The Embodied Man: Creating Safety, Polarity & Real Connection with Jason Lange | The Feminine Codes Podcast

Jason Lange: Foreign.

Host: Cover the wisdom of the feminine through soulful conversations on spirituality, healing, relationships, self leadership, sovereignty, and so much more. I'm your host, Tamar Gail, feminine embodiment facilitator, feminine arts mentor, and source soul Tantrica. In this podcast, my goal is to take you deeper into the world of the feminine, stepping more into your feminine pleasure, power, authentic truth, and your sovereignty. Welcome to the Feminine Codes Podcast. Welcome back to the Feminine Codes Podcast. Today I am here with Jason Lange, and we are going to be speaking about men's work and men's circles, as well as how it relates to women. And for me, I believe that we need to really heal this gap between men and women, that the separation of us is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. And I also feel that it's really important for us to begin to understand each other. So today, as I said, Jason is joining me. He's a men's guide. He shares that many men are struggling now more, maybe more than ever, as the old paradigms of what a man is supposed to be are no longer really relevant or even appropriate. And we're going to also be speaking to the masculine side of this equation and some of the common mistakes that men are making and relating both to the feminine outside themselves as well as within themselves. Jason has been running men's circles, and so I really want to dive into that. There's a lot of beautiful, like, conversation and knowledge that Jason can share with us that I really think is important for us to dive into. So let's go. Jason, welcome. Thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy to have you on and share with us a little bit about you and what you've been doing in the world and how this came about. I'm so interested.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Always appreciate a good space to have this conversation because you're right. It's just really important that men and women come together in this time. And my journey as a Mensworth guide and facilitator really sprang from my own journey as a man in terms of what I needed for my own wholeness and healing. So, you know, I'm a white guy, raised lower middle class and Midwestern part of the United States, and in a lot of ways had, you know, my basic security needs met and a lot of privilege. And as I got into my teenage years in particular and kind of hit adolescence and hit puberty and started kind of leaving the home, it became very apparent to me that there were a Lot of nutrients I didn't get as a young boy from my family system. And in particular, I uncovered that my family was, while there and present physically, no emotional connection. No physical connection. So we were just kind of in the same house. And in some ways I was a child of neglect. And as I started to come forward, in my case I'm heterosexual, so I was attracted to women and discovered I have no idea how to do this. I would get really sweaty and uncomfortable in my nervous system, heavy in my head and ruminating, and just did not know how to kind of talk to the feminine. Actually got quite uncomfortable in my body anytime I did. And then I also simultaneously noticed I did have some good male friends at the time, that they just related to each other in a way that was different than me. They would kind of horseplay and wrestle and tease each other, and I just didn't have any of that wiring and the pain around all of that. Eventually kind of took me on a journey of self growth and discovery that I think, like a lot of men, kind of started more in the head and philosophically. And then that eventually got me, in my mid-20s, into my first men's groups and into somatic therapy and started to discover, oh, wow, there's a whole lot going on in my nervous system I wasn't even aware of that's impacting really every breath I take. And that journey, probably more than anything else, particularly getting into men's groups, totally transformed me. And I was just so into it for my own healing. I just started talking about it all the time to kind of everyone. And guys in particular would ask me, oh, hey, can I join your group? I'm like, that sounds amazing. I've never heard of anything like that. And at the time I was living in Los Angeles and the group I was part of just met in a small office. One of our guys was a therapist, and there was just no more room to have anyone else come in. So I was like, okay, well, maybe I'll start leading something. And I started leading groups out of my living room, just posting them on meetup.com for a number of years. And everything just kind of took off from there. When I realized, okay, I'm not the only man who's had some of these challenges. And there's just not a lot of spaces for us men to go to, to. To heal and be honest and be vulnerable. And there's so much cultural conditioning we receive that partly scares us away from doing all that. And then I just continued getting more training and putting myself out there. And turns out the very struggles I had to work through as a man are now the ones that men are very happy to come work with me around because they're like, hey, you got from here to there. How did you do it? And, you know, major themes are just, yeah, getting more embodied, increasing my emotional fluidity, learning about the healthy aspects of masculinity and femininity, and learning much better tools for communication terms of my own inner world and bringing that forward. And now a large part of the work I do with men is around relationships and intimacy, whether that's dating or marriage. Because for better or worse, one of the only things I found will get a man's ass off the couch is when his relationship is melting down or he's not able to create the one he really wants. And the pain around that will. Will often be strong enough that it's one of the few things I found that men will be like, okay, I need help. And so they'll often show up to me.

Host: I just had a conversation yesterday, actually. We spoke about the suicide rates and men especially, you know, 40s, probably 40s, 50s men are the highest rates of suicide. Now do you see, do you see this in your work? Do you see that men are really searching for fulfillment? Like, as you just said, like, they're, they're some. There's something that gets them off their ass and makes them want to really make a shift in their life. But for me, it's finding someone like you that can get them to the emotional place, help them reconnect with that emotional body, understand their emotions. Because even I, like, I'm the era that we grew up in of being told, okay, man up, don't cry. We as women have a little bit more access to that. It's more appropriate for us to have shown our emotions. But for men, it's not. How do you, how do you encourage men? How do you get them to that place? I mean, even just a few steps. I'm not asking you to share all of it, but I think this is really important. And how do women. How can we show up for men in the aspect to help them kind of feel like it's okay to.

Jason Lange: Yeah, it's such a huge, potent topic. And I'll, I'll reference one bit of research I recently heard that kind of blew my mind, and it was really interesting. So, you know, I, I specifically coach men and I work with men around men's groups and men's community. But I'm going to be super clear about this before I drop this research. I'm also super pro therapy and a lot of are willing to come to coaching or men's groups before they're willing to go to therapy. And a big part of my mission is to change the story around that. That it's like a lot of guys think, oh, you only go to therapy if you're messed up or broken. And it's just all bs, right? It's the analogy I use is it's like you don't just go to the gym when you have an injury, you go to the gym when you want to be healthy and grow yourself. And something like therapy is just another version of that. But the stat that kind of blew my mind was it was up in Canada and they did do research around men who attempted suicide or had committed suicide. And it was something crazy. Like over 60% of them had actually reached out for some kind of help to a therapist or a friend or some of the traditional channels in our society. And something about that didn't hit them in the way they needed, didn't find them, didn't connect with them in the way they needed. And I think that's a big part of the work I'm involved in. I think why it's taking off is there is something really unique about male community and the way we can understand each other's pain. That is a peer based thing that you don't necessarily get through these professional relationships and that loneliness and isolation, right. It goes all the way back in terms of like you, like you said, the ways men are raised. And you know, in men's work we call this the man box, right? This cultural set of expectations, right. Of as long as you check these boxes, you're considered a man. If you don't check these boxes, you're not considered a man. Right. It's very kind of simple in some sense. And you're right, part of the challenge of it is it's co created both by men and women. So there was even another research study I saw that was super interesting. I'm not saying this is great, but they polled men and women around two things. What marks the transition from a girl into woman and from a boy into man. And interestingly enough, both men and women, when it came to girls into womanhood, pretty much just pointed to physical attributes. She has her cycle, she's developed in her body. She's a woman now. Right. But then both men and women, when it came to boys and men, it was not about their body, it was about their behavior and how they were showing up inside themselves, inside their culture, their community, their family. So you could have a quote unquote, fully grown boy, fully matured, but he's still a boy. He's not a man, right? Oh, that guy's not a man. He didn't. Da, da, da, da. And so that's another example of this kind of idea of the man box, that there's a certain way we're expected to be. And here in the west in particular, right, some of the big ones are being vulnerable. Never show weakness, Feelings make you a woman. Anytime sex is available, you should take it. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you as a man. The list just goes on and on and on and on. And it starts from a pretty young age. You know, thankfully, it's changing now. But, you know, my generation and many other generations, they've done lots of studies that, yeah, boys are parented pretty differently than little girls in terms of, you know, fall down, scrape a knee, okay, are you okay? With a boy, it's like, get up, you're fine. Be tough, don't cry. And from a young age, we're kind of taught to override what's happening in our bodies with our heads as boys in particular. And then we get into school and it continues in that. I saw one study that was like, basically, if you want boys to thrive in school, you need to give them like three hours of hard physical play first, and then you can sit them down and they can learn because there's just hormonally, their bodies need to be in motion. There's a lot. A lot of kineticism there. And yet most schooling is set up to, what, sit still, don't move that. If you're wanting to move, there's something wrong with you. You have adhd, you're a bad kid. Duh, duh, duh. And then it goes right up into adolescence, where other boys become the major kind of perpetrator here of our bodies are growing at different rates. There's clear hierarchies, and we learn very quickly. Whoa. Any. Any vulnerability or difference I put out there that might get me ostracized or. Very true for many men, just bullied. So I got to keep it all inside and I got to look tough, right? And then we get out into the workforce and, you know, what are men celebrated for a lot of times? Oh, he works 80 hours a week. He's such tough. Again, how do we do that? We disconnect from our bodies. And so we're often rewarded as men for being Actually disembodied and trying to fulfill this, so to speak, man box. But in the work I do to tie it together here, all emotion starts as physical sensation right in our body, right? It's like, oh yeah, my belly's actually getting tight or I'm feeling this pit or my shoulders are on fire. And so if we're not in our bodies as men, we're already losing the battle around being connected to our emotions, knowing what they are, knowing how to name them inside of ourselves, let alone how to share them or what to do with them. So so many guys are kind of already behind the curve by the time they're adults in that no one's taught them, what are you feeling in your body? What do you do with that emotionality? And so what do we do instead? We turn to the medicines our culture does allow. When I'm not feeling good inside, I go to alcohol, I go to weed, I go to, I go to porn or sex, I overwork, I zone out on tv, whatever that might be. And ultimately that doesn't really help us inside. You know, it might numb the pain for a little bit, but then that starts to accumulate over a lifetime. And I see this in particular for kind of guys my age entering middle age, you know, 40s and up. You know, you come into the world, there's a certain amount of chi, as I say on the preloaded debit card, like you can just party hard, work hard, push yourself, body bounces back. But you know, you start to hit the mid-30s and-40s and that doesn't work anymore. All that accumulated stuff in the body starts to catch up. And for a lot of guys, as they start to hit middle age, one of the major issues is energy management. I'm just so tired, I'm so fatigued. I don't have enough energy to show up for my kids or my wife or take care of my body or whatever that might be. And where I then tie that all together is going back to emotions, right? If we think of that kind of theoretical four year old boy who maybe falls down, has an accident or feels emotionally hurt by something and he's crying, and if as a parent I go up to him and unfortunately this still happens in the world and I'm like, stop crying. How does not just a boy, but really any human do that? They hold their breath, tighten up their body and actually stop the feeling. And that starts to accumulate over a lifetime. And you know, in the work you do, I'm sure you've seen this as well. You Know, there's all kinds of research now around our fascia, even going down to a cellular level of what happens when we tighten and hold this stuff. The emotions actually get stuck in our body. And the thing I tell men just to kind of tie it all together now as to like, why it's worth doing this stuff is it takes metabolic resource to not feel. So whether it's grief, whether it's fear, whether it's self loathing, whatever it might be, whether it's anger for more and more guys these days, when we're trying to avoid it and not feel it, how we do that is by that tightening and holding. And so, you know, anyone listening right now, you can just run the simple experiment. If I'm like, okay, right now, just contract the muscles in your body, your biceps, your shoulder, your abs. You don't have to move much and you can contract it. And it's like, okay, that's not too hard. But if I'm. But if I'm like, okay, now hold this for the next hour. Pretty fast, it gets very fatiguing, right? And that's what's happening for so many men, is they're holding all of this stuff inside and it's taking their life force and vitality. And then they get depressed, they get addicted, they feel isolated and alone. And so I tell guys, right, the thing about feeling and learning to work with this shadow emotional components, all of this stuff is you will come out the other side more alive, more vital, more present with more energy to put towards the things you care about in your life. People will trust you more, you'll make more money, you'll have better sex. Like, if I told you there was a pill that could do that, people would be like, yes, sign me up, I'm ready. But this is what happens with the deep emotional work that so many guys just have no idea how to do. And then why I'm particularly passionate about doing it in a group is, is oftentimes the fastest way to kind of break through and show there's another way is when they see another man, model it of, oh my God, here's a man that's fully in his grief but totally present, not collapsed, not as a victim, but he's here. And I actually trust him and feel his power more right now. Or here's a man who I am seeing fully connected to his anger and his rage. But, wow, I feel completely safe. He feels completely safe. Nobody told me or I never saw that that was possible. And as men start to have these experiences, it's like, it's kind of like leaving the matrix. They're like, nobody told me I could do this. And it starts to have a pretty profound impact on the men's well being, which again, I would say the community piece and then learning to work with the challenging emotions cuts beneath a lot of what I think drives men to. I don't know what else to do. So I just need to exit this planet, this life, this, this form. And so I think it's part of the medicine we need right now for, for all these men that are considering suicide.

Host: And I see that with women as well and the women's groups. And it's part of the reason that I love working with women in groups, especially through the type of yoga that I teach. When women really come together there, it's. It's powerful. They can see another woman. And I've experienced it and that's why I know it's so powerful. I remember there was this. I was in a shamanic training years ago and one of the last times that we all came together, it was only for women, was women doing women's studies in this deep, like shamanic way. And one of the girls had. We were playing with mud. Like it was kind of like this. We got to like offer something. And one of the girls brought in like mud for all of us to play in. And she just threw off her clothes and got into the mud and was smearing it all over. And she was just embodied in that moment. And I was like, wow, what power to like. I mean, we were only women, but just to be free and not care what anybody thinks and just be in the moment and just find pleasure in what you're doing really like struck me. I'm like, why can't I be like that? What is stopping me from actually being embodied and just diving in, you know? And so I was confronted with my own blocks, which then I got to process. But. And I find that with the yoga that I do when women are in a room together, I mean, through this yoga, you'll have women cry, you'll have them laugh, you'll have them have orgasms just from the movements of the energy in the body. And whenever you are in a group like that, you're. You're confronted with how you block yourself and you get to see this is actually okay. And so whenever you do it alone, it's not as powerful. It is powerful, but you're not, you're not, I hate to say comparing, but you kind of do in those moments. You're like, why can't I access that? What is stopping me from being able to experience this? And so it's. It becomes like tenfold in a way, whenever you can do it in a group. And so I can imagine with men just the. The energy that they can give off this, whether. Whatever that is. To be seeing that that is okay, to see that another man is accessing that, it's. Is really, really powerful.

Jason Lange: Yeah, it's one of the great joys of doing the work. And I think you're right. The. The beauty to, you know, a container like the yoga you create is it creates safety. So then in that safe container, you're quickly confronted with, oh, the limitation here is me in my relationship to my own emotions or my body, which can be much harder to do out, so to speak, in the normal default world. And then when we see whether, you know, it's someone more relaxed and comfortable in their body or someone more in touch with their emotions or someone just more free in some capacity, it also gives us the embodied sense of, oh, that's where I could go, right? Like, now I can. I can feel it. And, you know, mirror neurons are a real thing, and we're social creatures, and that is often one of the most powerful ways I, you know, this is true for femininity, but it's. I often say it with masculinity is. It's a transmission. When you're around someone who is freer, more embodied, deeper than you, you actually feel it in your cells. Right. It's like a. Oh, okay, now I get a hit of it. It's not a cognitive thing. It's an actual feeling in the body we start to experience when we're with people. And it's why group work can be so profound, because when we actually start to spend time with people more liberated, more free in whatever ways than us, it starts to open that possibility in us as well.

Host: Yes, yes, it does. I know you touched on this, but you. Can you describe what it would look like when a man is fully embodied?

Jason Lange: Yeah, it's surprisingly straightforward. And just what I mean by that is I kind of name it in three, three components. So he's first off, he's grounded. Grounded in his body, particularly his lower body. Deep, full breaths and just very much here. Like, I'm here. I'm connected to the earth, I'm connected to my body, and I'm breathing. I know it sounds very simple, but it's something a lot of men forget. And then from there, it's about being open. I'm also not armored up in posturing or totally collapsed, but I'm open, right? So I'm actually available for connection emotionally in my body. Like there's an actual posture component too, right? The difference between this a lot of guys and just I'm here, right? I'm open, I'm exposed, you can feel me. And I'm aware, meaning right now I am able to choose where do I want my attention to go and what's most important for me to pay attention to right now. So there's an orientation towards depth versus, again, where a lot of men I work with. Our default in the world is just up here in rumination. So our attention is on our own thoughts most of the time. And when our attention is on our own thoughts, right? Just overanalyzing, thinking things in our head, we're not actually present in the moment. And people we're relating to can perturb, particularly feel that, right? If it's our spouse, our lover, our kids, they can. They can feel when our attention is somewhere else. And that somewhere else is usually our own rumination. And we're disconnected from our bodies or our hearts or our feelings. So this embodiment is just being grounded in our body, open in our heart, and mindful in our awareness. Is how I teach men those kind of three capacities. And the result is, it's the good kind of, you know, you ask a man like, how are you? And he's like, I'm just here. There's actually not a whole lot of content a lot of times, right? It's just like a deep presence of I'm here right now. I'm feeling myself, I'm feeling connected to you. I'm aware of my environment. And there's no dissociating, hiding from, pushing away from, right? The trap a lot of guys get into that I work with is when we haven't been given these tools, right? Particularly around emotional content, we either collapse in it, which means it takes us over, right? There's nothing scarier or more dangerous, frankly, than a man whose anger and rage has him versus he has them, right? There is no presence that he is just explosive reactivity, super frightening to be around. He's collapsed into that emotion, right? It's running the show. He's fused with it. So that's one pole that's dangerous. But that can also be our grief, our shame, the part of us that just doesn't feel enough. And then on the other side, there's kind of a more traditional macho masculinity, which is the posturing no, I'm fine. Yeah, no, I'm good. I'm tough. Right. We put on the armor and we kind of brace ourselves forward in this deep embodiment you're talking about. It's right in the middle. Right. I'm not collapsed. I'm not postured. I do have an erect spine. I'm here, but I'm not too tight. I'm not armored. I'm open. I'm vulnerable. I'm available. You know, the analogy we often use in the work is bamboo. Right. A nice stalk of bamboo. Extremely strong, but not rigid. Right. Flexible. That's the kind of presence we want to get to as men, where I'm like, I'm here. I'm not holding any tension in my body that I don't need to be holding, but I'm also not collapsed in a puddle. Right. It's that kind of beautiful place right in between. And it's often quite vitalizing for men. Right. There's like a life force that comes back online when we're just really radically present in these ways. And, you know, like the work, you're so involved in one of the quickest paths there is, embodiment. So, like, actually moving and getting into your body to get out of your head is one of the most powerful tools that I really support men in diving into.

Host: I think the more embodied we are as women especially, that we can feel when a man, because we're more present, can feel when a man is also not open. It's not really anything that they're doing or not doing. It's an energy of, I am not. I'm not here. You can tell when a man is not fully open to, like, he's. He. I don't even know if they know it sometimes, but totally don't present with you. And to be fully available for even a connection or, you know, maybe something going on in their head and they're just closed off to that and they're kind of in their thing, but they're not really open to being in that moment. Being really present with the connection.

Jason Lange: Yeah.

Host: And so.

Jason Lange: Yeah. Not available for connection.

Host: Yes.

Jason Lange: I think that's a good way to put it. And Right. In relationship dynamics, often where I work with men around, this is if that's the case where I mostly work with heterosexual couples and men. So I'm going to use that as an example. But if it's the case your feminine partner is more aware of your emotional state than you. She's not going to trust you in that moment.

Host: Yeah.

Host: So true. And how many times I've heard men say that, like what you said, that everybody expects something from them. And so having that space to come to is, we need you in every city. I know a lot of men who have asked me what. Where they could go for men's groups. And so how can people find you?

Jason Lange: Easiest way to keep up with me and the men's groups I offer kind of everything I do is at my website, which is Evolutionary Men. And so it's not dot com, but dot men. And on there, you'll see. I have a podcast. I talk about all this stuff quite a bit. In terms of men's groups, I have programs for men. Some are men's groups around dating and relationships. Some are around emotional healing and shadow work. Some are. I just want to experience, you know, the power of a men's group. And whether you work with me or not, I would say if, you know, this finds its way to a man who's like, okay, I. My bell's ringing here. Reach out. I'm, you know, I'm well connected at this point, so even if you don't work with me, I will help you find a resource in your area. Because, yeah, I'm pretty convinced one of the fastest ways we can nudge the world in the right direction right now is by getting men into groups and getting them supported.

Host: Yes, I agree. I love that. Jason, thank you so much for coming on today, and I will share your information also in the show notes so that everyone has that. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, and I hope men also listen to this and women, if you, you know, know a man who could benefit from this, feel free to share this episode with them. Thank you. Thank you again. Such a pleasure to have you on.

Jason Lange: Yeah, thanks so much for having me and creating the safe space for men.

Host: Thank you. Ciao, everyone.