Holding the Moment

All right. And welcome back. On today's episode, I'm going to talk about one of the most important elements of leadership we can begin to cultivate as men.

And this is accessible to any of us, truth be told, whether we're a man or a woman, because masculine and feminine energies both exist inside all of us. We all have these energies in us. And we can use different terms for these energies. Masculine and feminine are the ones I most often use because people just get them. But you could also say relative and absolute, structure and flow, emptiness and form.

There's countless examples and ways we can talk about that. But for today, I'm just going to continue using the term masculine. And so the masculine is that part of us that is aware, that is actually aware of the moment. It's the part of us that's witnessing and holding perspective. And in masculine leadership, one of the most important skills we can begin to cultivate is actually not just witnessing the moment, but holding the moment.

Now, if you get into inner growth work or polarity work or men's work, at some point you're going to hear people use the phrase holding space. Now, it can be a kind of a generic term, and it can be overused, but it is an important one. And what we mean by holding space is our ability to be conscious and embodied and open and available in the moment.

When we're holding space for someone, we are rooted, we are grounded, and we are aware. We are tracking ourselves and we are tracking them. We are holding the structure of the moment so that whoever we're relating with doesn't have to. You know, a simple, simple concrete example of this is keeping tabs on time, right?

So maybe we're in a conversation or having an experience, and part of our attention is on tracking time because we have a limit where we have to go or something like that. Now, there's a difference. There's a difference in presence, there's a difference in energy. If we are not only engaging in relating with someone or an activity in the moment and we're tracking time, we're actually doing multiple things at once.

That is an example of holding space. We're holding the moment because we're actually creating a container around it, right? We're holding the structure of the moment and developing our capacity to hold our structure as men is one of the most important and meaningful growth trajectories we can be on. So much men's work just comes down to that.

I've talked about it before. It's our ability to be present with whatever's happening and kind of keep an awareness on something even larger than that. Holding the moment, holding the structure is also something you'll see pretty obviously as parents. It's something we do all the time for our children. And again, anyone can do this because we all have this energy accessible inside of us.

But our child might be playing totally engrossed and lost in what they're doing, and we're right there with them. And we're tracking other things, particularly for kids, oftentimes and young ones, their safety, right. We're holding a larger container around them to make sure they are safe. Our awareness is often deeper and more encompassing than our children's. They might not know they can't run into the street, or they can't put their finger in a light socket or power socket.

Again, it's our consciousness that's holding them in that moment. We are holding the structure, we're holding the moment. Our awareness is kind of wrapped around everything that's happening when that happens. When our awareness can hold ourselves, who we're with, in the greater context of the moment, it allows whoever we're with to just relax more into their expression in the moment, their flow in the moment.

It's an important and powerful thing. Now, developing our ability to hold the moment, as I say, is critically important for being an effective leader in the world, in our relationships, in our families. It's really our ability to track things in time, things in space, that makes us invaluable to the people around us.

If our goal is to be in our masculine. If that's not our goal, this isn't what you're cultivating. It's that simple. And you're not going to have this online all the time because like I said, we all have these energies. Sometimes we're the one holding the moment, sometimes we're not. Sometimes we gladly give that away to other people. I know I do. Other coaches, healers, therapists, friends, people in my men's group. I love not always holding the moment, but I also have that capacity that allows me to lead my family, lead my business, lead other men, etc.

Now, from this context of who's holding the moment, I also want to talk about another important factor that can deeply impact specifically intimate relationships between A couple who is polarizing each other between the feminine and the masculine. So if we come into an interaction and we're wanting to relate to a feminine partner and we give them the structure or have them hold the moment, that can reverse or neutralize the attraction and polarity between us.

There's nothing wrong with this happening. It's actually a totally normal, functional part of being in a relationship. The challenge can be if this is only ever what happens. The relationship will probably hit some troubles if it's an intimate one. I mention this because this is one I've seen show up a lot in the work of helping men thrive in relationships.

So many men, as I've talked about on this show before, particularly as they age and start families and get deeper into life, don't have much other community outside of their work and maybe their family and maybe just their intimate partner. And so if they're going through a stressful time in their lives and they don't have anyone else that can hold space for them, they're often having their partners do it, right?

They're getting overwhelmed, they're getting stressed, they're getting anxious, they're getting lost, they're getting collapsed. And in doing that, they're asking their partner to hold them and to hold the moment, to hold the structure, to hold space. And that can reverse polarity or at best, just neutralize it. Because when our partner is having to hold, so to speak, us and that awareness, so we can kind of drop into our feelings.

If they are from a feminine essence, that's going to have a cost on their nervous system. There's just no way around it. Can they do it? Yes. Should they do it sometimes? Yes. Should they do it all the times? No. And I see that a lot with guys who end up having their partners hold them, hold the space for them more than they're doing it in reverse.

And if you have a masculine essence, because we're more sourced in that space of witnessing. So how can we work with that in relationship? There's a couple key things that I've learned doing this work through some of my teachers and through some of my experiences. 11 is we can still meta hold the moment sometimes by just putting a little structure around it before we go in and ask our partner to hold space for us.

Literally, we can set the container for our interaction so that even though we're asking them to hold the moment, we're holding the larger conversation itself, a structure. And that can be as simple as, hey, do you mind just letting me rant or get some things off my chest for two or three minutes? That's. It can be that simple. Suddenly our partner knows, ah, just for two or three minutes.

This isn't going to happen forever. He's just going to get some things off his chest and then we can interact in a different way. If that's not set, and let's say you just wake up or come home from work and are just complaining, but there's no container around it, the feeling might be, this is never going to end for our partners and I'm going to have to hold this forever. And that is not such a pleasant thing. But again, we can kind of set the meta container for, hey, I've had a really hard day.

What do I mean by this is if we show up in an interaction or in our date or with our wife and we're really struggling with something, right? It feels hopeless. We don't know how to win. We're mad, we're upset, whatever that might be. And it's clear we are lost. We do not know how to move forward with this. We do not know what our next steps are going to be. We are actually totally at a loss.

And so we put this out there in hopes that our partner can help us figure it out or fix it. In that instance, we're actually asking our partners to carry the burden for us. Oh, my God. Can you hold this? I can't hold it. I'm lost. I don't know what to do. And there's like a weight to that, right? Because now, in addition to holding the space, they're kind of holding whatever that tension is for us.

You know, this is, again, something we can see in relationship between kids and their parents. It's incredibly Normal for a child to give their burden to their parents. Fix this. I don't know how to do this. And then we have to figure it out, right? Because they haven't yet developed the capacity to figure it out as kids. Now when we start bringing that into an adult intimate relationship, that's when things can get a little dicey and we can get into the mother lover syndrome that I've talked about that just isn't particularly attractive.

They are holding me in this so you do not have to completely all by yourself hold me back. So it's a capacity that we can develop to learn to hold space in ourselves and learn how to share our burdens with our partners without asking them to carry them. Want some help on this journey? Feel free to reach out to me.

You can join me for a drop in men's group Evolutionary Men events, or you can join my intensive coaching program for men around dating and relationships. Viewing my training at Evolutionary Men webinar. Until next time.