In this episode I talk about the real cost of staying numb and what's actually happening when a man feels flat. I get into the one-pipe reality, why clamping down grief and anger also chokes off joy, desire, and aliveness, the difference between a state and a stage, and why you can't think or read your way back to being fully alive and how important it is to plunge into spaces of depth to give you a lived experience of your power and vitality.
Come Fully Alive at the Evolutionary Men Labor Day Retreat
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All right. And welcome back. For a long stretch of my life, if you asked me how I was doing, you get one of three answers. Good, not great, or fine. That was the whole range, three states. And I thought that was normal. I thought that was just what being a grown man felt like. Good, not great. Fine. But here's what I didn't know back then. That narrow little band, that flat little strip of feeling I was living inside. It was quietly costing me almost everything. My aliveness, my power, my ability to actually be moved by my own life. I was comfortably numb. And the comfortable part was the trap. So if your life right now, if you're listening, feels just okay, you know, a little soft, a little flat, if fine is the most honest word you've got. And if you can't remember the last time something cracked you wide open, the last time you wept, the last time you felt that fire in your belly, that is your power. Well, this one's for you. Because this is what I see all the time in the men I work with. A guy comes to me, and he hasn't really cried in 15, almost 20 years. And he can't figure out why his life feels gray, why he's tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch, or why he's a little anxious, a little low, or just feels like he's going through the motions, even though on paper everything's fine. Good job, good family. Good enough. But then when I get him talking, it's almost always the same handful of things. He and his wife get along fine, but they're not really lovers anymore. There's no heat in it. He's home with his kids, but he's half on his phone, not really in the room, and some part of him knows it. At work, he's competent, but the drive he used to have that fire to build something to go after what he wants, has gone quiet. And he's not in the driver's seat of his own life anymore. Life is just happening to him. He's often wondering, is this it? But then he reverts back to, well, that's just how life is. This is it. But here's the deal. Here's what's actually true. The numbness of that man, the numbness in me. It's not a defect in his wiring. It's a door he. He shut on purpose, way back when, when feeling wasn't safe. Maybe it wasn't safe in his house growing up. Maybe the world and the culture of masculinity taught him that. A man who Feels is a man who's weak. So he shut it down. He clamped the lid on it. And it was often the smart move, the protective move. It got him through life. The problem is, the thing that saved him back then is the thing that's flattening him now. He built a whole life inside. Good, not great, fine. And he forgot there was ever anything else. No. This is the part nobody explained to me when I was young. But then when I got it, it changed my entire life. And it came from my first coach trip, which who told me, when it comes to feeling in the body, there's just one pipe, one channel. All of it comes through the same place. So follow me. Here, you've got grief in there you don't want to feel. You've got anger you were told was bad. Maybe you've got old fear, old hurt. And you do what we all do, particularly as men. You constrict the pipe around the stuff you don't want. You clamp down to keep the hard things from being felt and moving. But you can't selectively numb. That's not how the body works. When you clamp the pipe around the grief and the anger and the fear, you also choke off the joy that desires the wonder, the aliveness, and definitely the fire. You wanted to stop feeling the lows, so you put a ceiling on the highs without realizing it, and you end up in this flat, even soft little life where nothing hurts too much but nothing lands too deep. It's good, not great, and fine, comfortably numb. The moment feeling stops is the moment you're dead. Feeling is literally how you know you're alive. And here's the part that flips the whole thing around. We think of numbness as empty. Nothing there, a blank. But it really is the opposite. Numbness is full. Try this right now, wherever you are. Right. I've said this one many times, and it works. Tense up every muscle you can. Jaws, shoulders, fists, gut. Clamp it all down and hold it. Not so bad for a few seconds, right? Now, imagine holding this for 30 years, because that is what numbing actually is. It's active. It's a clamp you've been holding down so long you forgot your hand was even closed. And it takes a staggering amount of you to keep it shut. So when a man tells me he feels numb, what I actually hear is a whole reservoir of life dammed up behind everything he's been holding at bay. The grief he never cried, the anger he was told was bad, the wanting and desire he shut off. None of it left. It's all still in there, full and under pressure, and he is burning most of his precious fuel just to hold the lid on it. That's really the cruelest part of it. The very power he's looking for. The drive, the desire, the fire to go after his own life. It isn't missing. He's spending it every single day. But it's on staying numb. That is what comfortably numb actually costs you. The energy of your whole life. Quietly going to hold one door shut. Now, this is where most men stay stuck for years. So this is important. You cannot think your way back to aliveness. You can't read your way there. You can't podcast your way there. And yeah, I see the irony you're listening or watching to me say that. This on a podcast, but it's true. And you can't will it or even just strategize it, because the numbness doesn't live up in your head. It lives in your body. And insight is not the same thing as feeling. I know, guys. Ding, ding, ding. Who've read every book. Who can explain their childhood and their attachment style and their nervous system, often better than their therapist. And they're still flat, still numb. Because understanding the dam is not the same as over opening it. The mind cannot give you back a feeling you haven't actually let move through you. At some point, you have to stop reading about the water and get in. So let me give you the framework I've talked about before on this show, because it's the key to all of this. There's a difference between a state and a stage. A state is temporary. It comes and goes, like the weather, a peak experience, a moment where you suddenly you're flooded with feeling and it's all online and you're awake and alive in here and in the flow. But a stage is when that becomes a place you can live from, stable, a foundation you come back to and don't fall off of. A stage is the climate you live in. A state is just the weather that blows through in any given time. And this is where men get it backwards. You cannot build a stage you've never once visited as a state. You cannot integrate a depth you have never actually touched. I like to think of it like this. You've got a pond and you have no idea how deep it goes. From the surface, it looks shallow. So you assume that's all there is. Until one day you take a pole and you plunge it all the way down and you feel it. And then you get in There. And you experience it. Oh, it goes way deeper than I thought. Now you know. Now your body has an embodied reference point it never had before. And every day after that, your practice becomes to keep going back to that depth on purpose, in the middle of your ordinarily ordinary, normal life. And that's what I mean when I say train at the edges and live in the middle. You go to the edge on purpose. You stretch your nervous system into territory it's never been. You feel the grief, the rage, the joy, the wild aliveness all the way to your edge. You open up parts of yourself and feelings you've never experienced before. And then you come back to your regular Tuesday carrying a capacity you did not have before. Now you have range. The state is the doorway. You go in, you feel something all the way through for once, and it cracks you open. And that opening is what fuels the integration of your life. You can't integrate what you were never brave enough to feel in the first place. And this is what I've learned over and over in my own life and now with hundreds of men I've worked with. That doorway is rarely solo and it is rarely quiet. You go deep, you go intense. You plunge into the parts of yourself you've spent decades avoiding. And the thing that lets you do that, the thing that makes it safe enough to actually let go, is being witnessed and held by other men. There's something about the masculine that bonds through ordeal. You go through something real together, and you come out the other side carrying each other. I have felt closer to men after one weekend of retreat together than to guys I've known for 20 years, because we went deep and we went there fast, and we saw each other all the way down into the depths of our being. I've watched a man hold something in his body since he was a boy, for 30, 40 years, and finally let it move while being surrounded by men who have his back. And a different human being walks out of the other side of an experience like that. His face softens, the eyes get brighter. There's energy where there was heaviness before. And what that man says almost every time is some version of, I had no idea I was using that much of myself just to hold all of that down. That is power coming back right out of the exact same place that man had shut down. Now, I know probably some of you have been listening or watching to all of this thinking, that's nice. That's not me. I'm not a crier. I don't really do the emotional thing. I'd be the one guy sitting there stone faced, right, while everyone else experiences something. And I want to talk to that guy, to you for a second. Because frankly, that guy was me. For years people told me I had this deep, calm presence, so grounded, so present. And it took me a long time to realize the truth. I wasn't present. I was numb. The calm was the clamp. I was the most shut down man in half the rooms I walked into. And I'd gotten so good at it that it looked like peace. So if you're sure you're the stone faced one, the guy who doesn't feel much, the one who's a little skeptical of all this, hear me clearly. You are not the exception to this work. You're exactly who it's for. The men with the thickest lid are the ones with the most life pressed up underneath it. And I've watched the stone faced guys crack open and walk out the most alive almost every time. So I'll tell you why all this is on my heart right now. Every Labor Day weekend, I take a group of men into a beautiful valley in Northern California and we do exactly this work. We plunge together out in beautiful country, away from screens and the inbox, in the whole flat hum of regular life. It's about three and a half days of going to the edge on purpose. In the company of men who are right there with you. Embodiment. Shadow work, deep presence and real brotherhood. Men leave that land different. Lit up in a way that fuels them for months and sometimes even years. Now. Nobody walks out. Fixed forever. That's not how any of this works. The retreat is just the start. But something real comes back online and it stays. And those men, they leave with a handful of men they can call at 2 in the morning, a year later, knowing that someone's going to pick up. Now, I'm not going to pitch you too much. I'm just going to say this. If something in you leaned forward while I was talking, some quiet part of you went, yeah, I want that. Then go look. Check out the retreat. That's all. Just go look. It's at Evolutionary Men retreat. The plunge, the work. It's just the doorway, the integration, the daily practice, the long work, that's the rest of it. But you cannot begin to integrate a depth you've never been to even once. You have to get in the water and experience it. Now, if a retreat just isn't in the cards for you right now, the timing's wrong, the money's wrong. It's not this year, I don't want you walking away from this episode with nothing. So here's something you can do tomorrow morning for free by yourself. But you actually got to do it. Sit down for five minutes before the day grabs you. Don't put on a podcast, don't reach for the phone. Just put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly and ask a single question. What am I actually feeling right now? And then stop talking and listen for the answer in your body, not in your head. Many men feel almost nothing the first few times. That's fine. That's information. You're knocking on a door that's been shut a long time, so keep knocking. The point isn't to fix everything in five minutes. The point is to remember there's a whole you in there you likely haven't experienced and talked to in years. That is the work in miniature. The retreat is just that turned up all the way with men around you, which accelerates things so you can finally go where you are never going to go alone. So let me bring it back to where we started. Good. Not great. Fine. You can spend another year there. A lot of men spend a whole life there. It is comfortable. It is safe. Yet it's slowly, quietly costing you the one thing that actually makes a life feel like a life, which is the capacity to be fully in it, to feel all of it, to be moved. One of my teachers once said, the quality of your life is determined by the range of emotions you have access to. A flat range gives you a flat life. But when you're willing to dive all the way into your own experience, the whole thing widens. Your drive comes back. Your desire comes back. The fire comes back. The power was never gone. It was just waiting on the other side of what you wouldn't or couldn't or didn't know how to feel. So you can keep standing in the shallows of your life, or you can find out how deep the pond actually goes. Comfortably numb or fully alive. You already know which one you are. Right now. The only real question is which one you're willing to become. I'll see you in California.
