I got invited on the Threads of Enlightenment podcast, and what struck me about the conversation was how much we went into the territory that matters most to me. The kind of stuff that doesn't always get airtime in these conversations.
Ken and I talked about the roots of disconnection so many men experience, how that shows up in our bodies, and what it actually takes to come back online. We went deep into shadow work, what it means to be embodied versus just thinking about being embodied, and why so much of men's pain comes from resisting what's actually happening in the moment.
What I appreciated about this one was getting to share my own story. Growing up in a house where my basic needs were met, but emotional attunement just wasn't there. The way that showed up later as this crippling discomfort around intimacy, particularly with women. How it took years of work to even be able to name what I was feeling inside my own body.
We also got into some of the neuroscience that backs up what I've experienced, like how 80% of the information traveling through the vagus nerve is body to brain, not the other way around. Most men are trying to navigate life using only 20% of their antenna. That's a big part of why embodiment work is so transformative. You're literally coming back online to the majority of your sensory experience.
If you're someone who spends a lot of time in your head, ruminating, overthinking, or you just feel disconnected from what you actually want, this conversation might land for you. Ken's a thoughtful interviewer, and we covered a lot of ground in under an hour.
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Host: Welcome to another episode of Festive Enlightenment. Guys, I'm excited about this one because Jason and I have been trying to get to where we are today, and we are just honored that we are able to be here on behalf of every single one that is going to be listening to this podcast. But as you know, my custom here is to welcome our guests because I know they're coming with a couple of things I DEEM Very expensive. That is their time. And every one of us is given 24 hours. And Jason is here to spend some of that good stuff, that quality stuff with us here at Threads of Enlightenment. Enlightenment. So we want to thank him and honor him for that. The other is his journey. The journey is power. It created Jason, who he is today, this individual that is about to engage with us and cause us to see some things that will assist us in becoming better human spirits while we are here on this planet. Jason, thank you so much for coming, man. Yeah.
Jason Lange: So excited to be here, Ken. Thank you.
Host: It is an honor, man. Tell the folks what you have created. I've been trying to educate them that every single man and woman on this planet is a creator. The creator is the individual that gave birth to things that were residing within them whilst they went through their journey. They were able to learn things and create this new world that they are walking in, which is, as I mentioned to you early on, was their assignment. So here you are. Talk to us as to how do you serve mankind? That is the question I asked people, because, Jason, I want them to step out of their world to see that this thing is much bigger than just them. How do you serve mankind?
Jason Lange: Yeah. So my path, which very much started out of my own pain and my own growth as a human being, of trying to figure out how best to, you know, love and show up in this world, has led me to be a men's embodiment, coach, group facilitator, and what I call evolutionary guide for men. So primarily, what I help men do is wake up to their. Their truer selves, their higher selves, and more deeply connected to their bodies, their emotions, and their relationships. So I really help men kind of become the most powerful, purposeful versions of themselves they can be. And how I do that is through a combination, like I said, helping men get more embodied, so actually connected to their direct felt body experience, which includes their emotions, and through getting connected to other men, something that there's a bit of a crisis around these days for so many men. There's a huge epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
Host: Yeah, I'm excited about this because you know, as I mentioned to you how what my heart is when it comes to men, I'm just happen to be one of them and I have five sons and so I know the heart of a man and what and I believed as many of us, most of us did the programming of our ancestors in society and stuff like that. And Jason mentioned one of the most powerful things that most of us men are not affording ourselves the ability to do that and that is to connect with our in emotions guys. It is imperative that you get to connect with that aspect of yourself. And when you do, you will see some powerful stuff. One of our customs here Jason, is to go back. We like to travel in during time and get a sense of who you are. And one of the spaces that we touch base for as we came into this planet is the first place we call the family. We hang out there for a couple of years until we began to move into our world to create our life. What was your family unit like?
Jason Lange: Yeah, my family growing up was one that I'd say is pretty typical for men I work with in that it was pretty good. I had a pretty good childhood in that my basic needs were met. I mean compared to the majority of the planet. You know, I was lower middle class white man growing up in midwestern America in the 80s and 90s. So I had it pretty good on the kind of surface level just having my needs met, not being wanted, you know, hungry or treated poorly or anything like that. What's important in my journey me though, is that while my basic needs were met, what my family didn't have online was a sense of interiority. So that ability to connect emotionally. So I grew up in a house that was had very little physical touch and very little emotional connection. It was kind of we just all lived in the same house, so to speak. But there wasn't a whole lot more deeper than that. And that is what really started my journey as particularly. Once I became a teenager, I started to feel really uncomfortable connecting with people outside of my household and particularly, particularly connecting with women I was attracted to. My body would just get very tight, I get very anxious. I wouldn't know how to communicate. And that was so painful for me. It was the first time I realized and had to kind of look around of oh what I thought was a normal childhood. There were some really fairly big fundamental nutrients I just didn't get in my body in terms of touch and love and closeness that drastically impacted how I experienced the world. Becoming a teenager and adult and it's stuff that I've had to spend, right. Many years of my life unwinding. So it was, yeah, it was this process of not feeling, coming out of that family unit. You know, I love my family and they love me to the best of their abilities. Right. But what they didn't have was a capacity to really attune to me, to help me feel into my body, my emotional experience. So as I grew up, you know, I would start getting into men's work and transformational work and people would ask me like, what are you? What do you feel? And I'd be like, huh, I feel okay. What do you mean? Like I couldn't actually name my inner experience. And that was a big part of my, my challenge and growth was learning to connect first and foremost to myself, to what was happening inside of me. And from there I was then able to build that capacity more and more out in the world with others.
Host: Yeah, learning to love the self, honor to self. As you begin your journey, I tell people it is a study in human behavior. And you're studying yourself because when you come out of the that you have a degree, a depth of understanding that is different than when you first started that depth of understanding towards human behavior. Jason had mentioned one of the things in the family, because as he's saying it, I identify with it myself as far as love my parents, just like Jason, middle class family, everything was provided for. But mom and dad were never the ones that can express I love you. Those words were never said in my household until I was an adult and never heard it from my mom, never heard it from my dad. It was more of a household that was based on performance, doing what you need to do in order to set up your own thing. And so for men, we need that just as much as women. Women are a little more fine tuned, but we need it as well. We need it just as bad, probably even more so than the women because they're already in tune with that. And we are just islands drifting all over the place, don't know anything. And then we have the society as if we cry, you're not a man and all that other stuff. So here you are, Jason, you're going through, you've recognized a couple of things within yourself and it is as you are able to translate that into your relationship with others, you notice, you started noticing the things, you started noticing the body disconnected from the emotions and all that stuff. As you are moving through your life, Jason, you're going into high school and beyond what was high school like, with having that knowledge as you are, you said, and you began to notice those things, how did it begin to affect you?
Jason Lange: Sure, yeah. I did get lucky in high school in that. And this, again, I think, is part of my story in that I did connect with a few other men. I found my kind of little nerdy clique of guys, and we mostly played video games. So I wasn't totally isolated and I was never bullied like some people. But it was around connecting to women. That was what was so uncomfortable for me. I just had no idea how to be close to someone or how to share what was going on inside myself. And so it just started to cause me a lot of pain as I saw other people starting to date and connect. And my body would literally just kind of clam up anytime I was interested in someone and it hurt and it didn't feel very good. And I started to put. Well, actually, I didn't start to put these pieces together quite so much then. But retrospectively, a big moment for me was in my junior year of high school. I went on a summer program, environmental program, which was, like, out on the East Coast. I grew up in the Midwest, so one of the fathers of one of the groups of people I was going drove us all out. And what's significant is I remember it was the first time I really kind of left home alone, like, without my family members, and the minivan came to pick me up. And, you know, my mom walks me out to the car and just kind of instinctually, because that's kind of what I saw you did in movies. We, like, hugged goodbye and then we got in the car. And I remember feeling like that hug felt really weird. I just remember it felt weird with that. And I never. It wasn't until I got into therapy a couple years later that I realized, wow. What my body was realizing in that moment was it could. Could not remember the last time my mom and I had physical contact with each other, like, actually touched. And that was, like, as far back as I could remember, could not remember that. And so it had a huge impact on me as I started to realize, wow, okay, like I said, there's some basic nutrients I didn't get here. And some things that assume are easy for others are kind of hard for me. Getting close, touch, feeling good in my body. I would ruminate a lot in my head, overthinking things as opposed to just, again, relaxing into my body. Stuff I've learned now. And that caused me a lot of strife. And basically it got to a point where you know, in the middle of high school, towards the end, I just had this realization. I was like, there has got to be a better way to be alive and in my body. Because this just doesn't. This doesn't feel good. Right. And I think I'm going to need some kind of help. And then it took me a little while, you know, I detoured through college and whatnot, but it was that which then started to drive me first because I wasn't in my body. So what came most easily to me at that age, Ken, was philosophy. Right. So it kind of drove me towards trying to learn more about humans and what makes us happy and how we tick. And that kind of kicked off my whole journey of self understanding that eventually completely changed my life and now is what supports me in supporting other men who have been through similar challenges as me. I totally agree with you in that I do a lot of work with men around purpose and direction and kind of that sense of like, yeah, what are you here to do? What are you here to give? What are you here to serve? And almost inevitably, it's. It's always kind of blows my mind how there's often a deep connection, I find, between our deepest purpose in life and what we experienced as our deepest pain. Because lo and behold, as we navigated, figuring that out, we're uniquely qualified to guide other people who are experiencing that same pain, to offer them a pathway out of it. So for me, right. Grew up in a lot of disconnection, disembodiment. What do I love to serve men doing in particular, helping them get into their bodies, get connected, get more present, and get connected to other men in relationship even more.
Host: Yeah, I think I. I've done so many of these interviews, and as I began to dig deeper into myself, I learned, and I have been learning that our pain is the mechanism that will usher us into our service. Meaning that trauma is. It is not at the time, but it will eventually be the way by which we are going to, to able to begin to serve others. Why? Because there is a need, and I tell people there was and is a need on the other side of it. And some of us are picked to go through the journey so that we, once we have exited the journey part, we are open, if you will, Jason, to becoming a servant and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable of that trauma so that when we speak to someone else, we are not speaking, Jason, with a weekend class knowledge, we are speaking with the real stuff. And so when we release our words, that's where the power is. And I believe that's our superpower back then, but we don't know it until we become and surrender to becoming a servant and be used by that trauma. So here you are, Jason. You are heading into college, and you saw. Well, that's a great revelation that you have. And because of your situation, you began to navigate yourself towards philosophy, as you stated, learning the deepness of humanity. As you began to study that and bring in that data into your sphere, if you will. What did that data begin to do to you?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I think it was the first thing that just opened me up to the idea of healing, right? That, oh, there's ways to work with these discomforts or struggles in my body. I just need to get the right to tools, right? I need people to help me that have the tools to support me in that. And so, you know, what really changed my life was it was literally the day I was about to fly out to California for college, walked into a library and saw this book on a shelf of this white dude with his big bald head that said, a brief history of everything. And it was a book by Ken Wilbur, who. I read that, and it immediately just lit me up of like, wow, here's. Here's kind of. I'm a big, you know, fan of storytelling through movies and books and whatnot. And I was like, this is a story that makes sense to me about what happens to human beings and spirit and evolution. And so I started really immersing myself in his work to the point that a couple years later, crazily enough, in retrospect, he had started what was equivalent to a podcast way before podcasts started. And he was releasing these weekly dialogues with different philosophers and thought leaders and, like, across the board. And I started listening to those, and he was always hyping up, you know, and all these people are moving out to Boulder, Colorado, all these young kids. And I was like, all right, sounds like something's happening there that I want to be a part of. And I just kind of had this intuitive sense, the healing I want, people can point me towards it there in this community. So, you know, it took a while, but then when I was 20, 25, I got myself out there and started working at his nonprofit. And that kind of on ramped me to leaving just the philosophical side of things and actually working my interiors. So it was the first place I experienced men's groups. It was the first place I really got serious about therapy, somatic work. Some of first medicine journeys were out there. And it was what really kind of quickly blew open my insides and allowed me to have to actually feel things I had never felt in my body before. Including, you know, some of the deepest work I did was shadow work, which I now really support men. And having done a couple years of therapy and it was really useful. I did the shadow work weekend with a man who facilitated me and when it came to my turn, within like 10 minutes, he had guided me, just guided me through a process where I was on my back crying out, touch me, touch me, I need you. Where are you? With the voice of like a two year old just bursting into full body tears, finally giving voice to this part of me that had been neglected for so long that I didn't cognitively, I kind of knew was in there, but was the first time I actually felt the emotional resonance with this young part of me that to no fault of its own, to this little. The baby inside me zone. That was the part that had been showing up when I was around women of this desperate need to be, to be attuned to and touched, which is great when you're a baby, but when you're an adult man, you know, not so attractive. So as I got into contact with that part of me, though, and so much grief poured through, I came out of that with a whole different level of presence in my body. And as I like to say, just more space. There was more spaciousness for me to feel my entire experience. And that was really what I would say was kind of the pivot that then really just continued this onward trajectory of getting more and more connected to myself, my body, emotionally and at a somatic level where now, you know, if someone asks me, like, what are you feeling? I can dial right in, right? Oh, yeah. I feel a little tight in my belly. I feel anxious about this. I have much more fluidity with my emotional experience. So the quality of my relationships has gone through the roof.
Host: Yeah, There's a couple of things that Jason has said that every one of us has to visit. You have to have a meeting, if you will. An appointment is set within your journey for you to reconnect to that young, younger version of yourself. You have to go back and have a conversation with that individual, learn how to love that individual, and you will work through that conversation. Now, once you get there, one will react differently. As Jason stated, his reaction was that of the emotion outburst and how it came out. And let me give you guys some insight about that. Trauma is the stamp of. Trauma is an emotional. It's an emotional thing that you are held into your, your heart, your belief System. Mom and Dad's local. I'll give you an example. Mom and dad, they're doing their thing. This little girl, a little child, comes to mom and dad and trying to get their attention. Mom and dad literally busy. And they said, no, we can't do it. And they may say it in a tone like that, not meaning any harm, but that young individual is traumatized by that. No. And they store that emotion inside, and it is locked there until that emotion is removed. As Jason said, when it's removed, there is more space. And so that trauma has to be removed. And we do that by bringing in tools and so forth. He mentioned shadow. He talks about that particular aspect of it. And we're going to go into this as well and talk about it. One of the other things that he mentioned, and I want to point you guys back to this, books, very important, as Jason said, books are stories. Jason. I grew up in the church, and one of the fascinating things about Jesus Christ was he would tell and recall the stories back in those days, parables, but he was telling stories. Now, the stories house all the information for the right brain thinkers, the left brain thinkers. All the stories are laden with facts, but they have the imagery for those that are thinking in that Fastland facet, and they're able to grasp the story, story, the factual. Get it? The right brain, get it. Everyone gets it. So when you read books, guys, allow the books, the story and the factualness within those pages, those are called words. Give them the opportunity to come into your heart and your space and begin to unwind all of your belief that has kept you in that darkness. Jason, you're Colorado. I love Colorado. That place, man, you get there, a boulder, and you can sense it as you're walking the street. Streets, the energy and all of that. You have all those different belief systems there. The shadow work that you're talking about, mention to them. Because a lot of people say, you say shadow work, and they have a clue. And I don't want to fly by it. I want you to talk to those that are listening to us. What does that entail when they hear the term shadow work?
Jason Lange: Yeah. So shadow, it's a pretty varied concept. Jung wrote a lot about it, in particular from kind of more an archetypal perspective. But in the way I've learned to work with it, shadow really just points to anything inside of us that isn't conscious that we aren't aware of. Right. So this is often parts of ourselves that we've disowned or dissociated. From or that are so painful, we just instinctively kind of move away from. And we often know there's shadow material. We. We all have shadow material. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not bad, per se. Right. It's just what happens in our life is sometimes we have experiences like that, know from our parents that are overwhelming to our nervous system in that moment. So what our nervous system does is it can't quite process it. So it just holds it. Right. It stops that process in some capacity. You're right. You know, there's more and more data that shows we actually hold that in our fascia in particular. There's an actual musculature to tightening up the body to stop feeling something. So what that does over time, though, is it takes energy not to feel. And anytime we're not feeling something, we're either pushing away from it it or we're pushing it out. And what shadow will do and how we know it's showing up is overly reactive or bothered by something, meaning our reaction isn't necessarily correlated to the bigness of whatever caused it. Right. We get overly reactive or anytime we keep doing something over and over that we don't necessarily want to, and we don't know why, that will oftentimes point to shadow. And the metaphor I've been using with guys around this, Ken, is like I said, anytime we stop feeling an emotion, so we clamp down on ourselves. That emotion doesn't go anywhere, it's just stored. And the image I use lately is it's kind of like dead wood at the bottom of a forest floor. So anytime we're not feeling all of this organic material is starting to build up at the bottom of the forest. Right. It didn't burn, so to speak. So what happens is where shadow comes in is then one day we're just walking down the street and, you know, we go get in line for the atm and someone cuts in front of us and we have this enormous angry outburst, let's say, is one possible example. What's really going on there is what would normally be just be a tiny spark. Someone did something mad, we get a little angry about it. Totally appropriate, actually hits that undigested emotional material and it ignites it in an extra large explosion. Right. There's way more gas, so to speak, for that fire. And then we might scream, we might yell, we might get aggressive. There's so many different ways that can show up with anger. It can show up with grief, with disgust. So it's these processes inside of ourselves, these parts of ourselves too, that we've lost connection with. So for me, what was in the shadow was quite literally a crying baby that was desperate for his mother's touch. Just desperate. And that was showing up in particular with all of my relationships with women. That little, that little baby was the one that was actually in the driver's seat, so to speak, without me realizing it. And oh, that's why I'm feeling so awkward. That's why I don't know how to communicate of just trying to consciously bring these elements of ourselves to the light up into our awareness. Because as soon as we become aware of these different shadow elements in ourselves, the big transformation that can happen is we can start to relate to these emotions or parts of ourselves in relationship versus relating from them, which means they take over our whole. Our whole bigness, our I ness, our whole self. So shadow work is. It's sometimes hard for me to describe because it looks completely different for every human being. When I'm doing, yeah, deep work with someone, I don't really know where it's going to go. But like you pointed to in the intro, oftentimes there really is an element of kind of time travel where what I have found is we go into the body, we start to connect to the sensations and then those sensations start to evoke and help us remember certain moments in our life where we got shut down or we felt frustrated or he felt sad. And we get to. In some ways the work I do is then try to bring that emotion so you know, this platitude, I think it's real for a reason of emotion, energy in motion. We try to bring that stuck emotion back into a process so it can complete itself, so we can feel the upset, so we can share with mom or dad, so we can whatever it was that we didn't feel safe or didn't have the capacity to do, then shadow work allows us to bring it through. And then that holding, all that holding we were doing in our nervous system relaxes and all this vitality and just natural joy and goodness and energy to handle the stresses of life comes back online. So one thing I love about doing shadow work in particular is often have is getting the privilege to witness this experience of people actually coming more alive, like more life force, more energy coming back to their soul, which then they can take back to their families and communities and relationships.
Host: Yeah, once it is, and I tell mention it all the time, try to let people be aware of it. Once it is, once you've made aware of it, your freedom is right There, right there. Because you did not know it was there. But when you become aware of it, life becomes really interesting because as that emotion tries to come back, you're aware of what the source of it, and then you're able to make your adjustment. Jason, what were some of those tools? Once you have walked in and began to utilize the techniques of the shadow work, what were some of those tools that you first of all had to bring into your space to help you to become more proficient in applying the knowledge, the insights that you had achieved from that shadow work? What other tools did you bring into your life to help you as you walk from day to day? Once that began?
Jason Lange: Yeah, the first and foremost tool is that I just continue to do that work myself. So twice a year I meet up with a group of men and we lead each other in shadow work. And it continues every time to blow my mind how much deeper and deeper and how much more there is about myself to discover. Right. I think I'm like, oh, that was the last peel or layer of the onion. It's like, nope, there's 20 more under there, right? There's, there's always some nuance to continue. So I've continued to learn. You know, just in these last couple years, I uncovered a deep, deep thread of just self loathing and shame I had not been aware of that was motivating so much of my behavior at a subtle level that was mind blowing to me. Once it came to the surface and I saw it, I was like, wow, I thought I'd done a lot of work and you know, da, da, da. But here I am just carrying the same stuff like so many of us do. And so the tools are, you know, doing this kind of shadow work that I talk about, which is inorganic. It's more like an art than a science of guiding men into their bodies in the moment and then using some different tools like sentence stems or role plays to get the energy moving. That's almost always tied with some kind of embodiment work in, in what I say is oftentimes the quickest way to move emotional material involves, well, some combination of, but at the very minimum, one of either breath, sound or movement. And when you can combine them, when there's breath, sound and movement, things tend to move and transform pretty fast. Material comes up. Our bodies are really quite exquisite and they know how to heal once we get them in the right situation. Right. And this is stuff that people have been doing for, you know, as long as humans have been around.
Host: Ye.
Jason Lange: And we're just starting to reconnect to it as modern culture, I think, in some ways. But so there's that shadow work, there's embodiment work, which is just, you know, both more at a meditative level of learning. You know, it's, it's. I guess the other thing I could say is there's the paradox of needing to do both practices. For a lot of people, it's really important to create a meditative practice to learn to distance ourselves from our thoughts and realize, oh, my God, my thoughts are not reality. They're not true necessarily. Most of the time they're garbage. Just monkey mind just doing its thing.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Lange: And it can be really liberating to realize, oh, I don't have to be identified with that stream of thoughts. So there's a practice of transcendence, so to speak. But then there's also the practice of embodiment, which is coming more fully into our bodily experience. Yeah. What is, what are the sensations I'm feeling? What is the impulse of my body right now? And for so many men, and for me in particular, this is what was such a game changer because I had been trying to navigate through life just using my head and yeah, it's pretty hard, right? Self doubt, rumination, overthinking things. Sometimes, you know, being a more intellectual person doesn't make it easier because then it's like, well, if I do this, if I do this, if I do this, maybe I just need to research it more. And that's where men can, in myself included, get into this analysis.
Host: Paralysis.
Jason Lange: But so coming into the body and learning that actually oftentimes just noticing what my body is feeling often is all I need to make decisions. And there's, you know, after I started having these experiences, as I got further in my journey, you know, now I've learned some of the research that backs that up, up, right. We have this beautiful bundle of nerves that go right down our center channel called the vagal nerve. And the fascinating thing is, you know, that's the highway for how the brain communicates to the body and how the body communicates to the brain. And the interesting they found thing they found, Ken, about that, that you may know about that channel is only 20 of the bandwidth of that channel is brain to body. 80% of it is body to brain, meaning 80% of that channel. The information we can be bringing in our sensitivity, our attunement, comes from the body. So many men are basically trying to get through life only using 20 of their antenna for making decisions and making choices. And what Feels right. And so as I got more into my body, it's allowed me to lead myself and my family and my communities in a much more organic way where I'm actually getting as much information as I can. But it's not intellectual information. It's emotional information. It's attunement information. I would even say in some sense it's spiritual information in between that the body brings online. So my life has just become a practice of trying to cultivate presence in my body and an awareness of where am I going in my life and how can I best love and serve people along the way. I don't know if that fully answered your question.
Host: It's perfect, absolutely perfect. And I hope that those. I always give this little nugget learn to those listeners, learn to transition into becoming a hearer. As Jason so eloquently spoke about the body and the brain connection, as that is just the house. He was talking about how the house is working, the interconnection, connectedness with the house. We call that the natural mind. Then there's the subconscious mind. That's who you are now. That subconscious mind has been programmed. Way back when mom and dad made love and you began to grow in there, all the energies of mom and dad began to program that individual right there, that subconscious mind. That is why, Jason, we are. We are not aware of all the programming because they started programming us way before we came out. We had nine months inside of mom being programmed about Mom's energies, Dad's energies, the surroundings that mom has, what she ate. All of these things are energy that we are being attuned to as an individual. And so the programming starts there. Now, that subconscious mind is made up of a couple of things. Subconscious, conscious being. As for my studies that I've learned is that mind, the thoughts, the mind, the thoughts come into that field in your mind how is in your soul, they call it is your mind your will and your emotion. So this field of thoughts is coming here and you pick one and you say, and you take it with your mind, and then you agree with it with your will, and you store it in your heart with your emotion. And you own it unless until you began to excavate it. As you're going through now, some of the most powerful tools Jason mentioned is that of meditation. The shadow work is necessary because there's so many chambers within that subconscious mind that we haven't opened yet. And we call those layers again because the programming from when we were young. And then Jason said, yeah, wow. Now, after I See this additional information. Now life begins to make more sense. Sense. I see the thread and we see those things because of those programming. So Jason talked about meditation, one of the most powerful things. And the medication, meditation is exactly what he said. It allows you to pick which thoughts you will give permission to now bear fruit in your life. That's what they're there for. You don't have to take all of them. You know, you now have the opportunity through meditation to slow it down and all truth, those are just stuff that is out there. Now. I could pick one that comes and resonates with my soul, that that's one that I need to hold on to. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to make a decision to take it. I am now going to decide with my will, I am going to take it. I'm going to have an emotional stamp. I own that. And I promise you, 10 years, 20 years from now, that stuff is popping up in your life. That's what Jason is talking about. Men, the men that are listening to us. This is what he is talking about. How to take yourself. Learn how to reprogram some of those things that you're experiencing life through, the shadow work, bringing it. Then you put your tools in. That's why I asked him what tools did he use? And he mentioned several of them. And guys, I want you to. I'm going to provide everything for you to get to Jason. I'm telling you, we're not finished yet. But I just want to let you know we're going to provide everything for you to get to him so that you can get into his space, so that he can help you go through and identify some of those things that are stored there so that you can begin to become free and create more space to input more data that will keep you moving through. Jason, here you are, you're seeing all of these things within yourself now. You are. You're bringing in meditation, you're bringing in the tools to assist you in your journey. As you're walking through now, Jason, you got the shadow work work. You're breathing, you're bringing in breath. And I tell people the breath is the bridge between the natural and the supernatural. Simply, that's it. When you. You look at athletes, you'll see them, they've moved over guys. It's a mindset. They've gone into a degree of focus, a degree of quietness that is different before they took that breath. And you'll see an athlete, especially a basketball player, when he gets in that foul throw. Line you see them, them all buying first of all, take the breath. They rest, they sit and their focus. That's what this is all about. Jason, you're getting the breath, you're bringing meditation. What was happening to you as you are now moving in your space, walking with all of these powerful tools as your friends assisting you, what began to happen in your life?
Jason Lange: Yeah, I would say it all really started to constellate together probably in my mid to late 30s. It was just deeper in my journey and I kept going. And you know, probably the most significant thing was I magnetized my now wife who's also a deep practitioner and growth oriented, just deeply spiritual human being. And so finally, you know, had some relational experiences, but met her and started a family, became a father, which has just accelerated my growth even more in that, you know, seeing a child. Yeah, getting to witness my daughter, you know, and it becoming even clearer in us offering her what my wife and I never got as kids is like healing that part of ourselves. Right. Just being able to deeply be present and attuned to her. And there's tons of touch and there's so much love and it's totally transformed myself in a different way. But what I would say is I just started to relax more into myself. That's often what I share with men is that there's less of a push in life now and more just an allowing. Which sounds a little counterintuitive, but turns out I'm getting a lot more of what I want and able to create and serve at a much deeper level as I just start to trust this unfolding process even more and more. Surrendering, you know, the other thing.
Host: Yeah, the surrendering. I tell people, you become a life of one who is in a continual motion of surrendering. That's what it is, you know, it's amazing.
Jason Lange: Life totally. And how I've, you know, and I can't say I've perfected this. Right. It's still a process I'm in. But how that's really shown up for me, Ken, is this realization of. Yeah, learning as I teach men to become a yes to the moment. So much of our pain comes from resisting the moment as it is and assuming it could somehow be better. It's like such a painful thing for so many men in particular. And so it doesn't mean I don't have preferences in my life and where it's going. But there's also. Well, this is what's here right now. So can I just be fully with that? And as I'm getting better at that. Again, just everything. Quality of life is just getting better. It's not getting easier per se, but life is definitely getting better. And for me, I continued to down this path, specifically of men's work, of being in men's group and supporting other men just for my own healing journey. And it was around that time in my mid-30s, that I was just so lit up about it and talking about it so much and getting so much energy from it. People started to ask me, like, hey, can I join your men's group? And I'd be like, no, we're full. Because, you know, literally we only fit eight people in our meeting space. And then that kind of naturally led me to start leading my own groups so other men could experience what I was experiencing. And that really, really just changed the trajectory of my kind of professional work and how I now serve in the world of just yeah, really wanting to support other men to get into spaces where, honestly, they feel safe to feel the things that we're often told we're not allowed to feel as men. And that as we do that, this natural power comes back online. Right. This ability to just deeply engage with the world as it's at. And so, you know, there's a lot happening in the world right now. And, you know, I'm just very clear that part of my mission is I feel like if every man was in position a men's group, things would get a lot better, a lot faster because it's. Men are isolated, in pain, and disconnected from their hearts. That's often where some of the worst things that happen in the world happen. Not all driven by men, but oftentimes, you know, driven by disconnected men. It's not that men are bad. It's men that are disconnected from themselves, their hearts, and others. So I'm really lit up about getting men more connected as we've been talking.
Host: Yeah, guys that are out there listening to our conversation with Jason is very important that men, young men get connected, because when we don't, someone will connect you to something. You have to learn. Find true groups that will connect you to you, not a group that will connect you to a cause, because some causes are corrupt based on the individual that is has that cause and that agenda. But when you find a group that will help you to connect to you, that's a different place. That is a place where you can become safe, you can become free, you can become even more in touch with who you are. As you become more in touch with who you are, your cause is inputted in you. You came with it. And Jason and I, before the onset, we talked a little about it. I deem that. Cause your assignment Jason scores is his assignment. That's the stuff that he was brought here on this planet to do, and he's doing it. And I tell people, your job may not be your assignment. That is something you will have to go in individually. I've interviewed so many people that had made the millions and multimillions when they're 20s and stuff like that with their jobs and we're missing their assignment and realized that they weren't happy at all. After they have achieved everything that people say they should be and then be happy, they realize, wait a minute, something is missing. And what was missing was that they weren't doing their job. Assignment. You will never find peace until you do your assignment, Jason. Attest to it. Your assignment is not to make it easy. Your assignment is to do your assignment totally. You know, people. People think that the assignment is to make things easy. The assignment has built in things in there to keep you humble and keep you growing. It's not to make you a super multimillionaire and all this kind of stuff, which, you know, some people can do that stuff. But the assignment is to keep you moving and uncovering more of who you are. Because every time you do, you're able to continue your assignment and speak with power and authority and that assignment. And that's what you hear in Jason's voice when he's talking about men's group and men's relationship and relationship with self, to others and so forth. Once you find your purpose, you become purposeful. If you don't have a purpose, people will begin to use you and put you in one. And that may not be the one that you want. Need to be. Find a group like Jason that is interested in helping you to find yourself. Those are the best groups to be in. Others that are having an agenda. Stay away from them. Jason, here you are. You have been doing your assignment. You have your partner that is there to support you, your daughter to expand you, because that's what they do. And as you are moving forward into the. Or unknown, into the future, if you will, what is it that you are looking at, Jason? What is it that is beginning? And I tell people, this is an important aspect in our relationship. There's always this unease, this unrest that sits in us when we need to move forward. And the purpose is not to. Is just to make us aware that there is some more stuff that we have to do. What is it that you are sensing within your yourself, Jason, as you're looking into a year, two years, five months, you know, out of your life.
Jason Lange: Yeah, I have both, you know, my grand visions for just wanting to support men in the world and get men's groups more out there, which is unfolding at its own pace. And that is a place I'm just more in an allowing space right now. What I would say, what's in an interesting way, what's kind of more immediate in my life that's come online is so, yeah, Yeah, I was 39 when I had my daughter and we're working on having another kid if all goes well. And so I'm a little bit of a later parent and doing some deep work. Maybe two years ago, I had a very profound experience of realizing how my lineage basically, and my wife's lineage, the way it's played out is there have been no grandfathers present in our lineage. Like, they've maybe been around, but, you know, not in good health or died early or were absent. And that was not an end energy I really ever experienced. And it's not an energy my daughter's really getting to experience. And I just had a full body sense of like, oh, wow. One of my assignments is I want to do all I can do to become a grandfather in my life, which at the age I had my kid means, you know, I really got to start taking care of myself if I want to have mobility and longevity in my body, you know, when I'm in my 70s and 80s, to be able to interact with toddler. And so my life is really in some sense shifting towards how to become the most sustainable version of myself I can be. So I can hopefully be present for my child's child in a way and change this kind of karmic pattern in my lineage. And it excites me, provides me a tremendous amount of motivation actually to take care of myself and showing up in my family and how to even, you know, it's modified in some sense. Even the work I do in the world of, well, I want it to support that. I want it to support me being the healthiest version of myself. So, you know, my business, let's say I'm not trying to grow it like crazy, right? I don't want to grow super fast, which, you know, I had that impulse like a couple of years ago, just get bigger, more money, more money. And now I'm like, no, actually what I want is what's going to support me in my lifestyle. Being super present for my kid and hopefully her Children at some point in the future. And that starts now. Like, you know, getting enough sleep, eating well, meditating, taking care of my body. There's this very nuts and bolts stuff that I'm really shifting towards prioritizing. And, you know, it's. It's in some sense out of my control whether or not I'll actually get there and get to be a grandfather. But I know part of my work right now is to do everything I possibly can. So I feel free with wherever that, you know, wherever life takes me.
Host: That is awesome. I hope you guys are listening, because what Jason is talking about is not money. He's talking about wealth. He's nothing like it. Yeah, that is wealthy stuff that he was talking about money. You're not going to die without all that stuff. If you don't, you don't have it. But the wealth that he's talking about, that stuff keeps you healthy, keeps your mind in a certain state that is more powerful than being a millionaire. You have no idea. Get to a space. All you men that are out there listening to us, you want some wealth? I got someone that'll help you get there. Not just the spiritual aspect, not just about shadow working and bringing in the tools to assist you, but to get you some wealth to deal with you and your family.
Jason Lange: Family.
Host: That type of stuff is priceless. Jason, I want to thank you, man. We had to work this out to get here, and it's been some good stuff, and I am honored that you came and you're able to share with us your life and your journey. And again, guys, Jason, I believe that my guests present when there is a need, so there must be a need. For those that are going to be listening to this, we're going to provide all the access you get to. To him, get to Jason, get into his space, and he can work with you through shadow work to get you to that space and maybe even help you that if you're not in his neighborhood, to guide you to maybe put together another men's group that you can learn from him. But you would need to get into his space so that you can understand the cost of doing it and the cost of not doing it so you can get a chance of it. Jason, I want to thank you so much, man, for coming and spending this precious time and sharing your precious. This powerful journey with us here at Resident Life.
Jason Lange: Yeah, thanks so much, Ken. It was such a fun experience, and I'm glad we finally got here. And just love. Yeah, the. The questions you brought and the flavor of work you're putting out there in the world. So really grateful to have shared this time with you.
Host: Thank you, sir.
