Offensive Love (with Luke Adler)

Luke Adler: Jason Lange: All right, and welcome back, everyone. So very excited to be back again with another episode in our Heart of Shadow series with Dr. Luke Adler here, my co facilitator in the Heart of Shadow program. And we're here to talk about a certain phrase that more and more we're seeing as a way of life and a way to engage with this work that is something we actually explored and kind of emerged in our shadow work group about a year ago. And it's this kind of funny, simple, but I think really potent term of offensive love. And what I love about this term is, yes, offense.

Luke Adler: There's.

Jason Lange: There's that thing we can all think of, of what it means to go on offense, but also offensive. Offensive meaning like in your face, surprising, outside of the norm. And we often think of offensive. I think, at least I do, in like a negative way. But there's a connotation here where what we're being offensive toward is sleepiness, the status quo, closure, habitual shadow, habit and conditioning. And so this idea of offensive love is what does it mean for us men to go on the offense with our love, to not just wait, but to actually come forward in vulnerable ways in our intimate relationships with our relationships with other men, with our families, with our kids, you name it. And so here we're just going to talk a little bit about what we think. This is why we think it's such a cool term, how it showed up in our lives, and why you should care as a man out there.

Luke Adler: There's two things that are surrounding this term offensive love. And you mentioned, you mentioned them both. One is this experience of shock in the sense of the word offensive. And shock, again, like you said, is normally looked at as not a great thing, not good for you, not healthy for you. And it's interesting to highlight that, because what would keep us from being on the offense or offensive and bringing our love and our heartfulness into the world is that we've experienced some kind of shock around our heart. We've experienced that negative sense of surprise, and we wall up, we get protective and we sit back because that's an experience. We instinctually, reflexively don't want to have it. It's usually hurtful when we experience shock, something that we didn't expect happens, that we didn't want to happen, and we just naturally begin to set up not so much boundaries, but barriers to avoid that experience. And so it keeps us from wanting to be on the offense. And to, God forbid, be offensive and bringing our heart really forward. But you just mentioned something that's really great and not commonly associated with shock, and that's the shock of being blown open in a positive way when someone brings a blast or a burst of enthusiasm and love and really seeing you for who you are. And there's a transmission of energy right to the heart, right to the brain, where you get woken up to what's good and what's possible and beautiful and wonderful. And that kind of shock is something that we welcome and is part of this skill, more advanced skill of offensive love. There's being on the offense and then there's being offensive. There's. There's bringing it into someone's field with a, with a. The intention to wake them up. So I'll, I'll set it down there just for a moment that you run with it.

Jason Lange: Wakefulness, I think, is a great way to put this. And right when we're talking about offensiveness, it's important to name what we're pointing to is offensive towards a certain kind of culture or way of being or sleepiness. That, yes, exists at a societal level, but also, you know, as both of us are in long term relationships can exist and emerge in an intimate relationship where there's kind of this patterning, default way of being. You know, what we often call in couples work, like our dance, oh, you do this, I do this, you do this, I do this. It's like as repetitive as you can imagine. Even with all the growth and work, it's like, fuck, I get triggered. Then she does this and here we are again, right? So what we're talking about is offending that saying, you know what? No, no, I can feel all my protection, all my wounding, all my projection as to why it's all your fault. And you know what? I'm just going to slice through all of that. And you know, so many men that come to work with us, one of the many things they want to work with us on is becoming better leaders in their relationship, right? There's so much energy and attention these days and men having healthy masculine and being able to lead. And this is a big part of it, right? It's not just making a plan for what to do with my wife or my partner or whatever. It's. Can I actually lead our relationship into more honesty, vulnerability, truth and relationality, Meaning actually being present with each other right here and now, regardless of all the crap we've accumulated or are afraid of in the future, all that patterning in a way and, you know, this term is so great because, yeah, right, Offense. What's kind of the opposite? It's defense. And right. If we've been shocked before, this is what starts to emerge. We create some kind of defensive system inside of us, right? We're in a mode of protection. And so whether that's not stepping towards a partner, not speaking our truth, there's these different defensive mechanisms that us men, certainly me, have taken on before. Where then it's more like I'm waiting, right? I'm in a defended position, so I'm waiting, maybe tracking what's about to happen, but I'm not necessarily moving things forward in. This is a real theme that came up in our personal group last year of the different ways we were each waiting in our relationship. And what would it mean to boldly not wait, to cut through, to come in, to take the initiative and try something else, to go on offense with our love. And this is not something I was ever trained in. I sure as shit never had it modeled for me in my life. And it's been something I've really had to build capacity for. Another way to think about this, right, is two ways this really shows up in my relationship is just touch, right? My whole wiring system with touch, easy for me to go into neglect, to not need touch, and then to not touch my partner. And if that goes on long enough, bad things happen in our relationship. So for me, going on offense has been learning to move toward touch, even when it's not my habit. And I don't mean sexual touch. I just mean get close to my wife, kiss her, embrace her, hold her, make the effort to walk across the room when we have that three or four minutes between kid chaos and connect. Wow. Hey, I see you. You're important to me. I like you. Something as simple as that, in some ways communicated with touch. That's been a big one for me to learn to go on offense, as is probably the much deeper one of tension, right? Ah, I feel some tension brewing here. Something's going on. Maybe it has to do with me because, oh, fuck, I said I was going to do that thing. I didn't do that thing. Or. Or, I don't know, I just feel something's up with her. And I don't know, my old pattern would be, well, I'm just gonna ignore that. You know, I would treat it like an ache in my body, right? I think something's wrong with my. With my muscle. Just ignore it.

Luke Adler: Just push through it.

Jason Lange: It'll handle itself, right? Like that's how so many of us men deal with our health. And that's how a large part of me dealt with the health of my relationship for a while. Well, I'll just kind of ignore it. Maybe pretend it's not there and then it'll go away. Going on offense has been. Well, a. Yeah, I'm going to go schedule that colonoscopy and just get it done. Right. I was literally did that this year or. Okay. I can feel there's some tension here in our relationship. So I'm not going to wait for her like I would in the past. She would have to hey, da da da da, da, da, da da da da. And then I'd be like, fucking stop nagging me. And instead it's like, hey, I'm gonna step in. Is something going on? Or I noticed we haven't connected or maybe you're mad at me or I'm feeling this and instead we turn right towards the tension. So it's like going on offense into the fray is this capacity that more and more, I think men who really want to succeed in intimate relationship and really any relationship need to cultivate. And I'll close here with then what often gets in the way of that is ding, ding, ding, lo and behold, surprise, surprise, shadow of shit that hurt us from these previous shocks, this previous wounding where we had to build defense mechanisms, where we sometimes are conscious or even not conscious of why we don't go on offense.

Luke Adler: Yeah, the stored pain in the shadow in that repository, that storehouse of everything I just don't want to deal with and feel. It's just there, right? It's there and it's not there. It's not there at our conscious awareness. It's below that. And it's acting as a, as a drag or an anchor in a negative sense. It's slowing us down. And to use the double entendre of the word waiting, like you mentioned, we're waiting, waiting it out. It's also like we're starting to. The more we do that, the more we weigh w a d e we in the heavy, soggy waters that have been unexamined and unexplored within our. Within our body and energetic system. And that's the shadow. That's. That's why you and I have dedicated so much of our, of our healing work towards shadow work. Because you can function in relationship that way without being offensive. But very it not. Is it insidiously? Yeah, insidiously. Slowly. The, the smoldering kind of inflammation of what we've not examined builds and it builds and it builds. And then like you said, the relationship starts to feel heavy. Starts the relationship as a body of, of existence starts to feel sluggish and not inspiring and not passionate. And then that's where we get into these patterns of like just using sex to like discharge all the pain temporarily that's stuck in the shadow, which we won't get into the anatomy of that now. And the relationship doesn't have that spark and passion that hopefully it had in the beginning when there wasn't all the baggage and patterning of not looking at what was uncomfortable, that we never cultivated the skills to do so, which is what we do in the shadow work that we facilitate together in The Heart of Shadow program and one on ones is we teach men how to feel all of those feelings, how to excavate what's been put in the background of their being and build the skills to recognize that pattern. And like you said so beautifully, that's what I used to do. That's what I was taught. Now I'm doing the gritty work of catching it and moving into offense to set a new groove in my brain and a new pattern in my system energetically. And it just actually becomes a new way of being. I'm on offense. I'm detecting, I'm not vigilant, but I'm aware because my priority is love and connection rather than survival and storing my pain. So what that, what that leads to is really at the heart of our work, which is this archetype that we don't cultivate systematically, but it starts to occur over time, which we move from walling up and storing our pain and enduring to the archetype of fire tending or what I like to call the hearth holder. So we're, we're like, we become really skillful at tending all of these beautiful fires in our lives with wrapping the hearth of our care around them. And the thing about fire is, of course, if it burns too hot, it burns out. There's. There needs to be some containment to fire. And then if it's just, you know, embers and it's not really flaming enough, it's not warm. So in offensive love and you know, being, being offensive and being on offense, we're looking to, we're looking first and foremost at what we care about. What in our lives do we really care about? What's the most important thing? And then tending that, well, not too much, not too little, but kind of having our, having our attention on it. And that's the ultimate skill that we build in the Work that, that we teach.

Jason Lange: Yeah. And it. It. You know, what's so great about this kind of phrase and way of being is, you know, we're talking about it specifically relationally here, but this is also just another metaphor for the work itself. So part of the heart of shadow and the shift men make when they step into this kind of shadow work and container is this whole idea of the power of turning toward our pain. So we spend most of our lives, particularly as men, being taught and trying to get away from our pain, away from our shame, away from our grief, away from our fear, insecurity for some of us, away from our anger. Right. And that has all kinds of downstream effects, right? Because like you said, when we're turning away from it, essentially we are kind of, in all the ways you just said, we're waiting, right? We're waiting for that pain to just handle itself, and then we're waiting in the stagnancy of that water and then it's weighing us down over time. Right. I mean, there's so many ways we can rock that out now that I see it, but the turning towards that's going on offense, it's right. Okay. I'm actually, what would it mean for me to consciously, responsibly and at the right pace, turn towards this pain so I can feel it and metabolize it and not be run by it and free myself from it? So it's not just something we're doing relationally, but offensive love is something we bring to ourselves too, right. Of, wow. This thing that's been sitting inside of me, right. And almost every man we work with, whether they've done a lot of work or not, this is what surprises, I think, a lot of people is we often have an intuitive sense of what's in there. We might not know how to get to it. We might not exactly know how to label it, but yeah, there's something in there for me, right. And I've been afraid to go there and not known how to go there, been frustrated because I haven't been able to go there. And going on offense means, okay, I'm going to get support, get coaches, get a group. I'm going to get into the necessary space and conditions where I can go right at this thing so it stops controlling me in a sense so I can free myself from it and build a different kind of relationship with it. And that's going on offense. And the thing about offense, right. Even though in a lot of ways it's often glorified of to be offensive Lineman or on the team or whatnot. There's a way offense comes with a unique kind of vulnerability because we can kind of be in defense for a long time and not open ourselves up, right? I can just wait in a defended position. But to go on offense means I'm actually moving the ball forward, literally and metaphorically here, right? Which means there's a risk something else could happen, right? I might get another shock, I might get rejected, I might get hurt. It's just the nature of what it means to be vulnerable, to open ourselves up to something when it's scary and unknown and uncertain. And it's also, though, what makes this so powerful is a kind of leadership that men and men we work with are continuing more and more to step into of. Oh yeah, there is leadership in vulnerability, in going first in speaking to the truth of what I'm actually feeling or seeing in the system with my wife or in her or with a friend or with a co worker with a kid going on offense. In that way, it is vulnerable because what we're saying is I'm willing to take a risk here with whatever is playing out in service of something deeper. I don't know if it's going to work. This is what makes it so vulnerable, right? When maybe see a partner or a wife and they're kind of in their thing and it's like, oh, my God, I can feel how this whole day is going to play out, right? Like beat by beat, I know what happens. And okay, fuck it, I'm gonna walk over there, I'm gonna pick her up, I'm gonna twirl her and I'm gonna say, I fucking love you. We can do this. She might slap me in the face, right? And be like, ah, no, you know, I don't know any of it's possible, but is it worth the risk? Yes. Because maybe in that 30 seconds, we cut through to something deeper that changes the course of our day, week, month, even year. But it's that willingness to kind of go on offense for the sake of depth and love and consciousness and transparency and vulnerability. You know, things we teach in our program that I think is so meaningful. And, you know, I'll just share that. This isn't just with romantic partners we're talking about here. Like I've said, right? We've seen it in recently in our groups of what it means to cut through the bullshit of how we're supposed to relate as men. And a man you've maybe never even met before, you can say, I love you. And it's a real thing. It's not like fake. It's, holy shit. In going this deep and revealing and being transparent. You know, I was just doing my Labor Day retreat, saw it there as well. Like, there's a way we can cut right through that. And it is a shock to the system of, like, wait, no, this can't be real, or I don't know, right? And then it's like, well, no, fuck, this is as real as it gets, actually, because we're really two human beings and we're here with each other and we're open and we're transparent and we're not hiding. And that, turns out, often opens us to, you know, in some ways, I think what is one of our default states, which is care, compassion and love.

Luke Adler: Like you mentioned, all of this starts within, right? We're waiting because there's a voice inside that says to wait. There's a voice that says, be careful. Don't watch what she's doing. Wait, see what's happening over there, and then calculate my move. And if you're hearing this pod and thinking, wow, this sounds great, I'm just going to try it, or, wow, that sounds really scary to just. Just go on offense. I'm getting. I'm pretty damn good at defense. You know, I'm like the Alabama, or, you know, Alabama under Nick Saban defense. So. But really, what we're talking about is winning. You know, we want to win. We want to win the game. We want to win the championship. We want. The game of life is about love and connection. That's what it's about. That's what we think. It's not about eking by and hoping for a sliver or a crumb of goodness and joy, right? No, it's not. That's actually not what it's about, to be frank. So how do you do it? Well, yeah, you gotta bring that offensive love to yourself first. The care, the warm, the warmth that you didn't get in your nervous system growing up. And, you know, I've noticed recently within myself, I am really good at bringing warmth and love to people. But there's a flavor of it that doesn't actually come natural to me. My mom was incredibly steady and loving and enthusiastic and supportive in her feelings, you know, in. In the way she smiled and looked at me and touched me and Right. Held me. But I don't have memories of, like, of that from my father. I don't have memories of him coming towards me. I don't have memories of him, like, looking at me Eye to eye with a hand and saying, you know, great job, son, or I see you or I love you. And the times that I did hear that, they were. They weren't warm, you know, they were. They were. They weren't clear. They were not necessarily sarcastic, but I guess a little cool. I wouldn't say cold, but more matter of fact. So there's. There's. There's kind of two flavors of offense. There's. There's. And I don't necessarily want to say masculine, feminine, but there's a kind of. There's the love and care you feel from a father, where you feel, like, protected and seen, and then there's the love and care you feel from a mother, which is, like, you know, warm and held. And I guess those are the directions of it. It's kind of this. This heldness that lifts you up. It's a little more masculine, and this. This sense of being held, and you can settle down. It's more feminine. So there's. There's these two flavors of it. And, you know, in my system, I have a deficit around the. The masculine one. So sometimes I. It's actually not familiar for me at all when I see that. And when I see it, it's kind of foreign to me. I'm like. When I hear someone say, oh, I'm proud of you, or, you know, I really want to acknowledge you, I'm like, the. What do you. Like, why do you need that? You know what I mean? Like, it's like just. It's. It's a total blind spot. So offensive. Love is really the landscape of our inner work and how to bring dimensions of love to our own being that we then can transmit. You know, this is a transmission, like we've been saying, and there are really two textures of it. And you may have gotten one, not the other. You may have gotten neither of them. You may have gotten a diluted version of them. But what we do know is they can. When you tap into them, there's a. There is a, you know, a universal current that they're both connected to. And we could say a spirit, a spirited current. And so the more you work on it, the more full and potent they become. In other words, you can't pretend, you know, it's like, oh, I want to be on offense. It's like, good. Bring that to yourself. And really, you know, having a group of men you can template that off of practice with is the dojo, the crucible to build that skill and then bring that into your relationships that matter most. To you.

Jason Lange: And having that community, that masculine love container we've seen is one of the most powerful parts of this. So. Right. You can imagine. Yeah. Like, again, we love to win, we love football, we love metaphors. It's nice to have a team at your side. Right. So when we go out there and take a risk in our relationships with our kids, with our loved ones, with our family members, having a source of love we can come back to is one of the most transformational things you and I have experienced in our men's group. We've now, we've seen in already all eight of the heart of shadow groups we've created and many other work, types of work and stuff we've done for groups. And there is this very unique texture of masculine love that I think is undervalued in our society in a lot of ways. A lot of people don't even know how to name it, and many people have just frankly never discovered it. And the amazing thing we see in our groups over and over again is it's like a fusion nuclear reactor. It's almost unbelievable how powerful it is, how clean burning it is, and how available it actually is when we plug into it. And time and time again, what we've seen is men who come in, who didn't even know what they were missing, and then they experience it. And in some ways it can create a little grief where it's like, how on earth did I survive for 30, 40, 50, 60 years without this? Because it's like seeing. It's like for me, discovering, like, oh, my God, Yeah. It's like half of my engine was off my whole life and everything was a little harder than it needed to be. And then just having this incredible love that's like, I'm here, I'm with you, I see you, I want the best for you, and I welcome you exactly as you are in this moment. I don't need shit from you. Right. Like, it's this unbelievable thing to be in the presence of. And the more we get to experience it, the easier it is for us to give to other people. And it's why it can, you know, steep and deepen so fast in a group. That makes it so powerful. And again, that makes it easier to go on offense, right? Because it's like, ah, if this doesn't go well, where do I have to go back to to get resourced? And that is one of the most amazing things we see in the group where as men get resourced, as men get connected and build safety and trust, it Becomes a lot easier to take risks in life, right? And not like the crazy kind of self endangering risks, but the risks that are really just to go into the vulnerable places we didn't know we could go, to speak our truth in the way we never did, to set the boundary we were never able to set before. To end a relationship, to start a relationship. Oh my God, I'm so afraid of getting lost in something again or picking the wrong partner. Holy shit. I can just go play full out now because I got a team that's tracking me and loving me at the same time that can kind of call me forward on all that and help me update and course correct along the way. And I think part of why you and I are both inspired in our own lives to do this, and I think certainly at the grander cultural level, is I firmly believe we need more men on offense right now, from a loving place, not just waiting for someone else to clean up the fucking mess of the world we're in right now. But men who are willing to come forward, speak to what's really happening, and cut under it in a shocking way. Right? I think that's something that's a huge opportunity for us men to lead in right now at all the levels from the political, the cultural, to the community, to our family, to our romantic relationships, and yes, most of all, to each other as other men to cut right through. Like, dude, I see you, you're being hard on yourself. It's okay, I love you, right? It can change a man's life when we just cut through that with our love, right? That's all we really mean by offense. We're cutting through, cutting through all of that stagnation with our love, care, presence, attention, truth. And it wakes us up and it wakes everyone else up. And then it certainly, if nothing else, feels a lot more alive.

Luke Adler: Safety is paramount around all this and why we practice in a men's group and particularly the way we've designed The Heart of Shadow, is we build in that safety gradually and then trust grows. And then inside of trust, we can practice being offensive. And then like you said, you can take risks in your relationship because you have this container of trusted friends, you know, men steeped in this practice of depth and vulnerability. And then it gets easier to build that resilience to pick yourself up and start again. You learn to flex that muscle of going on offense and then losing the ball and like, oh my, now we're on defense, get the ball again, you know, and so we just learn to get better at all sides of the game, so to speak. So that this is something we have to train. We learn. You don't just get this because someone tells you it. You hear it in a podcast or you read it in a book. This requires training, and as soon as you start to get the context of it, then it's just a practice that gets stronger and you get better and better and better. So heartofshadow.com, you'll learn all about our work. Our next cohort starts in January, and we will be getting that live here in the next, hopefully the next month or so. And we've already got a lot of guys interested, so if you're intrigued by this work, you can book a discovery call, and we'd love to talk to you about it. This is, you know, this is. This is the work that Jason and I care most about. And it's also our sense of how we can serve the planet the most. Because as Jason said, as Jason and I say often, you know, this, we need men who can lead with love. Absolutely. With. With being offensive, with getting on offense, with waking people up to what's to who they really are, you know, so join us. Join us in our cause if you're feeling called to it. It's, you know, obviously needed.

Jason Lange: Yeah. And I'll just close with the other thing I've noticed about this spark, this wakefulness, this offensive love is. It's often contagious. So as we bring it forward, it enlivens other people who then bring it forward and it radiates out. So it often impacts even more than just who we're bringing it to in pretty profound ways. So if you want to go on offense, guys, we'd love to have you on your team. Our team. So reach out and till next time,