Master Fluidity to Master Your Life

All right. And welcome back. So on today's episode, I want to talk about a powerful attribute that we can cultivate as men to quickly improve the quality of our lives.

And it's fluidity. Specifically, I want to break it down into three different types of fluidity that as we increase our capacity for them, the quality of our life can just go through the roof. The first type of fluidity is nervous system fluidity. And the idea here is in polyvagal theory, right, our nervous system has two primary states. There's the sympathetic nervous system, which is when we're activated, when we're going to respond or mobilize ourselves in the world, and the parasympathetic system, which is where we actually rev down the engine and slow down to restore.

On the sympathetic side, the extreme of this right, is fight or flight. We actually feel threatened, and so our body mobilizes its muscles to either eject us from the situation or attack to protect ourselves. But sympathetic in general is just anytime we are engaged and we're moving towards something that takes an active participation in kind of energy, we. We need sympathetic activation.

On the other side, parasympathetic, the extreme right is freeze. It's where we just totally shut down and, in a sense, might even play dead in our lives. We become paralyzed. The better part of parasympathetic is rest and digest. It's the part of our nervous system that allows us to downshift and send signals to our whole body to restore itself, to repair, to heal.

We get this through deep sleep, through relaxation, through meditation, and through proper taking care of ourselves. And we need that restoration. It's very, very important. Now, what's tricky about our cultures these days is, is because of technology and the way things have played out and the amount of information most of us are being bombarded by on a daily basis, much of which is actually set up to activate your sympathetic system and get you into a fight or flight state.

Why? Because then they can sell you shit to make you feel better, right? It's kind of that simple. It's not like there's a mastermind trying to make this work. But this is the stuff we've seen and social media in particular. Its gift, it's real superpower, is putting People into a sympathetic state and making them feel like they're in danger. Now because of this, a lot of us get stuck in the sympathetic state and a lot of modern anxiety is us just being revved up.

And then we have this really kind of work, work, work obsessed culture where people can just get stuck in fifth gear and push harder, push harder and. And we'll get burnt out, right? That's the danger of staying in that sympathetic state. On the other side, we have a lot of people and guys I work with that get stuck in depression, right? We actually get downshifted into that parasympathetic state where we feel unable to engage with the world. We don't have the energy, we don't have the motivation. We feel trapped or paralyzed in our own lives.

Now, before we have fluidity here, the thing that happens is it's kind of like when you first learn to drive a manual car. The transitions are really choppy, meaning we'll often just be up there in the sympathetic state and we go, go, go, go, go, until we crash hard into the parasympathetic state. And our body actually forces us to slow down, to start to repair, to start to rest, to start to digest. Or sometimes we get then stuck down there and we cannot mobilize ourselves to take action in the world.

So nervous system fluidity is actually this capacity to learn to intelligently, consciously and smoothly shift between parasympathetic and sympathetic states in our nervous system. When I need to engage my life, I. I can rev the engine up. And when I need to rest and come down, I know how to bring it down. And so it becomes this smooth transition rather than this really abrupt one so many of us get stuck in.

Learning to shift gears like that creates a level of sustainability in our lives that can help us get more of what we want, right? We're not burning ourselves out by overworking, and we're not getting trapped and stuck into that kind of analysis. Paralysis or inability to engage with our world, Learning to shift between them is really what we might call self care, right?

How can I get myself to do what I need to do when I need to do it? And then how can I let myself rest when I don't need to be doing anything? And these two seasons, in a sense, we all have to move through. And many men I work with in particular get stuck in that go, go, go energy and have to work really hard to learn to ramp down into the rest and digest of parasympathetic. The paradox and the power of this is the smoother we learn to make that transition, the more sustainable our lifestyle becomes.

And actually the more we can go overall and get shit done, right? So we're actually taking care of ourselves. It's like we know how to sprint when we need to sprint and how to catch our breath when we need to catch our breath. And we can often see this. I know I used to see this when I was a runner. Would run really hard when I was out of shape. Getting back to a rested state took a long time. I'd be huffing, I'd be puffing, I'd have cramps.

It would take 10 or 15 minutes for my body to regulate itself. As I actively trained and got healthier, that transition became a lot shorter and a lot smoother. I could run full out and then when I stopped, my heart rate would come down very quickly, my body would re regulate itself and it'd be a smooth landing. It was much, much easier. So nervous system fluidity, and so much of what we're learning about, how to regulate our nervous systems is all about this.

How can we learn to smoothly transition between these two states, the sympathetic activation and the parasympathetic rest and digest. And many, many men do not know how to make those shifts. And because they do not know how to make them, they're often very bumpy, extreme, and sometimes actually forced upon them in a sense. So that's fluidity type one nervous system fluidity. Type number two is emotional.

Now, what is emotional fluidity? It's really this idea that whenever an emotion comes up, I can just go straight towards it and be with it and fully express it inside and outside myself. This is a superpower in a sense, because anytime we're not expressing or allowing ourselves to metabolize an emotional experience, it ends up getting held in our nervous system, in our actual tissues, in.

In some pretty profound ways, right? To hold an emotion, we actually have to tense up different parts of our body, mind and heart. Emotional fluidity is this idea that instead of resisting whatever my experience is, I'm just going to move towards it or another way, I'm going to let it come towards me like a set of waves. And instead of trying to get away from them or not feel them, I'm just going to let the wave crash over me and I'm going to experience it completely.

So that might be the depths of grief, the heat of anger, or even the effervescence of joy and passion in our lives. So emotional fluidity is whatever's happening. In my experience, I'm Just going to move towards it and be with it. And as one of my teachers once said, when we allow ourselves to touch an emotion completely, that's often when it starts to dissolve or transform or metabolize in our system.

And so many of us men, as I've talked about before, are radically unprepared for how to deal with our emotional experience. Our cultures, our families, our religions do not give us the tools for processing or our emotional, well, our emotional selves. As we learn to metabolize that, we're able to move through the world with a lot more ease. Because instead of resisting and feeling deep emotion or strong emotion, we just go right towards it and realize it will not last.

So what I'm ever, whatever I'm feeling or is coming through me in the moment, I can just allow that to be. And paradoxically, the more I allow it to be and fully engage with it, the faster it passes and transmutes into another experience, which as I talk about in my shadow programs that actually when we learn to do that, can free up tremendous amounts of metabolic energy in our bodies. We can actually reclaim vitality by practicing emotional fluidity.

So we have nervous system fluidity and emotional fluidity. And now I want to talk about the third, equally important type of fluidity, which is around polarity. And these are all pretty related when you really get down to it. These distinctions in some sense are just make it easier for us to talk about it. But polarity has some similarity to nervous system fluidity, but really comes down to this idea that in any given moment, like I said, we can be in go mode or flow mode, receive mode.

Now, in the work I do, we often call that masculine and feminine. Some people call it alpha and omega, you call it yin and yang. There's lots of different ways to talk about this. And whatever labels you want to use doesn't really matter. It's about the energies underneath them which are universal. And so this idea of fluidity when it comes to polarity is we used to have these rigidly set expectations, some of which were born of biology, many of which were born out of culture, of what masculine oriented people and what feminine oriented people are supposed to do, right?

If I'm born in a man's body, I have to be masculine all the time. If I'm born in a woman's body, I have to be feminine all the time. And in the polarity world, there's. There used to be some rigidity around that, right? That if you're a man, you got to be like this if you're a woman, you got to be like this. All of that is getting blown up right now. And I think that's for the best. And fluidity, when it comes to polarity is this idea that in any given moment I can get a sense of what is the most important energy for me to bring to my relationships, my interactions, the people I'm with, in order to serve honestly, just love and consciousness.

What is going to bring the best forward of my environment, of my friends, of my family, of my lover. And so being able to shift back and forth, which for us men again can be a big challenge because sometimes, yeah, we need to be able to get shit done and hold space for others, but then be able to shift to being inside our bodies, being inside our feeling state, expressing some of that emotional content we talked about in emotional fluidity, that would be us shifting more into our omega, into our feminine state.

And we need both. All human beings have both of these capacities, both of these energies inside of us. And what makes us valuable these days is not that we've just mastered one, but that we have a capacity to fluidly move back and forth between the two as needed, based upon the moment. And as we can cultivate that, particularly in long term relationship, it allows us to keep the fire alive in our partnership in a way because we can't always just be playing one side.

There's always going to be a time and place where we need to reverse or we need to play the other side, so to speak, so our other part, our partner, can step forward into a different energy. Learning to cultivate that fluidity, I have found when it comes to these polar energies of masculine and feminine, actually increases our capacity to appreciate the other one as well. So the more I have developed my inner world, my feeling state, my flow state, my omega, my feminine, whatever you want to call it, the more I have cultivated that and appreciated what it means to hand over the reins in the moment, to trust someone else, the more I can actually have more capacity as a leader.

For how I can support her or create an experience for us. Other times that's giving the reins over to her so she can handle something that frankly, she might just have more capacity at, and then I'm going along for the ride. That fluidity becomes so important in a coupledom. It's not the same as just being equal around everything. It's depending on what's needed in the moment. We can play the full range of these energies.

And paradoxically, one of the many reasons I love men's groups is it becomes a place for men to practice fluidity in this sense of sometimes, yes, holding structure and bringing direction to the moment and the relationships, but also having the oh so important experience of letting go of that and being held emotionally, cognitively, and sometimes, yes, physically by other men.

So our inner world can come up and out and we can actually get to the content of that emotional fluidity, which then helps us keep a nice smooth shifting in our nervous system state. These things all work together and are quite related. Fluidity is a superpower that's more and more needed in our modern day society. And all three types of these fluidities can be cultivated, but they must be practiced.

You can't do this stuff cognitively. You actually have to get in there, get on the mat, so to speak, and try this stuff out in an embodied sense. And that's one of the many, many gifts that I think men's work and men's groups can do, particularly for guys, is give us a safe place where we can increase our capacity for all of these types of fluidity. All right, well, I think that's about it for now. If you want some help practicing fluidity in your lives, definitely check out many of the different offerings I have for men at Evolutionary Men.

If you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary men. Apply.