Shadow Work for Better Sex (with Luke Adler)

Jason Lange: All right, everybody, and welcome back. Super pumped to be once again joined by Dr. Luke Adler. Here, my brother at arms for the heart of shadow. Hello, sir.

Luke Adler: Hey, brother. So happy to be here. Let's do this.

Jason Lange: And we're here to talk about a fun one, guys that tends to get a lot of clicks and listens. So shadow work for better sex. You've been listening to this podcast, Luke's podcast. You've heard us talk a lot about shadow work and might be wondering, how is that going to help me in bed? Well, turns out there's actually quite a few different ways, and a lot of it is not necessarily what men tend to think about when they think about, oh, having better sex. It's some kind of technique I have to master. It's some kind of breath, it's some kind of touching her in the right space. Things that, you know, I know I certainly fell into the developmental trajectory of at some point in my life that I was like, oh, if I just do, you know, this, then this, then this and then it's all good. But we're, we're going to be kind of exploring some of the deeper things here of what's really going on with sex and how it is often very connected to our shadows and our shadow material inside, including not only performance, but also connection and just what it means to share an intimate moment with a partner.

Luke Adler: This is a place a lot of men have sex on their mind often, you know, it's something that they're thinking about, they're wanting, they're maybe unconscious. Unconscious about how much they think about it or. A lot of men feel self conscious about sex. They're not sure. They question their performance, they question whether, you know, their partner enjoys it. Maybe there's some sexual dysfunction, stuff like erectile dysfunction or kind of miss syncopated orgasms or premature ejaculation or just different issues around sexuality and sex and being able to enjoy sex. Some men really approach sex with a goal orientation. Like the goal is to satisfy her, the goal is to satisfy me, or to kind of entertain some kind of sexual fantasy I have around pornography. Kind of be in the lane of objectification. Whether it's I'm objectifying her or objectifying myself or kind of a mutual Objectification. And we're not necessarily saying any of that is bad per se. But what we do want to highlight here, particularly in the context of shadow work, is that the vitality that we experience in our lives is directly related to how our sex life is going. And let me put the dots closer together. The only reason we're here biologically is because of sex.

Jason Lange: Right.

Luke Adler: That's the core thing that we're here to do, is to procreate, perpetuate the species. It's just automated into us. We don't even have to try. I'm looking at my prepubescent daughter and people in middle school and remembering my time there and how all of a sudden, all of the sudden, I don't know if it was this suddenly, but within weeks or months, all of a sudden I'm looking at girls in a different way. And we have all of the story and narrative and religion around the propriety on how we're supposed to behave around attraction. The truth is we're just attracted. We're attracted biologically to keep us going. And then our wounding and pain gets overlaid, kind of embossed onto our sexuality. And then we start to not feel the flow of our vitality and our sexual drive in a. In a natural way. It becomes kind of thwarted, it becomes made wrong by lots of religious. Religious movements. Education and school kind of tries to bring science into it. And there's not a kind of easeful way to look at our sexuality and look at sex and begin to experience it in a healthy way. So that's what we're going to get into today. How does shadow work help us free our sexuality, our sexual energy, into a place where we feel vitalized by it, where it's healthy. And shadow work absolutely does that. We've seen it in our own lives and with so many people we've worked with. And we're going to get a little more specific now.

Jason Lange: Yeah. And, you know, there's some pretty unique things I think we've talked about before, but, you know, we can just cover again here around specifically our sexuality as males and how we use it and what it gets used for in a lot of ways. And, you know, one frame you've talked about that I really appreciated and has really stayed with me is this idea of, you know, female bodies have a monthly cycle. Right. Of building up and releasing that tends to have a correlation to a certain type of emotional process with it as well. So. So there's a biological process that kind of mirrors a certain emotional process for many Many women. And you know, there's more and more research coming out that men also have cycles. It tends to be more within a day of when our testosterone peaks and when it crashes and all that kind of stuff. But just this idea that we don't have a monthly release, right? Men don't have a monthly kind of natively built in release mechanism in quite the same way. So what tends to develop for a lot of men is ejaculation becomes one of our primary emotional release tools. Right. We were just talking about this on our recent retreat, right? This, this phrase, you know, I grew up with. And then it's just really hit me as we've been continuing to get into this deep work of oh, I got to get off, I didn't need to get off, gotta get. What does that actually, oh, I have to get feelings off of me is generally what it means. I have this tension inside me and I want to get it off. I want to get off this tension. And that tension can sometimes just be sexual. But part of what we're going to talk about here is often it gets interwoven and intertwined in ways many men don't even realize with all their emotional and sometimes physical tension, right. If I need to release that to free myself. And because of our culture, so much gets bound up in terms of our sexuality, our worth as men. We feel shame, performance, like it's all there. Are we even having sex? Again? So much gets layered in there and then pushed down, really driven deep inside of us in a sense. And then we often forget what the original thing was. We even pushed out. And so shadow work, you know, really in a lot of ways we've talked about, is that process of bringing things into the light, bringing them into our consciousness. And for many, many, many men, so much of their sexuality, whether it's with a partner, whether it's porn use, whatever it is, is kind of kept in the unconscious, in the shadow. It's not something we definitely talk about, right? Whether it's religious reasons or family reasons, we gotta pack all that stuff down and keep it generally in a place of shame. You know, I would say we mostly live in a Judaic Christian country here in the United States. And one of the big contexts of it is, yeah, sex is just for procreation and it's not something you should celebrate, right? That's essentially one of the transmissions of a large part of the meaning making system that pushes our country forward. And guess what? That has a lot of downstream consequences for what happens with sexuality. And it's not even just there too. Right. You and I have been in the transformational world a long time and basically name any kind of transformational or spiritual community and you'll find someone at some point who was mucking around with sexuality either because they stuffed it down too far and so it comes out sideways, because guess what? It is a human part. We have to deal with it, or they don't put any boundaries or limits around it.

Luke Adler: Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that. I want to name two things now for us to riff on. One is one is releasing sex from the obligation to make you feel better, and then two is taking charge of your charge. So we'll get into that. But I want to touch on what occurs in a transformational community, even religious communities at certain level of power in those communities. You can see that across different church organizations or more kind of new age spiritual organizations, meditation organizations. When you're starting to do deeper spiritual work and, and run the. The vital spiritual currents through the body, they interact with our sexual centers and they're there to enliven that part of our being. So if we put dogma around it that says something's wrong with this, or we go the opposite way and say we need to become hypersexual. What we're missing is the insight and integration that shadow work enables you to do. And I definitely can speak from this, from my upbringing of being part of a spiritual organization for my entire life and then doing shadow work. It wasn't until I started doing shadow work where I uncovered that the specific nuances of wounding that I had been living with inside of my Persona and personality structure. Shadow work enabled me to see that the meditation work allowed me to feel connected to God, to divine, to the universe, but it. It didn't have the technology inside of it, the psycho spiritual technology, to help me understand why my body was doing what it was doing, Right? And so that's where spiritual organizations really start to falter and fall apart, is inevitably, as you and I have commented over the years, you see spiritual leaders just totally out of integrity with students around sex and, you know, cheating on their partners, having sex with multiple students, just totally out of the norm that we agree to in society. And the bigger issue there is that there's no context around it. And clearly it displays a lack of inner work. And that gets into a sticky ground, which this podcast isn't about, which sometimes we see a spiritual leader do something like that and we think. Which I think is an absolute travesty, but they're Doing that to wake up this person's consciousness, and that is just absolutely malark. It's malarkey. You know, it's bullshit. It's totally gross to think that way. And when I read things like that in different traditions, that the teacher is there to awaken, and they're doing. They're yelling at the student or they're being abusive, or they're sexually manipulating the student for their up, you know, up leveling of consciousness. I just think, wow, this organization has gone off the rails. Like, this is totally not okay, you know, And. And it comes back to, I'll just touch on it and then pass it to you. Jason, the. This idea of taking charge of your charge. If you're not in charge of your sexuality, which means you're not fully aware of it, which ultimately means you're not in touch with your wounding and trauma, it will take over. It will take over in some context. It'll show up in your sense of your interest in the kind of sex you're interested in, your predilections around pornography, how you get triggered and what you get upset by. And shadow work is about reclaiming your charge. Not controlling it, but becoming fully aware of what has kind of kinked up your energy, what has kinked up the hose of your being and has limited the amount of flow and power through your mind, body. Shadow work takes that knot, begins to unravel it to free up the river of your life, the vitality of your mind, body, the blood flow, the nervous system energizing. And you start to become. Become more responsible and more enlivened by your sexuality. Essentially, sex is freed up.

Jason Lange: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you. You kind of named it. And we have this two parts to dive into here of, you know, a liberating sex from the burden of making you feel better. And this is one. I really want guys to just sit for a minute. What would that mean? Right? If. If sex's job. If the job of sex in your life wasn't to make you feel better, what is it for? Right? Oh, it was just appropriate then, okay, that's. That's one spot. But that's often the frame a lot of men are bringing to sexuality, that this is the place I go to to feel better. And so often, you know, in a lot of the work I do with men around relationships and whatnot, it starts to get bound to. I actually need sex. I need sex to feel better because I haven't necessarily, through some of the work we've done, developed the tools and awareness to really get clear about what's going on underneath. And when we have a need for sexual. I could tell you guys that transforms the feminine in particular's experience of you. They feel you needing sex. He's not going to feel okay unless he has. Sex tends to decrease the trust the feminine has in men. And, you know, this eventually ties right into the take charge of charge thing. But it is also tied into why for so many men sexually has so much performative ranking associated with it. Of, right, If I'm not good in bed, I'm not a good man. If my dick's not as big, I'm not a good, you know, a strong man. And there is this thing that a lot of men get stuck in around sex is tied to an objective of I want to feel better and I need, you know, best case scenario, it's not even true for all men. I want to make her feel better, right. I want to give her pleasure. And if I don't, then da, da, da, da. This starts to mean things. And while that's important is that's really the root oftentimes of performance pressure format, which is a real thing and something that is heavily distorted by our pornified culture. Right. I've worked with a lot of guys who, you know, the expectation is I should be able to get hard in an instant and stay hard as long as I want because that's what I see in the porn videos, right. And they don't show them cutting to the other scenes of guys getting injections and fluffed and all the stuff that it takes to often perform that long and that because of this performative element. Yeah, there's so much pressure put on men that does often cause either Ed, like, can't get it up or they ejaculate too soon. Different men that we've both worked with and where this again, starts to tie into shadow work that I think a lot of men don't realize is our sexuality as men is so unique in that how it actually works is it's a really unique blend, right. Of sympathetic activation and parasympathetic activation. So for the blood vessels to actually open, you have to be relaxed, right? So your system actually has to relax enough for your blood vessels to dilate and for the erection to come. So it's a parasympathetic state that allows the blood flow to come and get us into that more aroused state. But a lot of guys miss that, right. And why that's important is what helps us feel relaxed, Safety, being settled in ourselves. Things guys Often don't necessarily one to look at of, wow, I'm actually in this relationship with a partner, and I don't feel fucking safe with her, right? She comes at me, she attacks me, she digs me or whatever, or we just haven't established some kind of safety here or a previous partner. This is one, you know, I've worked with a lot of men on. Did kind of drill into me because I came too soon or I couldn't get. Couldn't get hard. And she mocked me for that. So now my system is on guard against that with any sexual interaction. And I'm not feeling safe. And I don't know how to talk to her about that. And because I can't talk to her about that, I feel even less safe. So there's all this anxiety that comes up in that. Shadow work is one of the paths to connection and safety. Right inside of ourselves, feeling settled in ourselves, realizing if we don't get it up one time, that's not the end for our relationship in that as long as we can stay connected, it's usually not a problem for most partners. But what tends to kill it is what we. How we respond. I remove myself from connection because instead the shame steps forward and shame kills connection. That's really kind of one of its main things. And that all of that then underlies this idea of, you know, we're using sex to feel better about ourselves, that to make our partners feel better. And one of the major shifts, you know, I've worked with a lot of men with and had to even make the shift in my life is okay, if sex is not about that, how does you know when it's really working for me, at least it becomes a way to express the connection I'm already feeling. So I'm already feeling connected with my partner. And this was something that totally blew me away. You know, my experiences with my wife where I had all these stories about, you know, what turns a woman on. And usually they were more pornified stories in a sense. But what I found over time is actually vulnerability, transparency, getting real and raw. Sometimes that's around conflicts, sometimes that's around sharing shames or fears or whatever often would instantly ignite our systems. And why would. Because suddenly we'd be feeling very connected. Very, very connected. And then the impulse was not to just get myself to feel better. It's like, this feels great, and I want to share that with you. I want to use this as a means to express the connection with you, which is a whole different game because then there's nowhere to really get. Orgasm's a great, you know, byproduct of that, in a sense, but it's not actually the goal. Expressing the connection is the goal. And that tends to change things. And shadow work, you know, is a big part, I think, of what creates the bedrock to even have those types of connecting conversations and learn how to be transparent and vulnerable and share what's happening inside in those moments to create that kind of connection. Which is, again, just one type of.

Luke Adler: One of the adages that we use in shadow work is that it's not that there's anything wrong with you or that something's diseased or pathological in your system. I mean, there may be some kind of diagnosis, but what we're talking about is more energetics. And the adage we use is that you're not sick. You're cut off. You're cut off from your vitality. You're not connected into the core nature of your vital force, your spirit, the living, vital energy that flows through you. Now the question is, where. Where am I cut off? How am I cut off? And if we look at. If we look at sex and sexuality and our experience of sex as a barometer for our health in general.

Jason Lange: We.

Luke Adler: Can see that the distance sometimes between your head, your brain and your penis, your lower head, sometimes can feel like it's just miles apart. Like, if you're looking at sexual dysfunction, things like Ed and Miss, syncopated orgasms and other issues. Often men who are experiencing that are experiencing pain and frustration and truly a sense of being cut off. They look down at their penis and they're like, why aren't you working? Why isn't this working? And of course, they're speaking from their brain, from their headquarters. And the first place that embodiment needs to occur is your heart. It's kind of this upper circulatory center. And the. The. The experience of the heart really is to say it's the first orientation of getting into a healthier place around our sexuality is to feel. And then the question arises, will feel what? And this is where we start to connect into what's. Where we're cut off, where we're stuck, where we're kinked up. And this is why, as you're saying, vulnerability and transparency are so important. Whatever we think is going on is not the right answer. It's not the place that's going to take us to connection and to vitality. The only way that we regain that functionality and vitality is by feeling the stuckness generally in Our abdomen, generally down in our digestion. That's where we're formulating all the narratives. The first and foremost narrative is, something's wrong with me. I'm fucked up. Something's wrong with you. My childhood was amiss. I suck financially. I can't do anything right. Why doesn't my body work? And it's just this incessant, analytical, critical, doubting voice. And we say the word voice, but it's really an energy that's constrictive somatically. It creates tension around the digestive process. That's the stomach, the spleen, the small intestine, the large intestine, the liver, gallbladder. All of those digestive mechanisms start to get slow. They get inflamed. Our diet changes because we're stressed and we're trying to eat foods that numb us out more. And we're just kinked up. We're cut off from feeling all the things you just mentioned. Shame, grief, anger, worry. And that just gets right in the middle of our sexuality, which is that lower center of the body and our ability to connect, which is up here in the heart. It's that place in the middle where we're just. We're just angsty about our life and we can't experience the vital flow from the lowest part of our body up to the highest part of our body. And religion gets in there. Childhood parenting views around sex gets in there. These really hardwired viewpoints on what's permitted, what's not permitted, what's a good boy, what's a bad boy. And the other end of it is the guy who doesn't look at porn, but he's so rigid around what. What is good. It's the same tension. It's the same kind of tension. It's just brought on by a different belief system. So they're seeing the beliefs, but shadow work, really effective shadow work, which is what we facilitate in heart of Shadow, enables men to start to feel into those accreted layers of shame, disappointment, criticism, doubt that live right there in the gut. That bloated gut that we get in our 40s if. If we're not really work, doing the work.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I think that's a great way to phrase it here. You know, not interesting word in a sense. But yeah, when you think about that flow like you talk about. Right. Our. Our center column is in most traditions, where we talk about the movement of energy and where we feel most deeply and it goes right from our sacrum all the way up to the base of our head. And the term we use all over our culture is, I stuff it down, stuff it down, stuff the food down. I stuff the feelings down. It's like, okay, down where is often what we're talking about here. It's not like we don't stuff it in our fingers usually, and we don't stuff it even an upper head necessarily. But, you know, even just the energetic of, you know, pushing something down is often what launches you up. And so as we stuff shit down, we're launching up into our heads in a big way. And the two major places we certainly see. I know I certainly have been in my life kind of constipated in a sense, are in the digestive system, right around the gut area, but also then around the heart, right, the heart, where there's not emotional content flowing. And learning to create movement in two of those areas is part of what we're talking about here with shadow work. And when we don't have the tools to help those things move when they're not feeling well, that's when a lot of men will turn to sexuality to create a different energetic. So I can get that feeling off of me, right? I can. I could feel some kind of pleasure here initially, which then burdens sex with that job, which is very different than the job I was talking about, which is as an expression of connection and vitality and creative life force in a lot of ways. So shadow work, what it allows us to do is actually start to unclog, you know, the energetic pipe around the heart, around the gut, around safety, around belonging, around our power, our voice. All of that is tied in here. And, you know, we've worked with men who just. The challenge of voicing desire, right? It becomes a huge shift in their sex life to, wow, yeah, you know, like, I want to fuck you right now. Right? Even to someone who they are committed to, that loves them, that wants that, it can be hard to voice that because of emotional content or feelings of unworthiness or different things like that. So this is one of those things where, yeah, we're not getting in there and teaching a man how to have a longer orgasm, but to actually be able to move desire from his balls all the way up through clear pipes, so to speak, and come out the voice is a powerful, powerful move. To actually speak that in some sense and to be okay with that and not collapse into shame around that, but also not then have that. That spoken word be attached to a whole bunch of need. Meaning, I need that because of all this doesn't feel good. And I Need you to make me feel better, mommy. I mean, it's kind of hardcore, but there's a way we can sometimes use sex like that. It's like, give me the nipple, I want to feel better. Versus kind of what we're talking about. This, this higher order, energetic in that, you know, the, some of the ways we've seen this in men is not feeling in their power, feeling shame around their sexuality in a sense. Because, you know, the, the best version that we tend to promote is, you know, our sexuality as men is. It's just our creative life force.

Luke Adler: That's it.

Jason Lange: It's the part of us that, yes, wants to create actual life, but also wants to create the life we want to live. And when we as men don't feel like we have the ability to impact the direction of our life, to create the life we went, there's often this deep sense of powerlessness and then that, guess what? That shows up in our desire, capacity, confidence to fuck, in a sense. But as we do the shadow work of, hey, what's getting in the way of me creating the life I want? Right? I can't set boundaries or I'm afraid of this, or I have no support in my life. You know, so many different things. Um, men start to feel more empowered. They actually get in touch with their power. Right. We, we recently wrapped a retreat and it was beautiful. One of the men we were working with, he didn't really come to us to work his sex life, but we saw him connect to his creativity, his power, his vitality, his voice, his healthy anger, his boundaries. And he went home and he reported back, I've been having the best sex of my life. Like I feel much more connected to myself in that way. And I'm able to express all of that energy I touched into with the group and on the retreat now with my partner able to bring that life force forward. And that's one of the huge just benefits and gifts of like we're saying, this shadow work to liberate our sexuality from just making us feel better, but instead becoming a vehicle of transmission for our creativity in life.

Luke Adler: Yeah, the, the other side of doing the deep work onlines for men, really a level of agency and power that feels pretty foreign because you can't fake it. You can't fake vitality. You can't pretend to be enthusiastic and actually maintain it. We're talking about embodied power. Power is a dangerous word. And in society, because power is misused all over the place ad nauseam throughout history. Shadow works about conscious loving, integrous compassionate power. It has enough room. It creates enough room within its context to allow power for me and power for my partner. So there's an awakened quality to it when we work our pain and work our wounding and make enough space to feel what. Once we experience this contradictory in our mind, we start to discover we're able to hold multiple perspectives. We can hold the wounded part of our nervous system from our childhood that had a lot of distrust for maybe a certain parent feeling that part of ourselves that maybe is shut down, that wants to retract, that has a kind of a void and attachment style and feel an agentic part of ourselves that can be loving and compassionate and present and kind of boundary setting around the kind of love that it needs, we need to have around us to feel safe. Porn culture in general is very superficial. It's about a power over or power under. So if you look at a lot of pornography, you'll see these dynamics. You'll see someone who's submissive, someone who's domineering. And sex pretty much plays out along those lines. In any kind of sexual fantasy, there'll be a power dynamic where one person has it, one person doesn't. What we're really pointing to is shared power because sex is so powerful. Often I see men who, you know, they're so overwhelmed by it. Like you said, Jason, it's hard to even speak out loud what one wants to experience, because the nature of sexuality is raw, vital power. It's the one place built into our physiology where we start to experience transcendence. You can experience our connection to life beyond physiology, in the pleasure of sex, in the orgasm of sex. And so it can then get relegated, if it's not handled with enough awareness, to the domain of addiction. I'm addicted to porn. I'm addicted to sex. I'm addicted to how that experience gets me away from my pain. What we want to offer you men out there is if you actually bring your pain into the forefront and work it in a deep, comprehensive way with the love and care of skilled facilitation and another group of men, you start to gain the capacity to free up that inventory. And then sex becomes this domain of a whole new possibility of connection. You're freed up from looking at women as objects to express your lack of power in life and work out your power dynamics from your early childhood conditioning. And then your partners, be it male, female, or wherever on the gender spectrum, become true partners in life. People that you can collaborate, that you can share pleasure with, that you can be open and upfront about what feels good and what doesn't feel good. And there can be this flow around that part of your life. If it's flowing there, it can flow everywhere. It can flow through finances, it can flow through philanthropy. It can flow through expressing your care for the people in your life. It can flow through your capacity to be with loss and to be with death and to be with some of the really difficult, painful parts of life. So this is really at the heart of deep shadow work. Working on sex, working on sexuality. And inevitably, it comes up in the heart of shadow. Devote some time to working on it because it's so important. It is the deepest part of our physiology, where we store our pain energetically. Just emphasize this point in terms of vital substance and visceral. Visceral pain. A lot of that gets stored in the digestion. Energetically, though, where the gravity, the weight of our pain ultimately settles into is our reproductive system for men and women. Into the uterus, into the ovaries, into the testicles, into the penis. The weight of that pain, it settles down to that lower part of our pelvis. And it's why, when we look at sexuality, our sexual function, what we're drawn to, we will directly see a physiological correlation between the health of that region and our condition. Pain and wounding and trauma.

Jason Lange: Yeah, And I think that really goes into what you're talking about here. What you named is this idea of taking charge of our charge. It is one of the greatest things we can do to actually liberate ourselves as men, where a lot of men feel victim to their sexuality and their drive, and they have to get rid of this feeling. What we're talking about when we say taking charge of it, is learning to work with it and direct it, in a sense, consciously, right? Where it doesn't have to be the enemy. It can be this place that helps us create flow in life. And, you know, I often, with guys I'm working with, use the old example. There were these mgm Tex Avria cartoons, you know, God knows where I'd watch them growing up. But, like, Droopy Dog and stuff. And there was the wolf. There was the wolf. Most of us probably don't even know why, but there's this image, right, of the wolf seeing the attractive woman. And his mouth just drops, his tongue rolls out, his eyes bug. And he's completely overtaken by the desire, right? His charge takes him over. And even, you know, some of them get even crazier where then he's, like, hitting himself with the mallet and, like, it's just too intense, and he's trying to knock that out of himself. And what we're talking about here is the capacity to learn to work with the energetics of our desire to create and. And flow and not have to constrict it and not have to overindulge it either. In that that energy is actually the gateway, like you said, to some of the deepest work we can do. And this is something we do consciously work in the heart of shadow program, where we do some deep work around sex that leads us to the deeper energetics that are actually often underneath a lot of man's fantasies, desires, sexual kinks or woundings that all get to be there. But when we understand the energetics underneath, it's actually a lot easier for us to start to work with the energy we want in our relationship without it having to be constricted into this very specific form embodied in a porn or sexual act or something like that. Or at the very least, it allows us to bring that forward to a partner. But talk about what's actually underneath it, which is way more inviting often to partners to, oh, yeah, okay, there's some part of you that's wanting to be nourished in this way there. And learning to not be at the whim of our sexuality in that sense is so liberating. Right? There's a reason, you know, a lot of these traditions, one of the highest order states is when you can conquer orgasm as a man, right? When it's, oh, I can ejaculate when I want to. That creates a lot of freedom for men around their sexuality and their ability to express it. And it's not that you have to get there as a man to have a thriving sex life, but what we're talking about is using shadow work, we get to get into what's really underneath often all of the drives in our sexuality, the wounding, the kinks, the desires for power, whatever that might be. And we can really start to liberate ourselves as mental and get those needs sometimes met in other ways, which then allows sex to be what sex is. It doesn't have to be doing all this other work, so to speak, like we said, including just, you know, being what makes us feel better and that, you know, again, it's such a potent gateway because so much of our identity gets tied into our sexuality. How effective we are, how good at it we are, how much we're getting getting of it. And the more we can directly just go to those wounds, in a sense, the less sex has to be responsible for doing all that. And shadow work is one of the most potent ways to get there that we've seen, right? To really often get into these core emotions, which, you know, there's an infinite variety. But what we often tend to see in guys that we work with are some of the big ones, right? Anger, fear, shame, disgust, right? These are often big ones that us men, grief, don't know how to work with. And the shadow work is going to help us, take us there to learn to work with that. And then sex doesn't have to be responsible for moving those emotions or numbing us from those emotions anymore. And frankly, it can get a lot more fun in my experience, right? Where I can actually talk about these different things, pieces of shame I've had around my sexuality or feelings when I'm emotionally connected and all that's flowing through me, turns out I'm much more sexually attractive to my partner as well. Lo and behold, right? When I'm not emotionally constipated and I'm not holding all this stuff in my gut and my nervous system is relaxed, partners want to be close to that, right? They want to be close to a nervous system that feels relaxing to be with sexually and not full of, you know, previously I was either really numb or just full of tension. It's like, who the fuck, I don't want to get around that, right? Keep me away. And so, you know, again, this is kind of a paradox in the sense that it's not the direct avenue to better sex that a lot of men consider. Sometimes it is, right? I just have this massive performance anxiety, whatever. But learning the skills to work with deep emotional content and wounding inside of ourselves and really learning the process of how to be transparent and vulnerable and reveal while staying in connection, those are madly important skills that then do actually translate exactly into the bedroom. And the more relaxed and in contact with our own emotional experience we are, and as I tell a lot of men, the less we fear our own emotions, guess what? We become a lot less terrified of them in our partner. And if you want, if you have a feminine partner in particular and you want to really see her lit up sexually, you create a safe space where she can emotionally express during sex with her body. So it's not just the sexy looking orgasm, but it's the tear feared one fueled one, or it's the rage fueled one. You are going to get a lot more energy from your woman. Like you're just scratching the surface if that hasn't been tapped yet. But you have to have capacity to Be emotionally present and to have cleared as much of the shadow material in yourself so you can be present with that in your partner. And it works, right? We have seen more and more men that work with us connect to this sexual vitality inside themselves and start to have better sex and start to even be able to talk about sex with their partners in a way where they're not just collapsing in fear or shame or coming at them so heavy that their partner feels like, ah, you got to get away from me. But instead, there can be this much more relaxed, connecting sense to things.

Luke Adler: Really, the breakthrough that we've discovered, we thought it would work, but we've really proven it now, after running Heart of Shadow for three, going on four years, and then our own men's group for eight, nine years, is that the power of a men's group over time becomes a vehicle for transformation. But it also becomes a vehicle, in a very practical way, of a place for men to share their vulnerability, their wounding, their victories, their losses, their challenges. And what it does is it takes up the space and the structure for you to share. Now, here's the nuance. We said we want to release sex from the obligation to make you feel better, but here's where we take it further. In shadow work, particularly in the heart of shadow, we want to release women from the obligation and pressure to make you feel better emotionally. Because who do we typically go to if we have some emotional literacy to share? We go to our partner and we dump all of our woes, all of our worries, all of our complaints onto our partner, feminine partner, female partner, whatever the dynamic is, it's our safe person. We go share that all with her. And that's a beautiful dynamic to have. But if they're the only recipient of your emotional life, maybe them and your partner or them alone, it's too much. It's too much for her to hold. You need a place where you can. You can hold that and get the perspective from a loving, caring man. And that's challenging for a lot of us in almost every generation, because we didn't. Our dads weren't taught to be that. Most adult men now didn't have fathers who were present, let alone present emotionally. So we don't know what it's like to have a space where we can share with vulnerability and transparency and have it be held in a masculine container where you feel safe, you feel heard, you feel no obligation to perform in any way, and you feel uplifted, you feel lifted up by the love and care of masculine presence that's something that your female partner can't give you. She can make you feel safe, she can return you to the space of the womb where you feel totally held. But her love isn't one necessarily that lifts you up unless she brings her masculine energy to you. Which is a lot to ask for women. Women in general, they don't like to be in the masculine all the time. Sometimes they do. But if you're having. If you're. One of the things that kills polarity and kills sex is if your wife has to start to play the role of pumping you up, of lifting you up, of getting you to the interview, of having you believe that you can do it, it's going to kind of neutralize the sexual charge between you. So we want to release women from the obligation of making us feel better emotionally as well. We want to take this teaching even further. And this is what Heart of Shadow does. It does it so well. Establishing and initiating a group of men in depth, vulnerability, transparency, playing their edge, playing at life full on and bringing forward their masculine wisdom and care. It is a breakthrough course that continues to blow my mind every time we run it. And we see a new coherence of 10 men come together. And they're like the perfect kind of coalescence of men that we could never predict that are this remediation they have within them the medicine that each man needs to feel safe, to feel lifted up and to start to live a life that they need. Because we need healthy masculinity, or what I would just call masculinity in our lives if we want to have great lives. And yes, better sex.

Jason Lange: Couldn't say better myself. And so, yeah, whatever it is you're wanting to work through in your life, particularly if it's some kind of sexuality, come work with us. Come join a Heart of Shadow cohort. And you know, I really just want to highlight, to close there that thing you said about part of what happens in a group is you get to feel safe and there's no pressure to perform. Guess what? That's a great setup for fantastic sex. Right? So you can think of that literally in the bedroom. But there's also part of what we're talking about here is what's holding you outside of there that allows you to go into your partnership not feeling pressure and feeling safe in a deep cohort of men will do that for you. We've seen it enough. You and I have lived it enough. It's one of the biggest game changers you can feel in having that place to bring your emotion, your problems, your challenges. That's part of what's going to allow you to unwind tension in your life and feel relaxed. So your nervous system's in that parasympathetic, relaxed place where you get to feel more aroused more easily and have actual energy that you want to express. Right where you're not just so fatigued and tired from trying to hold all the world together, but instead have a place to come to, to find yourself, to get grounded, to feel deeply so you can then go back out into your relationship and really bring the gift that you want to bring and create the experiences you want to create with your partner. So you can go head on over to heartofshadow.com and always on there it'll be talking about when our next cohort is. We're recording this one fall of 2025 here, and we got another one starting in January, but you can really go anytime. We run these twice a year right now, so it is limited in the sense we don't get to work with a ton of men. This is as deep as Luke and I go, so if you're feeling the call, jump on it. It's a profound journey. It's one we are. Luke was often talking about last week is like, I kind of wish I could go on the Heart of Shadow Journey because, you know, as creators, we had a version of this that we templated in our own lives. But, you know, I think we kind of improved it in some ways and offering that to you men here. So we hope to see you there. You can book a call to talk to me as [email protected] if you have questions. And until next time.

Luke Adler: Bye, guys.

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