from expressing ourselves. I have spent much of my life walled up when it has come to emotions such as loneliness, anger, fear and depression. It has caused me a lot of grief and pain because I haven’t been able to open up to other people around me in a real and authentic way up until recently.

And then there’s sex. When I read the author’s thoughts on sex, it caused me to reflect on my own male entitlement around sex and where that entitlement came from. I see how this entitlement has actually caused me to focus on a very narrow perspective and experience around sex, while missing out on some of the more subtle nuances and experiences around sex. I also see how it can exclude love from sex because the emphasis on sex is fixated around performance and how sex reinforces a man’s image of himself.

I look at how patriarchy has played a role in my experiences. It’s something I’ve often not even thought about for much of my life (an example of male privilege) and my realization has really come about because of getting involved in the men’s movement and through conversations I’ve had around the impact of patriarchy with other people in my life. I see how patriarchy has damaged my relationships with lovers, and I also see how it has isolated for most of my life. I have only recently, in the scale of my life, developed healthy relationships with other men and I am in the same process of figuring out how to have healthy relationships with women.

I feel sad about the impact patriarchy has had on my life. It has shaped me in ways that has kept me from being fully present in the relationships I have been in. It has limited me in ways that I am only now realizing because of how it has conditioned me to look at the world through a very specific filter. Yet I also know that this is part of men’s work: We become aware of the programming and packaging that effects our lives and we fully accept how it has benefitted and harmed us, so that we can make changes.

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.

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 Relationship between Anger and Self Worth

Anger is one of the emotions I’ve struggled the most with in my life. As a boy, I learned that expressing my anger wasn’t acceptable. I was supposed to keep my anger to myself, and I did that. It was unhealthy. I became depressed because I couldn’t authentically express myself or the feelings I was feeling. It also didn’t help that I would see the exact opposite behavior with anger modeled by the adults in my life. What I learned to do was turn anger toward myself, because it felt like the only way I could experience anger of any sort weas by directing it toward me. I have since developed a healthier relationship with anger, learning to be present with it and share it in a way that doesn’t have to be overwhelming or terrifying toward myself or anyone else. I recognize there is value in feeling anger, when it can be expressed constructively in a way that actually addresses what is underlying the anger.

One of the books I’ve been reading is Addicted to the Monkey Mind, by JF Benoist (Affiliate link). He makes a salient observation about anger, that it is a feeing that occurs when an internal boundary is crossed and that while it is often attributed to other people or situations, it often comes down to an issue within us. Specifically he makes the point that the anger we feel, in part, is anger directed toward ourselves for being in the situation we’re in. I’ll admit when I read that perspective, it took me a little while to wrap my mind around it, because it initially came off as a form of self blaming, but as I sat with that observation and considered what I am feeling when I feel anger, I realized there is an element of truth to this observation.

When I feel anger about a situation, there is a boundary that has been crossed. Some of that can be attributed to the situation or a person, but I also do feel anger toward myself or putting myself in that situation. There is a sense of “I should have known better,” and a judgment that accompanies that thought that brings an element of shame into the mix. When I sit with anger, I realize some of the anger is directed toward myself and it shows up as a from of doubt around my own worth.

When I turned my anger toward myself when I was a child it felt like the safe approach to handling the feeling, but I realize now it wasn’t. Turning it toward myself caused me to doubt my own worth because it created an echo chamber for what other people were telling me about their anger toward me. Later in life I learned to express anger toward other people or situations but would still direct a lot of it toward myself. I realize now that the self-directed anger is a feeling around my inner sense of worthiness. The awareness I bring to that feeling is one where I can be kinder to myself and acknowledge that I haven’t honored my inner boundaries and limits. It also motivates me to work on expressing those boundaries and limits, both to myself and to the people in my life.

Look at your own relationship with anger. Be present with the emotion and allow yourself to be aware of how it feels in your body. When you feel the anger, is some of it directed inward? What is the message that your anger has for you?

What can you do to honor your anger and help yourself feel safe to express it in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm you or the other people involved?

One of the solutions I employ is meditation. Meditation allows me to be embodied and present with the emotion and the situation and also provides enough distance to help me get some perspective. I use deep breathing and grounded awareness as well, focusing on being in my body, because I find that otherwise my body locks up and I feel frozen or I blow up. I want to deepen my connection with my body so that the feeling permeates my being and I dialogue with it, instead of just reacting to it.

I also recommend journaling about your emotions. Getting them onto paper can help you express what you are feeling in a way that isn’t filtered and won’t necessarily be shared with someone else. It allows you to give a voice to your anger in a way that isn’t out of control.

And there is also something to be said for speaking with someone who is removed from the situation and can hear the situation for what it is, without any judgment of yourself or anyone else involved in the situation. When you feel heard in a situation, it can go a long way toward helping you address the feelings. If you want some help with that schedule a free appointment with me.

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.

How to Father yourself (and why you need to)

When I was growing up I had an absentee father. He often traveled during the week for his job and when he did come home, he parked himself in front of the TV with a drink in hand and didn’t want to be bothered. On the occasions when he and I interacted it was more often than not because he was called in to punish me, which usually consisted of a combination of mental and physical punishments. I grew up and eventually had a better relationship with my dad, but I never really knew him or knew how to interact with him. My relationship with other boys and later men was one of distrust. I didn’t trust men because I didn’t trust the person who was my father.

Eventually I learned to trust men, but I realized that I still didn’t trust the energy of the father. The father, as an archetype, felt like a patriarchal oppressor who tried to dominate and control everyone around him and did his best to suppress his son out of a need to control him. When I recognized this about my relationship with paternal energy, I began to also see how this distrust played itself out in interactions I had with other men in any role that vaguely resembled a father figure. The question I faced was how to heal my relationship with the father archetype while also disassociating that energy from other men. I didn’t want to project my father issues on other men, and I was realizing that I was doing that sometimes.

My solution to the issue involved learning to parent my inner child the way I had wanted to be parented by my father. I had to father myself, and in the process heal the wounds I had around the father archetype. Some men heal these wounds by having children of their own and making the choice to be a different father than the one they grew up with. I chose not to have kids because I didn’t want to be a father. Ironically I was a step parent for a time, but that experience confirmed that I wasn’t the type of person who ought to be a parent. I had to take a different approach to heal my wounds around the father archetype.

I started my process by doing some pathworking and parts work with my inner boy. In those processes, I asked him what he needed from me. In one case, what he needed from me was to know that I would keep him safe by staying committed to my choices and following through on those actions. He also needed to know that I would still make time to play because play was essential for his happiness and when I worked all the time, it reminded him of my dad. Making the effort to reassure that part of myself helped it feel like it didn’t need to protect me from possible choices. It allowed me to step up and follow through on my mission and purpose.

I am continuing to father myself and in that process I’m getting better at recognizing when someone triggers a reaction that’s based on my projections around my father, both positively and negatively. These realizations provide me another opportunity to father myself because when I react to someone that brings up energy around the father archetype, I can examine my projection, separate it from the person and father my inner child while also releasing the charge around that other person. This is helping me change my relationships with people in my life, while also healing my relationship with my inner child AND my inner father.

Sometimes we can’t heal the relationships we had with people in our lives. That doesn’t mean we can’t do some kind of work that brings an element of healing in our lives. By working with inner our inner child, inner parent, etc., and recognizing when we are projecting onto other people, we can transform our relationship with ourselves and the people around us. If that’s something you need help with, contact me for a sacred masculinity coaching session and we can take a look at doing this work together.

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 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.

Why its important to learn how to receive

I’ve never been comfortable with receiving praise, compliments, or acknowledgement from people. When someone has praised me I have either tried to praise them back or dismissed what was shared. It’s not even for a reason of false modesty. Rather its for the reason of being uncomfortable with praise. Recently, however I’ve been working on receiving compliments that other people share with me.

It’s a work in progress, but I realize that allowing myself to receive compliments from other people or something else they want to share with me is actually a form of confidence. When I can receive what someone shares without having to respond beyond a genuine thank you it shows that I am comfortable with accepting that someone has something to share with me.

I don’t know if this issue around receiving praise is universal for men, but I do think its important to learn how to receive from other people. If you find yourself deflecting or downplaying what someone else says to you, it might be time to look at what the real motive is. You also may want to consider how you might actually be hurting the person who has shared their praise with you.

In my case, my girlfriend shared that my downplaying of her praise makes it harder for her to offer that praise. When I heard that it helped me realize that I needed to spend more time listening to her, and less time trying to either praise her back or downplay her. However it also caused me to reflect on why I was resistant to praise.

I realized part of it was a resistance around being recognized for my efforts because in the past I had not been recognized for when I accomplished something. I was only recognized for what I had not done well. It felt odd to receive recognition from someone for something I was doing well and in a way I felt put on the spot. When I recognized this about myself it helped me also understand that I needed to change this particular limiting identity for a different one that recognizes and appreciates myself and allows other people to also recognize me.

If you find yourself encountering a similar difficulty around receiving praise from other people, you may want to look at the root of your resistance and consider how that could be undermining your confidence in general. I know that once I began to accept and acknowledge praise I also have begun to feel more confident in myself because I am recognizing I have worth in how I show up. Learning to receive is helping me learn to accept myself and what I have to offer. You can do the same in your own life by taking the time to hold space with what someone shares about you and accepting it as a genuine appreciative expression how you show up in their lives.

What is the role of spirituality in sacred masculinity?

One of the questions I’ve been asking myself lately is what the role of spirituality is within sacred masculinity. I’m asking this question because while I appreciate the deep psychological work that happens with men’s work, what I’m also finding is that there’s something missing. It’s important to be in touch with your mission and purpose, and to develop a better understanding of how your wounds are showing up in your life, with yourself and other people. All of that is essential work for men to do.

But I realized there was something missing, a deeper level of connection, a spiritual level of connection. This spiritual level of connection could come in many forms. It’s not limited to a specific religion or spiritual system of belief, but it is something that puts men in touch with the spiritual essence of masculinity and allows them to express it, either in a positive or negative way.

We see this expression in a negative way through patriarchal expressions of the spiritual dimensions of masculinity. This comes in the form of attempting to control other peoples’ bodies, controlling the expression people have, and in the hierarchical inequities that are built into patriarchy for almost everyone. It also shows up in how the environment and nature is treated as a disposable resource to be conquered. This spiritual expression of masculinity creates a toxic pattern that is ultimately harmful for all involve because it glorifies an unbalanced perspective of masculinity as a dominant expression of life.

We see this expression in a positive way through expressions of masculinity where the feminine is recognized as equal (and also distinct) and in the recognition that we have a place within the world where we share the world with other life, instead of trying to dominate and control it. We see the positive spiritual expression of masculinity found through collaborative brotherhood and finding ways to work together and support each other, but we also find it in the exploration of male mysteries.

What are the male mysteries?

The male mysteries are spiritual processes that lead men into a deeper and healthier relationship with their masculinity. They are the rites of passage that help a boy transition to manhood and allow men to transition through the aging processing. The male mysteries connect us to the sacromasculine essence that all people have. As with anything else, this essence isn’t inherently positive or negative.

Within the healthy context of sacred masculinity work, the focus of the male mysteries is on developing a balance within ourselves where we learn the fundamental skills of how to create boundaries, develop awareness around our mission and purpose and create grounded presence. But the male mysteries is also a journey of self discovery around the sacred sexual mysteries of masculinity, the connection to the land and other aspects we have lost touch with through the advent of modern culture.

The choice to work with sacred masculinity isn’t just a choice of working on yourself as a man and how you want to show up in the world. That work is important and it’s the initial step men must take when they recognize how they are embodying toxic patterns of masculinity in their lives. The sacred masculinity work takes place once we have achieved a healthy relationship with our masculinity. At that point we can ask ourselves how we can draw on the sacromasculine essence to connect with powers of the land as well as do deeper work within ourselves in relationship to the divine masculine.

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 pt. 9: Embrace your pain and make it your ally

Men carry pain with them and more often than not they don’t know how to express that pain and sometimes they may not even be consciously aware of it. That pain ends up defining our lives in ways that aren’t always healthy.

When you become an addict to alcohol, drugs, sex, or porn, you are acting out that pain.

When you become emotionally or physically abusive with someone else, you are acting out that pain.

Reading this doesn’t give you a justification to act out the pain. If anything it indicates that you need to zoom in on that pain and discover what it’s really about.

A man grounded in the sacred masculine can hold space with his pain and learn from it, and turn it into an ally.

Your pain can become your ally when you learn how to listen to it and enable it to transform your life in a real and powerful way.

Get curious about your pain. It may bring up some trauma, so be careful and kind to yourself, but get curious so you can learn more about it and deprogram the triggers. when you deprogram the triggers you can change the pattern and as a result you change your life.

Why Doing Men's Work Requires Other Men

Men need other men when doing the inner work they do around masculinity. I break down why this is so essential and why you don’t have to be alone in order to do this work.