Shadow Work for Depression (with Luke Adler)

Jason Lange: All right, everybody, and welcome back. Excited to be here for another episode of our Heart of Shadow series with my man here, Dr. Luke Adler. And particularly for this episode, we want to cover shadow work for depression. Right. How this modality that some of you guys who've been following us know, Luke and I are really passionate about how one of the many things it can work in and transmute is this sense of depression. A lot of many, a lot of men carry in their lives the sense of stuckness or hopelessness or just freeze, you know, lack of movement in some different ways. And the ways we've seen as men engage in this work, particularly in groups, that it starts to create some movement again. And I thought one place we could start was, you know, for you to even paint a picture, Luke, of kind of. Yeah. Like, so what is depression? You know, like, what's going on in the body and in the heart?

Luke Adler: Yeah. I mean, the physiology of it is fascinating. There's a few kind of causative factors or vectors that lead us to depression. But like you said, Jason, a simple way to say it is there's just an experience of stuckness in the body. And then the deeper part of that is there's. There's an aspect of being cut off from one's source of inspiration or essence. And so what gets tricky with depression is we say, okay, well, what chemistry could we use to change the hormone profile of this body? Let's, you know, put more of the hormones that make you feel kind of. Well, like. The most known one is serotonin. Let's put those in the hormone pathway in the synaptic cleft, which moves. Moves that hormone through the nervous system. Let's just keep it there, and then you'll just experience a sense of well being most of the time. And a lot of people do report on SSRIs or antidepressants that they don't have the ups and they don't have the downs. They feel like, generally. Okay. And I think that there's a. Definitely a really appropriate place for those medicines when life is just so demanding and so stressful that we just need to be stabilized. Right. So there's a place for that, medically speaking. But let's talk a little bit about the Stuck experience. So the stuck experience is, at least at a physiological level, is related to somewhat to what we're putting in our body. So if we just think about movement and flow, if the blood is flowing and the blood is of a, of a high quality in a certain sense, you're going to feel alive. Now, you might feel sad, you might feel happy, you might feel depressed, you might feel shame, or all of the emotions, but things are going to be moving. Typically with depression, what we see is someone is ingesting and it could be food, it could be porn, it could be media, it could be just the company they keep. They're ingesting kind of qualities that are, that are depressive, that aren't uplifting, that are agitating, that agitate the nervous system. So they're watching media. That's overwhelming. You know, they're hanging out with people and the conversations are depressive. You know, they're, they're not, they're not uplifting. Right. And that impacts the nervous system in a deleterious way. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't lift you up and give you those dopamine, oxytocin kind of hormones, right? It, it gives you, it gives you adrenaline, right? It depletes you. And then if you add in sugar and dairy and gluten and, and kind of high glycemic or fat, fast burning sugars, that turns the quality of the fluid in your body into kind of thicker fluids, which we call phlegm or dampness or mucus. Right? And in the, in the mouth area, in the head, phlegm manifests as actual mucus. In the heart region, it manifests as kind of just a slower, more lethargic kind of mood. And in the bottom of the body, it manifests as urogenital. Urogenital issues. The digest, I skipped the digestive part. The kind of middle of the body is, you know, bloating, gas, burping, indigestion, right? And so you look at that picture and you go, wow, that sounds like a lot of people. You know, one of the big, the biggest syndrome in America today is metabolic syndrome, which is basically what I've laid out. So you have poor digestion, some of those symptoms, you have this adrenal exhaustion where you're just tired all the time. And then the sleep quality starts to go. And then that will lead to more of a chronic picture where you start to have heart function issues, you know, palpitations, more chronic sleep issues, runaway heart rate kind of things. And all of that leads to the biggest Causes of death in America, which is stroke and, and heart attack. So you know, this, this is, this is a huge amount of people in America. This is mostly men, some women too. And it's not just a depressive mood, right. The whole physiology is depressed, it's low functioning, it's not at an optimal place. The second part of the picture which I talked about was this experience of being cut off. And this is a really fascinating consideration. Question is, well, cut off from what? And I use the word inspiration, some might use sense of deep purpose or connection to your essence or your own sense of kind of personal meaning in the world. That is what I would say is the deeper cause of depression. It's not that you're tired, it's not that you have metabolic syndrome. It's not that you have phlegm and you're eating poorly or you're addicted to porn, or you're addicted to whatever it is, marijuana, alcohol. It's that you're cut off. You're cut off from a source of inspiration. You're cut off from this deep, deep experience of who you truly are and why you're here. And that starts to sound and seem esoteric, but I think if you, if we all feel into it, just right underneath the first response, you go, yeah, I am cut off. I don't know my purpose, I don't feel, I don't feel like I have a clear sense of why I'm here, what, what I'm here to do and be in this world. And that is what I would say is really that cause of depression, really. And if you think of the words, you're being pressed down, you're pushed, you're squished, you're compressed into, into yourself in a way that's not expansive and, and doesn't have a quality of lift to it. So I think the best approach for depression is that two pronged approach. Three pronged approach. Of course address the physiology, of course address the diet, medicines if needed, right? But at the same time, to really cure depression, we have to address this experience of being cut off. This core level experience of being cut off from a sense of, of connectivity and meaning and deep, deep abiding love that flows through your body and mind as thought forms and emotions that have. You want to wake up in the morning even if you're tired, even if you're feeling all the emotions that we all have to feel. So I think that's where you and I come in, right? This concept of being cut off.

Jason Lange: Yeah. And for guys, regular listeners in My show, I talked about this recently in an episode of. It's the exact same thing, but instead of cut off, I just said. I just use the words disconnected. And, you know, this kick I've kind of been on of the. The three places men get disconnected. Disconnected from self, disconnected from other, and disconnected from the world. Like, literally nature, the ecosystem, the things we're part of in when we're not connected. That's when I see men the most depressed and stuck, right? And then we. I guess in some sense, you take those conditions and then you sprinkle in where in this information environment that human nervous systems have not yet developed antibodies for, in terms of the level of stress and information we're all having to process. I mean, daily, hourly at this point, in terms of world news, political news, climate change news, like, you know, that wasn't available before. You might, in a newspaper, read about some disaster across the world, you know, a day or two after it happened. And it was kind of far away. But now this stuff is in our face all the time. And I know for me, that can feel overwhelming. Like, what can. I can't do anything, right? Like, and then I'm disconnected, and then suddenly I'm quite stuck and depressed, right? There's, like you said, there's this downward movement, and it's so overwhelming for me, that would show up is I wanted to numb, right? I wanted to numb, numb, numb. And the paradox of that, right? And I think this will tie a few things together for us, is.

Luke Adler: The.

Luke Adler: Yeah, that was a beautiful story, Jason. And I was there for that moment, and it burned into my brain, too, when you did that piece of work. And I reflect on that from my own life, you know, neglect and where I've experienced that and done that. So such a powerful frame. There's a. There's a few things that you shared that were really potent. The connection between anger and expression or your heart, you know, the reigniting of your heart's desire is a direct energetic link, at least in terms of physiology. Those two systems are ruled by the heart and by the liver and gallbladder and the meridian system. The liver and part of the heart's energetics are directly linked. So it's exactly right in terms of physiology that when we touch into our anger, we start to feel the, the, the, the misalignment with what we know to be true and right for us personally. Like for me, when, when we really touch, like, wow, that is true for me, we feel angry at not having seen it earlier. Or if we do see it, we feel, if we do see it in real time, we feel anger. In order to make it right, right in the moment, and in order to make it right, we have to lift up that anger and feel the courage to share it. And that's mediated by fluid metabolism. So we have to move blood up to the, the throat and the heart and the tongue and, and we have to feel it, just like you said. And that's, that is like those are, that's a sequential experience in terms of the body physically and sensorily and emotionally. And um, when we look at depression, just like you said, the experience of being cut off has an origination, meaning it occurred at one point we were not cut off and then we were cut off or we were disconnected. And what you and I are now talking about is what happened? When did it happen? And like you said, with sacred medicines, ayahuasca, psilocybin, etc. I think the real gift in a lot of those is they, a lot of them help you see that moment you got cut off. They, they illumine when you doubted your intuition, when you let the nice guy take over, when you were dominated and didn't have agency to make it right. And other things do that too, like meditation or being with a great mentor or an amazing group of friends have the power to do that. What's really unique about shadow work, and particularly the kind of depth work you and I teach in the heart of shadow, is that you get that experience. You begin to see in an incredibly safe and clear way that moment, that time, that relationship, when you got caught off, maybe you had to cut yourself off because it was just so dangerous you had to leave, you had to dissociate, you had to numb because you were young. And in most cases that is the truth. We had to, because if we had a better choice, we wouldn't have, right? So we got cut off. But then the thing, the, the, the Two things that occur in the Heart of Shadow that are really unique is you experience where you got cut off. You have that purgative experience where you release the tension of that and then you start to gain the insight. And that's the. That's the second part of the work. Third, the third ingredient in what we do. We educate, we do transformational work, and then we train, we do training. And the training part is so important. Like my biggest critique of sacred medicines is that if you don't do the integrative work, then it remains just as a kind of interesting experience that actually doesn't. Doesn't impact directly the quality of your life. So training becomes this really important part of working with depression, because in a colloquial sense, if you don't learn your lesson, you're just going to repeat the lesson. So training is where the group is there to hold us accountable, and we ask for accountability. And then over time, we actually start to shift that behavior. And then depression isn't just something we released once and we feel better. It's something that really stops becoming a phenomenon in our life because we can track the behavior that led us there in the first place, because we've trained it. We have intimacy with the history of our wound and our trauma, so we have compassion for it. And then when that wound comes up again, we have this new muscle of curiosity, compassion, and kindness which we bring to ourselves. And if we can't do it because our inner critic is having a heyday with us, then our men's group does. Hey, hey, hey, hang on a second. Our men's group reminds us of who we are, right? And that's the great gift of the Heart of Shadow is this in per. In perpetuity experience of a men's group. If you choose to really put the scaffolding into your life to keep depression a distant memory. And it's not. I mean, what I'm hoping is that we're laying this out in a sequential way that makes sense because this isn't a miracle. This isn't like it. There is a lot of grace here, for sure. But I want to. I want people, y' all out there to feel like this is doable. There's a pathway here to heal depression rather permanently. It's not instant. It's. It's a process of months and years where you transform and you train over time to get your mind to recognize where we're vulnerable, to repeat the pattern, you know, of. Of depression that settled in from some moment where we had to survive.

Jason Lange: Yeah, it's such a beautiful pathway you kind of paint the picture of. And you, you know, there's one. One step I also want to kind of illuminate that's often healing in that starting to identify it part, which is, you know, the. The beauty of the engine of a group like we're talking about is for some men, it's the first time they've ever actually had someone just be with them in their depression. Like, oh, yeah, it's actually okay for you to just fully be depressed and be in relationship. Right. And we're here with you in it. And a lot of men have never had that experience. Right. Because depression does tend to isolate us. We withdraw. So it's so strong for men and kind of pull away. So step one is often just, hey, you don't have to be depressed alone. Like, I'll sit with you. I'll just sit next to you. I'll listen to you. Or you can listen to me. You know, whatever that is is profound to witness. And, you know, it strikes me too, one of the other things I've certainly experienced and some of our guys have seen is the actual window becomes, fuck. It is so nice to just sit here and be so engaged in someone else's work that I actually get a. Like, it's like a break from my own. And that often starts to illuminate. Like, sometimes guys are like, I don't even want attention tonight. I just. I just really want to be here for you guys. And that actually, to me, is deeply healing. Right. Because I'm just kind of tired of my shit or whatever that is. And then eventually they come back to it. But then there's this, like, joining in and being with that. You know, it's okay if you're feeling down. Not a lot of men are told that, right? Like, oh, you gotta fix it. Yeah, yeah, it's okay to be down. And then often once that joining happens, that's when some movement can start to come. And like you said, it is training, it's skill building, right, to actually learn to bring the energy up and get it out. And this is what, again, we've seen so powerful in terms of facilitation in groups is, you know, certainly for me and for some men I've witnessed, we can't do it alone. Like, let's say it's anger, right? Something that for me was untouchable for a long time. And by doing it in community, sometimes you and I step into this role. Sometimes other men do. We can feel like the vector is There and it's still stuck, right. It's coming up, but you just can't quite get it through the vocal cords or, you know, through his body. And we join in. It's like we start to find the guy in his growl or his roar and then actually deepen it with him. And suddenly there's like his vector can join our vector and like boom, it pops through and then his vector takes over. It's like, oh, now it's fucking moving right now. Something is moving. That for some guys has been in there for decades.

Luke Adler: Yeah.

Jason Lange: I mean, since there were kids even before, you know, in some sense. And that's really hard to do on your own. If I'm like, okay, I'm gonna sit in my, my, my little meditation room here and do my anger work, like, yeah, there's a way you can do it, but it's also very different when someone can actually give you the scaffolding to start moving these things. Which, you know, it doesn't even just have to be anger. Sometimes it is grief, sometimes it is fear in that. Again, what we're really pointing to is kind of at this meta level, the, the cure for depression is movement. It's movement. And often before we can take action on the outside, we need to have that internal movement, literally getting the stuck emotional content moving again, actually circulating through our system where then it can start to be released and metabolized and. Yeah. Does it get fixed in one session magically? No. But does it start to create movement which in itself is so healing of, oh my God, I'm feeling something I haven't felt in a long time. That gives me fucking hope. Right? That's. We see that with a lot of our guys. And then it becomes this process of weaving it in, like you said, to a long term group to make sure we're doing that regularly, in a sense. And when we have that scaffolding, turns out it doesn't get stuck. And it's much harder to get depressed in a certain way. Even if that's just, you know, sharing via WhatsApp check in or you know, doing deep work in person together or doing deep work over zoom. It keeps things moving in once things are moving inside, like I said, we tend to see men start taking bigger movements on the outside. The life around them starts to shift. And for a lot of us guys, it's just terrifying to allow the movement to happen inside because no one ever showed us how to do it healthily or in a mature way or in a responsible way or in a way that wasn't judged as being less than a man or whatever that might be. But it turns out, you know, like we've talked about many times, big part of the heart, O shadow, is all of that stuckness. It's taken energy from you, and when you start to move it, that is your vitality coming back, right? Literally, blood flow starts to come back. We see guys come alive. I mean, it's the great joy of the work of like. Like, you know, this man is reborn in a sense, because there's vitality. And then we help create the structure to keep that going long term, which is, you know, like you said, a lot of what a lot of the medicine communities and other areas just miss that doing it once isn't enough, but creating a regular space to do. You know, in a lot of ways, what we're talking about here is kind of emotional hygiene. It's just like, yeah, you're going to the gym to take care of your body. Where are you going to take care of your emotional body, your psycho spiritual body? And your connection needs and turns out, you know, at least from where we stand, a men's group is potentially the most powerful vehicle for that we've experienced so far, at least.

Luke Adler: I'm glad you mentioned the gym, because I know you live in Boulder and I live in a very active area in Oregon. And, you know, one of the ways that guys will combat, I think combat's the right word, depression, is they'll work out. And so what they do is they'll move the blood and they'll. That will improve the quality of their mood. For sure. You'll get the endorphins going. But when it comes to depression, and I mean, like, state that's really settled into the nervous system. That's a. That is bio. It is a biochemical phenomenon, but it's also an energetic phenomenon that lives in the tissues. It lives in the vascular tissues, lives in the nerves from the brain down to the base of the spine and, you know, throughout the entire body. And it lives in the musculature. It's a. It's a settling in of the moments in life where we lost our sense of self, our sense of expression, our sense of hanging on to what we need to do as a. As an autonomous sovereign being to move through the world in the way that we're meant to move. And so working, even working out, it'll make you feel better temporarily, but it won't cure the depression. It won't release all of that tension that's living in the Body, like you're talking about, we're laying out, we're laying out the condition in which it will be released. So exercise is a good start, but to really address it we need this other phenomenon. And of course, why it's challenging is that if the depression is really there and a man is really distant from his anger, then that means all of the gates of protection of his mind body are, are up. The, the castle doors are sealed and barricaded and there's a sentinel force on the outside that's saying no one's coming in. And that would be the picture of a, of a chronic depression, meaning just. Yeah, there's a flatness there, there's a hopelessness, there's a belief that no one's coming and no one gives a. And it's why in our work, the first thing that we always create is this deep, deep sense of safety. Because if the Jawbridge is drawn and the gates are that tight, then we know there's been so much hurt at the core of this being. This man has been hurt. We don't, we, we, we might not know exactly what happened and we'll, we work to get that information, but the first thing that we're doing is creating safety to see if that man might be willing to lower the Jawbridge. So let, let someone in and, and you and I never have a judgment around, like, how much is like a victory. It's like. But what we do know is that with enough care and love and consistency on, on our end and in the groups which, you know, we really only we, we do screen for Heart of Shadow because we want men who are ready and who want that. And there's a way in which the love and support of the group is strong and potent enough that even a man who's experienced experiencing really heavy depression can start to have this incredible breakthrough of what it feels like to be in a place that's safe. And maybe just that just for that man to begin to feel to some degree that there's a grouping here of men who care is a massive, massive transformation, you know, and often even that man will, will let the Jawbridge down and start to let the love in. And that's the beginning of the cure. That is the ultimate cure. And, and you know, there's plenty of men out there that, you know, they're very high functioning, they're relatively doing well in life in terms of money and maybe even marriage. But that job bridge is bound and they've got the quadruple doors of protection behind it. No One's getting into that castle. And, of course, this is the myth of the macho man, right? No one can bother me. No one can get to me. I am impermeable to, to attack. And the truth is, the body is not built for that forever, right? The body does not last. The body breaks down. And like you said, Jason, the energy it takes to keep those walls up, it. You know, maybe you've got great genes, and you, you come from some part of the world that just, you just can withstand a lot. Some kind of warrior clan is like, okay, good for you, you know, but what's behind those walls is a lot of pain, you know, a lot of, Lot of sorrow and depression and fear and, and there's nothing wrong with that picture, right? But what we're saying is there's another way and there's a path. And, you know, I'd say, if anything, you and I are warriors of, of love, or warriors for men to get in touch with their vitality. We, we love serving people, we love serving men, and we love creating these environments where, you know, there can be this transformative experience of another way, another way forward, you know, and we know that's the case. We've been doing this a long time, professionally and personally, and that it works every time, you know, to some degree, even the most recalcitrant or resistant physiology begins to open, you know, and, like, you have to work really, really hard around us to not have a breakthrough. I mean, you know, and the truth is, if that's the case, like, this is not the right fit for you. Like, if you're wanting to just prove that you're totally unlovable and it's like, you know, we, we're not, we don't believe it. We don't buy it for a second. It's just not the truth. But I do completely honor that that has been a truth for you out there. You know, you've. You've experienced a life where you have not been loved properly. You've not been cared properly for properly. You have been hurt, you have been abused, you have been hit, you have been beaten. You know, these are men you and I have worked with. You know, just saying it's so deeply sad for me that, you know, you and I have witnessed men who have experienced things. It's like, I, I, I didn't. I couldn't even conceive of that, you know, and then watch that, Watch that man heal. It's like, it's, it's hard to articulate. Yeah.

Jason Lange: And as, as we wind down here. I just kind of want to contextualize everything in terms of what we're talking about. That right. This sense of depression. So many men, you know, you and I work with individually in our groups, whatnot are often coming to is, I feel stuck. It's hard for me to feel, I don't know, I don't feel like I have any power to change my life. And there's like a freeze, you know, in a sense, again, even if it looks like life's great on the outside. Right? Yeah. I'm stuck in this 80 hour a week, high paying job because I got three kids in college and I, part of me is frozen in that right. Or the different ways we've seen. But the idea is movement and feeling are the first step. So we create the safety where you allow yourself to start to feel that which likely wasn't safe for you to feel previously or is so overwhelming to even consider in your current moment that like, no, I can't go there. And you know, if there's one thing you and I, I think you've witnessed and even in myself, it's as men, we tend to over index on how intense our pain is. We think, oh, I can't possibly share this with someone else because it's too much. And the reality is often it's not too much for other people. Right. You and I sometimes were like, oh yeah, no, like more, more, more, bring it, all of it, bring it. Like there's so much space when men get together like this and it tends to rewire men. But this sense of, okay, I can start to feel again. And as I start to feel again, things start to get unstuck and things start to get unstuck. I can start to take action again in my life and I feel like I actually have agency again. And there's a lot in life sometimes we don't have control over. But this is the power of shadow work. You always have control over how you're relating to your own experience. So even if the one sliver of movement you can make right now is fuck, I can turn towards my grief, my anger, my disgust, my fear, whatever that is that gets the ball rolling. And when we do it in a group, lo and behold, not always, not only is it deep and fun, but it's healing. And we, we see the other part of the depression cure that I think groups really offer is purpose and belonging. Suddenly we belong somewhere. And suddenly our presence matters. It matters to the men in the group. It matters if I show up. It matters if I'm with them because sometimes my presence is the thing that allows another man to heal, or my doing my work actually unlocks something for another man and that in itself can start to cure depression. We're putting this out. We currently have two spots left for our Fall 2025 Heart of Shadow cohort and we have a great group that's formed so far. So if you're feeling stuck or depressed and really want to move, just get some movement going again at your pace, but with very skilled facilitation and a deep level of connection and brotherhood, just go over to heartofshadow.com and you can learn all about the program, the retreat, see testimonials of guys who have been through it, and know that you can move the ball when you have the right tools and system and community and love. Frankly around you that shadow work can be one of the ways to you unwind depression.

Luke Adler: Thanks Jason. So good to be with you.

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.