Shadow Work for Inspiration

Luke: Jason Lange and I are back. Today we're talking about shadow work for inspiration. What's the point of all this work we're doing? This inner work, the shadow work, meditative work, polarity work? Is it to get something? What is the thing that we're trying to get to obtain? Ultimately, it's to arrive us, arrive us at a place of inspiration, a place of true inspiration, not motivation.

Luke: Where we're motivated to keep pushing and pushing past, but a true anchored space, a state, an actual state that's inspired, that moves our lives in the direction of not just what's positive, but what's possible and probable with the right support structures put in place, which is at the very base of our program, the Heart of Shadow, building a support structure for life.

Luke: That increases positivity and inspiration. Now, this isn't something Jason and I talk about often because when we look at the shadow, we're looking at things culturally that we often put in the shadow, like our grief, our shame, our sexuality, et cetera, and so on. But ultimately, at the heart, at the very heart of what we're keeping in the dark, is the source place of inspiration. And today we're gonna dive deep into that. Here we go.

Jason Lange: Yeah, and this is, you know, different than I think we've talked a lot about and people often think about with shadow, because even just in the term, right, we tend to associate the dark, the heavy, the the challenging, the disowned. But, you know, in our program, we definitely do do some work with the golden parts of the shadow, the positivity. But I think what you're speaking about here, I think is really important because I think we should be clear first off.

Jason Lange: We're not talking about like spiritual bypass, okay, just gonna go to joy and bliss and ignore the realities of of life. And we're also not talking about what I call, you know, here in the States, like McDonald's American culture. Hey Luke, how's it going? good, how are you? good. You know, it's particularly, I'm from the Midwest. It's like, it's like a whole fucking thing, right? There's just kind of this.

Jason Lange: It's all, hey, McDonald's, smile. Have have a good day. Even though your soul's like dead inside, right? so it's not that. But here's where I'm gonna start where to maybe to paint a bit of a a picture of I think what we're talking about here. So, you know, we'll do really deep work with guys in our program. And particularly when we go on a retreat and we're all in the same room. Deep stuff.

Jason Lange: Will move and be unsurfaced and be uncovered and released in a man. Often which does have a lot of pain in it. Work on a traditional shadow. But so often, when we're right there in the thickest of the heaviest shit, often something magical will just release. There'll be a joke. There'll be laughter.

Jason Lange: They'll be like crying so hard it turns into some kind of tears, or like there's a transmutation that happens and it doesn't negate the pain. It actually exists right next to it. Of like, wow, now that I'm not being held captive by this deep thing, it's like suddenly the dam has burst and something else gets to f flow right back in.

Jason Lange: And it's it's it's this, I think, that we're talking about here. This this inspiration, this hope, this holy shit, I'm feeling and experiencing something different right now that maybe I never thought I could, maybe I didn't know was possible. And that alone, you know, I'm kind of thinking out loud here I as I go, when I have felt that movement in my nervous system.

Jason Lange: It's actually incredibly invigorating. It's like, shit, the world is not what I thought it was, and it can be different, right? And there's actual movement in my nervous system happening here that

Jason Lange: fills me with, well fuck, if this can start to move, what else can start to move? Where else am I inspired? What the fuck would happen if everybody got to have an experience like I'm having here in the room right now? And it in we see it, you know, literally kind of like fill up a room in a group of men.

Luke: There's something that we work on in particularly in the heart of shadow, which is looking at where your energy is. We use this word kink, like in a hose, a hose that gets kinked up and and blocks off the flow of water. And we think of it, we think of our state as our state when it's impaired is that we're cut off. We're we're kinked up around around our source place of of energy, of vitality is something.

Luke: that we we look at a lot, just feeling good, having energy in your body. And the the shadow is essentially this

Luke: energetic and physiological part of our being where we just stuff things into our body and of course they block they block the flow of of what what is that that's being blocked and that's your life force and your life force when it's open and it's dilated has certain characteristics one is that there's energy two is that there's a direction to that energy and that the nature of the direction and the energy together

Luke: Is inspirational. It's it has an intelligence that wants to move your unique life force, your unique being, your personhood towards something that it's meant to move towards. And that's what shadow work is for ultimately. It's for inspiration, vitality, and directionality. And inspiration is something that, like you're describing, Jason, when you move, remove a block.

Luke: When you unkink the hose of your mind body, there's this like joy, this laughter, this goofiness, this tears that turns into laughter and gratitude, not as a practice, but as a state that that's the nature of who you are. You are a being that is grateful to be here. Now, are you experiencing that?

Luke: No, not all the time, but there's a reason why you're not. It's because there are things in the way. There are things that are blocking it. And that's really the the skill and the technology of the of shadow work and then the program that we put around it. How do you remove these blockages? How do you clear the pipe, unkink the hose in a way that allows for inspiration? The the good news is that that inspiration.

Luke: And that vitality. That's who you are. That's your nature. That's the core of your being. You don't have to pretend to be that or act as if you are that to create that. That can be helpful as a mindset, but ultimately, until the hose is unkinked, we are putting on a pretense of how we might like to be. That depression in the background, that

Luke: anxiety in the foreground. That has to be dealt with. And if we turn our attention upon that kink, upon that blockage, with enough care and attunement, the blockage starts to move. And that's the

Luke: It's not really I to say magic, but it's not. It's the culture that we've created around The Heart of Shadow, where you bring a group of men together within these specific parameters that allows them to, to, to experience the culture, their innate culture, their inborn culture that's different from how they've been acculturated. To be tough, we talk about inspiration and joy, to be humble, to have false humility, to, you know, not.

Luke: not talk about what's good in your life. I notice this sometimes in my own men's group, Jason, you and I are are in the in a men's group, that sometimes I'm like, actually there's a lot that's good in my life. And I'm like, I don't, I won't talk about that. Let me look for the thing that's like more kind of like laden with grief or like anger or like some kind of s sex sexuality thing that just, you know, we become so attuned at looking at

Luke: The parts of shadow that kind of cultural culture deems as not okay to bring forward. But it's also, it's also at a certain level of the work, like, is it okay to talk about what's like really working and good and important without seeming boastful or grand grandiose? Right. And this is like a whole nother skill set that unkinks the host. Look at what's good and realize sometimes insuring what's good.

Luke: In the same way that sharing something about deep grief can it can be triggering for another human being to hear like, wow, you're you're doing really good financially and your relationship's going good. I'm so happy for you. And that contrasts with like my relationship's not going so well. And like, you know, sometimes we we practice this empathic reversal where we're actually trying to protect people around us. We don't want them to feel pain.

Luke: Because of what's good in our lives, right? It's this incredible dynamic. It's kind of codependent meshment that actually keeps the shadow lodged, lodged and stuck in a system. So it's very fascinating.

Jason Lange: And it's it's it's a common experience guys in our groups have, right? Of what you just named, this kind of fear of, well, I I know other people are struggling, so I don't want to celebrate too much because then I'm gonna like make them feel bad. And I shit you not. When it actually happens, guys are grateful to hear someone else is crushing it. And if something moves in them, you know, I was in I I have a local men's group too, and

Jason Lange: I revealed something in the group that yeah, I've noticed this thing. Sometimes when a few guys come in and they're crushing it, it does kind of get something moving in me in terms of like, I'm a little jealous. I'm a little da-da-da. But that was just work for me to do. And even just revealing that brought me more into the group. And I actually quite like hearing their celebrations. It's fucking awesome. It's inspiring. It just makes it would just sometimes put the lens on me, like you said, of where am I not feeling that?

Jason Lange: And you know, inspiration, I think, in a lot of ways is how I would frame it is just the flow of love and consciousness. Like when when we're inspired, love and consciousness are flowing. And, you know, I it's one of the things that's so fun about the work we get to do. It's actually incredibly creative. Right. So we get into a room full of guys, and there's

Jason Lange: Everyone in some way or another has somewhere love isn't flowing. Right. And then we go through this process and we're doing this thing, and shit just emerges, right? Scenarios, situations, practices, things that you know, yes, you and I are facilitating, but we're something's just coming through us, right? It's like a moment comes and it's like, I think this is the energetic move.

Jason Lange: This guy needs to make, and suddenly, holy shit, love's flowing in his life again, right? And that kind of creative emergence, I think, is exactly what we're talking about with inspiration. That when we start to remove the blocks, something starts to self-organize. And it's incredibly enlivening to experience, right? I've experienced it in our work, I've experienced it.

Jason Lange: A lot when I was doing film work and you're on set and everybody's doing their shit. And then something emerges that nobody planned, where it's like, holy shit, the light came through the thing, it hit the thing, radio is saying the thing, and like, who the fuck made that? You know, like it was more than the sum of everyone's parts. And that's part of what we're talking about here. And what I think is kind of so radical about it is, you know, you and I, as we were even coming into this episode, is

Jason Lange: It's tough times, right? Culturally, globally, we're we're feeling the the death gasps of a lot of ways of being, right? Ways of organizing culture, economies, relationships that used to work but are no longer sophisticated enough to handle all of the complexity of the moment. And so it's very easy, you know.

Jason Lange: People make a lot of money by you go online and they want you to think the world's about to end. Like, and it's all going shit, and it's all hor horrible, hopeful, blah, blah, blah, blah. This kind of inspiration is countercultural, I would say. In a way that, you know, that kind of first burst of, you know, hippie love was in its own way as well, of like, hey, we're missing something here. And turns out if you take some acid, you can see that something pretty pretty well. and it gives you some clues.

Jason Lange: But I think we're we're on the edge of something like that right now, where frankly, I think it's easy to give up hope and to be a pessimist and too. And you and I have had to work that in our own ways as the world and culture and our lives have shifted. But it's again one of the things I so appreciate about the work we do. I say this every time, right, to guys we work with.

Jason Lange: The way I feel when I leave working with one of our groups, of like, shit. I feel hope. I feel inspired. I know that what happened in the room here today mattered. Right? What that leads to, I don't know. But I know it mattered. This was time well spent for every man here. And I've seen men move.

Jason Lange: And love starts to flow again in their nervous systems between other men. Then it radiates out into their relationships. And like you said, they have a container now for dealing with life. And to me, that's just about the most inspiring thing I can experience, right? And the the cool thing about I don't know, inspiration and the work we're doing is.

Jason Lange: You know, yeah, you I think you you named it as well. So often, our deepest pain right next to it is incredible gratitude. There's something about when we just fully feel and confront what hasn't worked, where we've been hurt, what pain we have. That when that kink gets unlocked, we get to feel all of the other things we've been blind to, of what is going right. What what am I grateful for? And right there's an

Jason Lange: Incredible research on the power of gratitude and what that can do, you know, for our lives and our disposition. And again, it's not like over-indexing on it, but there is something, you know, it's it's like that feeling of, you know, you just get into the groove of life and then it's fine, whatever. You get sick.

Jason Lange: And then you're like, my God, I cannot wait to not be sick again. And the first time you like breathe through your nose, it's like, fuck yeah, this is incredible. Then in a week you forget and you kind of go back to normal. But you know, this is kind of what we're trying to wake up over and over and over again. That it's okay to celebrate as men. It's okay to notice what's working well. And it's okay to receive joy, goodness, gratitude, right? I do this on some of my retreats.

Jason Lange: Some of the deepest work I do with men is teaching them to fucking accept a compliment. Someone says something nice to you, let it land.

Jason Lange: So I like I I had to work so hard with this. no, no, no, dad it like the deferral. I'm not now you what you don't realize is I could have done it a lot better. I'm actually a piece of shit. You just don't understand. So don't compliment me too much, right? This is like default for men, or I don't want to seem like an egotistical prick, right? But learning, you know part part of the the engine of all this is learning that wow, every time I did that, I was actually robbing someone.

Jason Lange: The person offering me the compliment, I was denying them the gift of reflecting positivity to me and seeing me receive it. And as I learned to receive it, I can see it actually impacts the person giving it more when you can just breathe and say, Yeah, thank you. I've worked really hard on that. Appreciate you seeing it. And it it just becomes this engine.

Jason Lange: Of giving and receiving love and inspiration.

Luke: I love what you're saying. And and I remember when you're you're and my, you and I started a men's group 10-ish years ago. And it was so inspiring. Just being together was so incredibly inspiring, invigorating, enlivening. I just always looked forward to getting together. And I remember feeling anxiety when our training was over, you know, after two years of like this official training that we were a part of.

Luke: because there was a freedom and peace and joy that I had felt when we were together, this group of men, and of course I was afraid of it going away.

Luke: What took me another several years to realize is that it was a culture that we created. We created a culture where we could experience this state and that it wasn't going away because it it wasn't a memory and it wasn't just a shared experience. It was a state of consciousness that we created together that over time actually just became a stage of being.

Luke: That's settled. And as our group has stayed together, there's just this elevated, what was once elevated has become a normal state of inspiration and support that we live with and that we're sourced by. And that there are three primary characteristics to why this works and why it works every time. And why at this point in our work, we don't we don't necessarily like have to have faith, like, is it gonna work? Like, no, we know it works.

Luke: Because there's there's a there's a place that we share, there's a space that we make available. And the three characteristics, particularly in shadow work, that we set up at the beginning of every group, we always say this: for the work to work requires you to be vulnerable, transparent, to be willing to reveal what's there for you. And we're less.

Luke: concerned with the actual content of like what happened when, and we're more focused on how and where the energy is stuck in your body. So the first principle that releases the inspiration is the truth. Tell the truth. Share the truth. Now this doesn't mean like saying everything with every detail. It means make contact with what's what's

Luke: Stuck in the body that's impeding this flow of consciousness. And that the nature of that consciousness is is joy and bliss and happiness and and inspiration. And in this, in this manner, we know that if we create the right circumstance for that kind of vulnerability and revelation, and for it to go beyond just telling of a story.

Luke: And into this the somatics. This is really interesting. The root of the word somatic is soma. Soma is a Sanskrit word that means nectar. What? What's that mean? It means that when you when you get in top get in touch with your body's energy field and you get it to move, it feels good. It feels it feels it's something you enjoy. It's like

Luke: Drinking the nectar of a guava or a mango. You're like, wow, that's delicious, you know? And it feels that way. What's radical about this particular work that's different from the inspiration you might feel in a prayerful state or a long meditation retreat where you're experiencing a kind of peace and bliss that's related more to consciousness itself is that this is an embodied relational context.

Luke: Where you're experiencing these states, which is to say that it's possible to have relationships that are inspiring, joyful, and enlivening, not as a mindset, but as a state of relationality. And that's what occurs in the heart of shadow. As you learn to create relationships like that, what's radical, even more radical about it, is we're learning to do that with other men, which is.

Luke: The place where a lot of pain is built culturally around what we define as masculinity, which to a large degree is about stuffing, blocking, and kinking up your innate inspiration. So we shift that culturally, and then the the program moves from being a program into a prolonged experience of relational freedom where you get the

Luke: play out all of the kinks and blocks that you've been taught and and kind of inundated with by your family of origin and culture at large. So here's the thing.

Luke: I entirely reject the surface wave that says, we're fucked, everything's falling apart. It's like, yeah, I get that. I get that. I see that. I watch the news. It's like from the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it's utterly depressing. And that's not the entirety of reality. We've proven that with this cultural wave. And so the most with with the Heart of Shadow.

Luke: The most important thing what we could all be doing right now is bringing in more inspiration and power to our immediate relationships with our family, children, our friends, and our local communities. And it starts with shifting culture in those relationships.

Luke: In and towards a manner and a place that is truly inspirational. It's not very far either. It's not far off. It's not, it's not like this distant future. It's a choice that you can make. And it requires a little bit of effort. It requires taking this leap, this leap towards sharing what's real. And you can't just do it from learning our podcast. You have to come and train.

Luke: Listen to what we're saying and kind of take it on. But to experience it and to build it into culture, you need a practicing ground, a training ground where you can make contact with what's inspiring, because the surface wave of culture is negative. The surface

Jason Lange: Mm.

Luke: wave of culture is critical. Meaning it critiques, it it's criticizing of everyone. It's it's about comparison. It's about

Luke: Naming what's good and what's better. And it's not something that lifts you up, it pushes you down and it diminishes you. We reject that because it's not something that engenders health and wellness and well-being. And deep shadow, integral shadow work that includes all that you are: your mind, body, your soul, your essence, your history, your culture, your aspirations, your finances, your sexuality.

Luke: It's a complete reformation of what we've been taught. What we've been taught is to be against others, to be above them, or to be below them. That's not, that's not the actual basis of reality. It's not. It's just something we've all been taught. So in our work, it's about entirely about inspiration. Entirely about inspiration. We invite you to come check it out. If it's something that's interesting to you, I guarantee you'll experience it. It's not something like maybe it'll happen. No.

Luke: It will happen. Promise you.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I think there's just there's something I wanna name there too around inspiration and the cultural moment. Right. When we think of, that was inspired, right? Inspired like that kind of creative emergence I was talking about.

Jason Lange: It has a forward-facing energy to it, right? Something that had never been put together in this way or seen or whatever has now emerged. Right. There's there's something new to it. And I think you know what you started to say is is a great marker of the people leading us right now are not inspired. It's not about a vision of something new.

Jason Lange: Right. It's about looking back, back, back. And oftentimes in our culture, the cultural forces, the people that leave the biggest legacy, they they were connected to some kind of divine inspiration. You could you know, whatever framework you want to put around that, a vision of a new way of relating and being in the world. You know, whether it's the you know, the music of the Beatles or

Jason Lange: Martin Luther King, or for me growing up, it was fucking Jim Henson, right? Like when you when you really get the transmission of what they were trying to do with Sesame Street, with the Muppets, with Mr. like that whole thing was a new way of being of like, hey, fucking A. What if we treated kids with humanity? Right? What would that do? And, you know, I think it's something we're we're both passionate about. But this is the thing. We're we're what what we're saying here is.

Jason Lange: As a man stepping into something like The Heart of Shadow, where you can experience inspiration of like, wow, something is emerging here or shifting or now possible in my life I didn't see before. That is an energetic that is contagious. Right? When we're around people who are feeling inspired, it's inspiring. Like, holy shit, they're not just riding the tide.

Jason Lange: Right. This is this is rowing towards something. and we need that kind of I need that kind of inspiration, you know, to this day. And the the the power here, I think, of what we're talking about, right? I I've I've I've I've framed this in my work from kind of developmental psychology, but it's all related here. so just geek out with me for a moment, right? Because I I tie it like all things to to Pearl Dream, my favorite band. And right, they got this song Do the Evolution, right? And

Jason Lange: I I have an episode on this somewhere of what that really is and what we see in our work that starts in a man and it happens in a group, and our our conjecture is, and then what happens in the group starts to radiate out into culture, community, and family. Is that in developmental psychology, right? They they they talk about subject-object relations, right? And it's basically there's what is seeing and what is seen. That's it.

Jason Lange: Right? There's what is seeing and what is seeing. So if you're the fish and your whole life has been in the fish tank, you don't fucking know you're swimming in water. That's just that's it. This is the way the world is. Until someone picks you up out of the bowl and says, Hey, look at that fucking fish bowl you've been swimming in. And suddenly what was the subject of your being becomes an object. Whoa, I can see that.

Jason Lange: Now I can see this thing, which means me, I'm taking a bigger perspective. I am identified with something greater. Shadow work, that's all we're fucking doing. We're taking what has been fused a subject and we're making it an object, which allows us to see it and then consciously choose something else. And that moment, when it happens.

Jason Lange: You know, you could call it Shakti, you could call it awakening, you could call you call it core level awakening in your work. It is radical in a sense because it's it's taking the red pill, right? It's the magic, it's the matrix moment. It's seeing the thing that I was embedded in before. And inspiration is that, right? I can see something that I couldn't see before. There's a new object in front of me, which now means I can relate to it in a different way. And

Jason Lange: It's radical. It's radical to experience. And it's not, let me how to f how to phrase this. it's not safe. What I mean by safe is it's disruptive, right? When we start to get inspired in these ways, it's disruptive in a good way. It disrupts the the stuckness, the the grindiness of our life or our relationships, or the way we're not setting boundaries or

Jason Lange: The way we're treating ourselves in terms of our health, when we really see it, like, fuck, wow, every time I do that, I'm hurting myself. And I can see it now. That's when the behavior often starts to change. And that's the thing, you and I, you know, work really hard in a program like this. You know, we've we've worked, you know, thousands of hours with men at this point. And you know, you get to start to get some embodied senses of kind of what's going on. It's like, well, I could tell you this.

Jason Lange: And then you would do with it whatever, but it's a whole different experience where it's actually what's more important is to create the conditions where you can have the insight and see it, right? And own it completely. Because then it changes you in a different way. It's not coming from the outside, it's an inner experience of awakening where you can now see something you couldn't see before. And not only is that inspiring.

Jason Lange: It's so fucking empowering, right? It's like, I am not at the whim of my habits, behavior, trauma patterning. There's ways for me to actually work all this and ride this current of love and consciousness. And you know, as far as you and I, I think can so far tell and experience.

Jason Lange: This is the best vehicle we found that we're hanging our hats on of we gotta get some fucking men inspired in this world to charge the hill with love. And I think this is it.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah, it it's clear that it's not, you know, this is this isn't like come try Luke and Jason's 10-step approach to freedom. You know, it's it's it's not a it's not a paint by numbers thing because it's it's really beyond method and technology. We're we're tapping into principles of con consciousness, which you named, use the word emp empower. And truly what you what you begin to make contact with in

Luke: In this state, because it's it's really not just work, it's a it's a state of being, is you you get in contact with power, the source of power, and a euphemism for that, which is the title of this episode, is inspiration. It's inspiration. You also use another phrase that it's disruptive and maybe destructive at times, because like a river or like anything in the natural world, it doesn't abide.

Luke: By its borders the season before, right? Rivers change boundaries and banks every season as the water rises. And this is the nature of your being. Your being is a river of consciousness and a river of care and love. And it just wants to keep evolving and moving and changing agreements and renegotiating the boundaries, the borders of what's moving through your life. And it's disruptive.

Luke: And it is destructive at it at times, but it is disruptive and destructive in in a positive direction. The source of life isn't to stay static, although the mind wants to keep things the same. It wants that kind of safety. It's like you said, to do the evolution, to keep evolving, to keep moving not only towards, but aligned with something that's truly inspiring.

Luke: And when we're not aligned with something that's inspiring, the state that takes over for all of us is fatigue, which turns into depression. And depending on your nervous system, gets sprinkled with a bit of anxiety or a lot of anxiety, and then left entirely unchecked, turns into something that's truly pathological, that's diagnosable, that's really moves into a state of.

Luke: Concretized disease. What is that? Ultimately it's a lack of inspiration. It's a lack of true vitality.

Luke: And shadow work as we offer it, inspired by many teachers, one of them in particular, Robert Augustus Masters, who we did some training with, was very much about this idea. Not this idea, but this arriving. He talked about the context. He had this very technical language, but he was talking about a a place, a state of being. And he taught us, he taught us how to navigate it. And this is

Luke: One of the things you and I have evolved it in many, many ways and continue to, but it's how to guide people into this space of inspiration and to live there, to live there relationally. And what's so beautiful about The Heart of Shadow is that you learn to do that with other men. And then in some of our other programs, you have pillars and I have some other programs, we learn to do that with women.

Luke: So you learn to do that it with polarity. And it it's really exciting. But really, the basis of moving beyond that is to do it with other men first. So much of our wounding has occurred in the with the masculine current. And so we need to heal there. We need to do a lot of healing there. And the heart of shadow men's groups are

Luke: places where that happens is all of the groups we've started are still together in some formation, which is just so inspiring. And it's just because they've all tapped that state and they live it and they they tend it because not out of obligation, but because they're all tasting inspiration. So they keep meeting. It's self generative because there's fuel in it. And as they get better at relating to other men, they bring women into that and they learn to do that with

Luke: Polarity and it's just it's really beautiful. So if you're suffering out there, you don't have to be. You don't, you don't have to keep riding that surface wave of rejection and approval and hoping to get something or dominating other people. There's another path, and it's it's sourced within you, sourced within your own being. And to activate it, you need others, you need community.

Jason Lange: Inspiration. I mean, I think it's something we all could always use a little bit more of in life. And like you said, particularly if you're a man who's feels stuck or struggling or lost, you know, this is a place you can come to for inspiration. If nothing else, seeing other men transform is about as inspiring as it gets. We see this every fucking time. And you know,

Jason Lange: I'll just start to close here with the other thing. You know, what's so great about inspiration is it's just another word for aliveness as well, right? And one thing I've learned about my life, and you know, I I would conject many other people may have had this experience, is sometimes our most alive moments in life happen when things don't go the way we plan them to. But here's the key.

Jason Lange: Something inspires us to roll with it. Right? To just, okay, I had this fucking plan and fuck it's raining now. Let's take off our clothes. And suddenly we have this like, you know, who knows? Wild moment in the rain or something that we never planned for. We learn to roll with it in a way. So instead of fighting it or resisting it.

Jason Lange: You know, we do that Akido move of okay, how can I work with this momentum, whatever it is, and I have no idea where it's gonna take me, and it certainly wasn't fucking part of my plan. That gets so much easier with a group. We've just seen it. I've seen it in our group, I've seen it in the groups we've led. If we have our best laid plans as men with our goals and the things we want to achieve, and shit's always gonna happen to just shake things up.

Jason Lange: The group can help you ride that wave wherever it takes you and actually turn whatever that thing is into an inspired moment of wow, that never would have occurred to me or happened that way. If I could do it again, I don't know if I'd change it because here's where it's led me, and here's where these men helped helped me navigate. And I think just this whole posture of

Jason Lange: You know, our groups and the work we do is essentially everything is workable. Right? Whatever your shadow, whatever your pain, wherever you feel the most stuck, it's all workable in the right container where you feel safe and there's love present. And that radiates out into life. It doesn't mean life's not going to be full of real fucking challenges, but the one choice we always have is how do I want to meet it? Do you right?

Jason Lange: And I've had to make this choice many times. Do I want to meet it as the pessimistic kind of collapsed fuck it all? I'm just gonna withdraw from life and the world? Or do I want to meet it with, hey, this fucking sucks. Maybe we could do something better. You know, who who wants to come to this dance? Sometimes people show up, sometimes they don't. I know it feels better for me if I've at least tried the latter.

Jason Lange: Hey, fuck. Hey, man. And sometimes, you know, you just come out of with one other buddy, and you're like, fuck yeah, man. This is great. so it it's radical, right? Shadow work gets, I mean, it's hot online right now, you know, in a lot of ways. I'm seeing other things on the IGs and the shadow work for da-da-da-da. and it's not all about pain, it can be about pleasure, it can be about joy, it can be about inspiration, it can be about that current, you know.

Jason Lange: Kind of my original teacher in a lot of ways, Ken Wilbur, right? He had always had this thing he'd write about of like this evolutionary impulse, right? In some ways, of like something, something made dirt get up and write poetry. What the fuck is that about? Right? Like, like really, and you feel it, and whatever that current is, is one that.

Jason Lange: We can tap into, and you can definitely tap into in a group like the Heart of Shadow, and it makes life feel so different to trust that, even with all the horror and the pain that's going to come no matter what. But that wow, something is moving towards something, right? And when we remove the blocks, when we remove our

Jason Lange: grandiosities and our nice guys and all that shit, it tends to emerge clearer. So our job is like, okay, fuck. How can I just clear all the kinks and see what's being transmitted?

Luke: HeartofShadow.com, you can find out about our next cohort starting in late

Luke: September. Our retreat is in Austin, Texas, September, October, late October. And we would love to have you. If you feel called, if you feel a pull, you can book a call with us. We're happy to talk to you about it. But really, it's a it's a small investment in a in a lifetime experience that will serve you and support you.

Luke: In a way that I can say like nothing else will. So many men have said that that have done our program. It's way beyond you know, just a nine week container. It can be a a lifetime of support. So check us out. We'd love to work with you.