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.
5 tips for handling conflict in relationship
In a given relationship, conflict is inevitable. However the way each person approaches conflict can shape how that conflict is resolved and what the outcome is for the overall relationship. Both (or more) partners need to learn essential skills for handling conflict, or risk the health of the relationship as well as their own emotional health. Before I get into the 5 tips for handling conflict, I want to speak to the red flags around conflict in relationship. The red flags for conflict are: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
Criticism: When someone offers criticism without a solution it creates conflict. The person offering the criticism wants a different action, but what the offer with their criticism isn’t helpful because it tears the person down. There is a difference between negative criticism and constructive criticism, but when the former is offered it shuts conversations down instead of creating opportunities to discover solutions together.
Contempt: When someone expresses contempt, it is usually in the form of sarcastic comments and humor that makes a joke at the expense of the person it’s being leveled at. Contempt can come in other flavors as well. If you’re in an argument and the person is making it personal by commenting on you and putting you down its usually because the person has a lot of resentment and judgement. Contempt erodes respect and eventually causes both people to become harsh.
Defensiveness: When a person is defensive, they’re not listening to what the other person is saying or trying to understand their point of view. They are focused on defending their own position and protecting themselves in the process, and as a result they’re closed off from having conversations that can resolve the conflict.
Stonewalling: When I stonewall someone, I am shutting them out entirely and putting a wall up to keep them out. Ironically a person who is stonewalling is also keeping themselves out. A person who is stonewalling is shut down and flooded and unwilling to engage.
You probably recognize some of these behaviors in your own conflicts with your partner. If you’ve gone through a breakup, when you review that breakup you’ll likely find that all of these behaviors played a role in the conflicts you were having. So how do you handle conflict so that you don’t have these kinds of interactions.
My first tip is to take some deep grounding breaths. When you are in a conflict, you may find yourself taking shallower breaths. Pause and take a deeper breath. It will feel uncomfortable, because you’ll be feeling your body more fully as well as the emotions in your body. Keep breathing and ground yourself into the breath. This will help you be present with your emotions as well as the other person. When I am in a conflict and I take the time to breathe it also helps me slow down my thoughts and focus on the environment instead of getting stuck in my head.
My second tip is to look the other person in the eyes. This might seem like an aggressive move, but typically in conflicts people won’t look at each other. When you make the effort to look at someone in the eyes, you are seeing that person and that reminds you to see the person instead of paying attention to what you might be projecting on the person.
My third tip is to focus the conversation on what’s being said about the problem, versus the person. It can be really easy to make it about the person, but whatever the issue is, its betters to focus on that topic. If you find yourself making it personal, take a moment to pause and think through what you’re saying. A lot of conflict can be defused by focusing on the problem and getting curious about what’s underneath the problem, but this can’t occur if you’re making it personal.
My fourth tip is to know when to take a break from the conflict. It’s perfectly reasonable to take a break and it can actually give both people perspective. I go for a walk when I get to a place where I can’t continue the conversation. It gives me a chance to regroup and think through what I’ve heard and felt, as well as my own thoughts. When I come back, I’m calmer and more focused.
My fifth tip is to make sure you have more positive communication than negative communication. It take approximately 5 positive interactions to counteract 1 negative interaction. If you are consistently more negative than positive this will hurt your relationships, but if you make the effort to communicate in a positive way most of the time this will inoculate your relationship from negativity and help you navigate conflicts differently. When I am in conflict, I make a point to acknowledge the conflict, but stay positive about my partner.
What tips do you have for navigating conflicts? Leave a comment below and share them with the other readers.
Book Reviews April 2024
Book Review: Man Uncivilized by Traver Boehm (Affiliate link)
This is hard hitting book that will get you thinking about how you show up as a man as well as what you need to work on within yourself. I found this book to be emotional and thought provoking from the first page to the last page. The author doesn’t pull any punches and if you take his words in you will come out the other side a better man and person for reading and applying the wisdom in this book.
Book Review: Today I Rise by Traver Boehm (affiliate link)
I wish I had read this book after my second divorce or that it had been available after my first divorce. I wish I had read it after my most recent breakup…But better later than never. While I am in a relationship now I went ahead and read this book and found it to be full of really good advice that has helped me have some conversations with myself and my current partner as well as helping me fully move on from past relationships. If you’re going through a divorce or breakup this book can be a valuable companion to help you on your journey.
Book Review: Hold on to your N.U.T.S. by Wayne Levine (Affiliate link)
This is a must read book for any man who wants to become a better romantic partner to his wife/partner. The author provides some valuable tools that can help you do your inner work while also showing up for your partner. I began applying these skills in my relationship and noticed an immediate improvement in the relationship and how I showed up. I recommend reading the book and then applying the skills. Make sure you also talk with other men so you can do the work together.
Book Review: Love Between Equals By Polly Young-Eisendrath (affiliate link)
At times this book is preachy and the author makes clear from the beginning that she doesn’t think polyamorous relationships are viable. Nonetheless there are a lot of gems in this book about building conscious relationship with your partner. I read this book and applied it to my relationship to consider and recognize how I could show up with more conscious awareness and consideration about accepting my partners as they show up. It’s a dense read but there’s a lot worth considering in this book about building a spiritual and conscious relationship with your love.
Book Review: The Man’s Guide to Women by John Gottman, Julie Gottman Douglas Abrams, Rachel Carlton Abram (Affiliate link)
This is a must read book if you’re a man who wants to be a hero instead of a zero in your relationships with women. This book provided some valuable insights about the differences between men and women and shares how men can show up better with their women and get better results in the relationship. Whether you’re struggling in your relationship or having a good relationship in the moment, this book will provide insights that help you to have a great relationship.
Book Review: Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves (Affiliate Link)
The author provides a well research book that shows the challenges that boys and men face in education, the workplace and other facets of life, as well as showing those struggles are being mostly ignored due to politics on both sides. The author offers several solutions. This is a much needed book that illustrates why social and economic policies need to focus on all people, in different ways, but in ways that level the playing field for everyone.
Book Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear (affiliate link)
This is a useful book that breaks down the anatomy of habits and shows you how to create healthy habits and end bad habits. The author’s processes are easy to work with and implement, provided you’re willing to make a habit of them!
Book Review: No Bad Parts By Richard Schwartz (Affiliate link)
In No Bad Parts the author shares the internal family system of parts therapy and walks readers through how it works with practical examples. This is a fascinating book that explores how to apply the IFS system to your own inner work. I’ve used it to help me do some work with my parts and I will continue to make it part of my inner work practice.
Book Review: Addicted to the Monkey Mind by JF. Benoist (affiliate link)
This book explores how to recognize the monkey mind chatter of our thoughts and emotions which cause reactions. The author offers some mindfulness practices around using the observing mind. The book is presented in an anecdotal context, which makes it more user friendly. Overall I found the book helpful as a supplement to existing practices that I’m doing.
Book Review: Taking Responsibility by Nathaniel Branden (Affiliate link)
The author focuses on how people can take responsibility for their lives. It’s a book that many people might have reactions to because of how much it focuses on individualism, but I think the underlying practice is sound. I appreciated the sentence stem practice as well as the overall focus on how to take responsibility in different areas of one’s life. I have been applying it to my life and have felt more confidence as a result.
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 Shame and Self-Worth
Shame is one of the heaviest emotions and experiences a person can feel. It can become a background emotion that keeps a person in a bad place because of the messaging that comes along with that feeling of shame. Shame is distinct from guilt. If I feel guilty, I feel bad about something I’ve done. If I feel shame I feel bad about my identity and I take what I’m feeling make it personal to my identity. Neither feeling is necessarily easy to deal with, but guilt is easier to let go of, especially if the situation is addressed and resolved. Shame lingers. A person who feels shame can carry it with them because they’ve turned it into self-loathing. Shame kills the sense of self-worth a person has.
So what is the antidote to shame?
First I recommend looking at your messaging around the word should. Should is a shame word that can cause you to feel like you aren’t good enough. It’s telling you what you should do and there’s a judgement to what you should do, in regards to what you are actually doing.
Take a step back from that should word. Where is it coming from? Who is behind that messaging? Chances are your should is someone else’s voice telling you something about yourself. Is that message true or is it a projection you are giving power to? When we look at our shoulds with a bit of distance we can see that they are charged messages that have more to do with the judgement of other people than who we actually are. Let those judgements go and let go of the power behind that statement.
Another antidote to shame is the purposeful cultivation of self love. A self love practice may initially consist of telling yourself that you love yourself but can also evolve over time. For example, my self love practice includes stretches and exercises in the morning and kung fu in the evening so I can keep myself in good shape and because of how I physically feel. When you actively practice self love in your life this can go a long way toward helping you heal from shame.
A gratitude practice can also be helpful. Each night when I go to bed I review my day and what it is I am grateful for. This helps me put my day into perspective and part of my gratitude is toward myself, thanking myself for actions I took or other ways I showed up. By actively giving recognition to myself I am also orienting toward positive feelings about myself and this counteracts any shame I may be feeling.
Shame operates on stories about ourselves that we tell in order to punish ourselves. The punishment doesn’t help us feel better though. It reinforces the shame and damages our sense of self worth. The solution is to actively change our narrative and find ways to love ourselves and also change our thoughts and beliefs around the shoulds in our lives.
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.
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.
How to use conflict to create deeper trust in your relationships
Men try to avoid conflict in the home, wanting to have a harmonious and peaceful space. I share why avoiding conflict doesn’t work and how it actually kills your relationships. If you want to build trust and intimacy you have to learn how to navigate the storms that inevitably come up. It’s not about winning arguments or being right…it’s about learning how to collaborate through the conflict.
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.
Integrity and Alignment in Relationships
What does it mean to be in integrity and alignment with your relationships? I explore why its essential for men to be in integrity with themselves, if they want to develop healthy relationships with other people. I explore how to come back into integrity and alignment with yourself and other people by being honest about what you are really experiencing. When you learn how to be honest with yourself and other people you step into powerful relationships.
Trust and Safety and Relationships
If you want a better relationship with your love, you need to understand the relationship between trust and safety and how this leads to a deeper and more meaningful relationship with your partner. In this video I explore the connection between trust and safety and share how that can lead to a stronger relationship for you and your partner.
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.
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.