In this episode I’m joined by Dr. Luke Adler to explore how shadow work can transform your sex life. We dig into why so many men use ejaculation as their primary emotional release tool and what happens when sex becomes responsible for making us feel better. We unpack the connection between safety, relaxation, and arousal, and why performance anxiety often stems from deeper places we don’t want to look at. We also explore what shifts when sex becomes an expression of connection rather than a destination to escape to. If you’ve ever wondered why “better sex” isn’t about technique, this one’s for you.
Shadow work creates the capacity to feel more, stay present, and stop using sex to discharge what we haven’t learned to process. When we release our partners from the burden of managing our emotional lives, something opens up. And when we have a group of men to hold our vulnerability, we stop needing our intimate relationships to do all that work. The path to better sex runs through your gut, your heart, and the shadows you’ve been avoiding.
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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: 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: 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.
