Shadows, Sex, and Showing Up

Jason Lange: All right. Welcome back. Super excited to be here, back with Luke Adler for another installment of our Heart of Shadows series. It's been a little bit here, but very excited to dive in as we are approaching another cohort soon here and had an idea for an episode recently that I reached out to Luke about that. He was like, hell, yeah, let's do it. And it. In short, one of the things I like about Luke and why I like running the program we do together is we kind of have the shared commitment to basically bursting the myth of the kind of facilitator that has it all figured out. Right. I'm up here. I fixed myself. I've done all my shadow work. I'm good to go. So I'm just going to work on you you in that we are both men who are very passionate about what we do. I would say very highly skilled facilitators of shadow work and other modalities. And we're human beings that are in process and have messy, imperfect lives and don't always show up in the ways we maybe want to in our relationships or in our work. And so I really just kind of wanted to dive in that and kind of, you know, as Luke was saying earlier, we're going to peel back the curtain here and just show a little bit of what's going on in our lives in terms of some patterns or for me, a particular experience I had earlier this year that was, you know, 20 years into this work, basically, for me, still a huge edge, like quivering in the seats edge kind of stuff. So, yeah, man, I'll just welcome you back here and if you have anything you want to share along those lines.

Luke Adler: Thanks, Jason. Yeah, this is great. I mean, I love, and I have always loved calling myself out on the carpet as a style of teaching. And I think maybe 15, 20 years ago, when I was getting into my professional career in this world, I felt like, oh, we have to put on this air that we have it all together and really not be transparent about what's going on. And I think that's a huge disservice to people. And I still work with a lot of folks who think and project me onto a pedestal and think I've got it together as a. As a business person and A father and a husband. And I'm this kind of perfect picture that all men should aspire to. And I, I cringe when I hear people say that, describe that, or even act towards me in a way that suggests they see me in that kind of light. And I'm really appreciative of one of our mentors who said to teachers that act that way, that act as if they have attained the ultimate stages of enlightenment of nirva kalpa samadhi. There's no thoughts in their mind and their life flows perfectly and it just moves with the river of consciousness and everything manifests before them in this perfected way. And our teacher said to him, get out of the clouds and get into the mud with all of us, right? The real work is here on the here on earth. It's painful, it's messy, you get knocked down and you have to pick yourself back up. And God, if that's true. And to be honest, I had to graduate to that work. I was someone who thought the goal was to be in bliss and joy all the time. And I had to get to a point where I, where I could actually consider that there was this whole other part of the path that was messy and uncomfortable and oriented around feeling. So it's my opening salvo. The thing that I've been the edge that's really up for me now is my daughters are 10 and 7 and they're very attentive and have been to me and my wife and our behavior and the way we model love for each other and how present we are with them. And I'm reminded when I look at, particularly at my 10 year old, I remember paying very close attention to my parents at that age and I could tell what they were feeling and if their thoughts, if their, if their words matched up with what they were feeling because I was tuned in. You know, a lot of kids are tuned in. They can feel the emotional environment in a family. My daughter's very intuitive, she's very empathic and she calls us out, she calls me out, she calls Emily out when we're discordant and she doesn't hold back at all because we have a family value to be self expressed. Here's my stuff. I give, I serve at work, I serve others and I love it. It's very fulfilling. And then, you know, over time I start to get worn down a bit. And then I come home from work and I don't have the energy for my kids, let alone my wife. I don't have the energy. I want to Have. And it's a cliche. It's embarrassing. I'm sitting there on the couch, or if I'm really exhausted, I'll go downstairs and watch tv. And, you know, I might have four, six, maybe eight more good years with my oldest daughter before she just doesn't want anything to do with me because she wants to be in her friend group. And it's heartbreaking for me to think like, that I'm not going to have the energy to have presence with them and that they're going to go through their, you know, their brief childhood, what remains, and not have memories of dad and, you know, look back and go, yeah, dad. Dad wasn't. Dad was there, but he wasn't present. He wasn't really there. So the big edge I'm working on now is actually how can I build my life around being present for them? And I don't know that structure yet. I'm very attuned to it. But last night, for example, my littlest one, Juliet, was, like, looking at. She was drawing on the counter, and I was sitting in the chair on my phone, and she peeked up at me, and I peeked up at her, and then she hid behind the counter. I realized, oh, she wanted to play, like a hide and seek thing. And I could feel in me like, I just want to go back to the phone and be checked out. And then this other voice was there, like, Luke, this is the moment to show up for her. And I. It took. It took me a minute to kind of negotiate between the me that wanted to just stop and the me that wanted the deeper desire, which was to really be present for her. And I think because I have. I just had a break. I have. I just had a vacation.

Jason Lange: I've.

Luke Adler: I had some energy, and I put the phone down and I played with her a bit, and it was really fun. And I felt like it was. It was a really deep win of my soul to do that. But in reflecting on it, I'm like, I could see Jason in three or four weeks. You know, as I go through my work schedule for an entire month, I don't know if I'm going to have the energy to put that phone down and play with Juliet Corazon and, you know, let alone have. Have the presence of mind to be with Emily, with my wife and, you know, enjoy those relationships. So there's. I'm touching a sensitive core in here, and maybe we can circle. Circle back to me and kind of dive in a little deeper, but I'll kind of pass it to you and.

Jason Lange: I know my versions of that. I mean, I'm gonna. For me, part of the pain I have around that is the, like, that sense, particularly when I know it's happening and I see the active disengagement and it's like, oh, I know. I know I'm gonna regret this in 10 years. And here I am doing that thing anyway, which for me almost always is like, getting sucked into my phone or. Or I've really become aware in the last months with my daughter because she's about to go to TK this fall and then really kind of get ingested into the, you know, K through 12, like, really gone. And we have another child coming later this year, so it's like she starts school in a month and a half. And so the endless summer days of just her and I and not another child, like, they're coming to an end. Like, there will never be this type of relationship between us again. And yet I'll still get sucked into my phone or be exhausted myself and do the kind of, like, kind of hard to just explain, but, like, direct her to kind of play with herself versus what I've seen. So transformative for her is when I enter her world. So when I actively enter and engage into her world, whether that's imaginary play or hide and seek or, like, I'm going to come be with you in your world, whatever it is you're enacting right now. Shakes fucking energy and presence that sometimes I'll have not taken care of myself or worked out or gotten enough sleep or handled work in a way that I feel the agitation of that in my body, and then it has me disengage with her. So one of the things, yeah, I'm really trying to work in the next month and a half is okay to just give myself over to my time with her, you know, in an appropriate way. But it's. It's fucking hard. It's so hard because there. There are times where I just need nothing. But I can feel the loss of not having that and feel the loss of not having that with her and not having had that enough myself in my family system, like, and just the deep repercussions that's had on my life. So. I totally feel you on that one. So deep. So deep. And, yeah, embarrassing because it's. You know, I keep doing this thing and I don't want it to. I don't want to be doing it right, which is often a gateway for work we do with men into kind of looking into some of the shadow there of you know, what's going on in our life, which I think we can circle back to. The tale I want to share is it's a very specific moment from earlier this year where, yeah, you know, my wife is now halfway through pregnancy. And so it was very early on. We're older, higher risk. And so we were in a phase in the first trimester where for the, you know, just to be overly cautious, sex was off the table for, for, for a while. And we were a couple of weeks into it and I started to notice, I just started to notice some mild behaviors coming back of kind of like isolating, distancing, feeling really horny at the same time in other areas of my life. I was like, it was. We were deep in a program. Like I was just felt so on fire. I had so much energy coming through me that. And I didn't really have anywhere to put it with her in a sense. But so long and short of it is, it's like it's a weeknight after one of the group calls I led and she had been going to bed super early. Cause she was just exhausted and really wanting to play things safe. So we had this different experience where I'd come out of my evening calls and she wasn't available for connection, like even just, you know, non sexual. And there was some dumb TV show I was watching at the time. So like I fired it up and then there I go to my phone and I'm feeling, feeling a little randy. And boom, there I am just looking at porn. Just like, just have this intense amount of energy going through me. And the way our old place was set up, you know, I'm like looking at the tv, looking at the phone, and then I turn to my left and I see she's actually sitting at our dining room table the whole time she's been there. And it was an instantaneous. Like my body went to this very young place where I got up, I walked across the room to grab a cup of water. I think I'd been watching the Daily show or something. And I like made a comment about the show and then just sat right back down and fired up another show I was going to watch. I didn't engage at all, like at all, like kind of out of just panic and terror. And then she goes to bed. So she goes to bed. And so I'm sitting there on the couch, like my heart's thumping. I'm like, oh my God. She totally. Not only did she just catch me looking at porn, which is a sensitive thing for us from Our last pregnancy and stuff, but I just, like, totally ignored it and was a coward and, like, walked up to her and totally avoided it and didn't say anything. And then just, like, went back to my couch. And it was. It was, you know, similar to your moment where I'm like, fuck, this is. This is the moment. Like, this is the moment I think I'm pretty sure she saw. So there's two ways this can play out. I cannot say anything, and it can, like, fester. She's probably going to lose a lot of trust for me, or I can go have a conversation and it's probably going to suck right now, but, you know, maybe there's a way to salvage this. I'm sitting on the couch. I'm sitting on the couch. So I get up, I go into our bed. She's, like, basically asleep. And I wake her up. I'm like, hey, do you have a minute to talk? And she's like, yeah, why? I'm like, so I was just looking at porn out on the couch, and she, like, sits up in bed, and long and short of it is, she hadn't seen me. Like, she didn't know what I was doing. But she's like, that's so interesting, because I felt when you got up and walked over towards me, I was like, wow, this feels like a really young part of him right now. Like, he feels really young right now. And she thought it was because, I don't know, I was watching some. I was about to watch a video game show after the Daily show, and I just leaned in and, you know, kind of talked about what my experience was. And it was so vulnerable. So vulnerable. And in the past, she might have had some pretty strong reactions to it, but she just, like, was there with me in it. And we kind of ended up doing actually some pretty deep work. It was pretty wild. Where I identified part of my patterning of. You know, I was a very late bloomer. I didn't have sex to my twenties. Didn't really have any relationship experiences when I was young. So I basically went from nothing to full sex. There was no, like, phase of my life where it was, like, making out or petting or groping each other or the things you can do in between full intercourse. So for me, my nervous system had constructed this reality. Well, if intercourse isn't on the table, there's nothing on the table, right? Like, there's. There's no. There was no middle ground for connecting with erotic energy of any kind of. And it was so intense to, like, surface this with her. And then, you know, we actually constructed an evening later that week where we basically pretended like we were a high school boyfriend and girlfriend that couldn't have sex. And we're, like, watching a show and I was just kind of feeling her up on the couch and we were making out. And it was so fucking nourishing to me. Like, I couldn't believe what it did for, like, my body, mind, and, like, relaxing this thing in me. And then she obviously loved it because we were just making out. So she was getting all this just touch and contact and oxytocin. But it was that kind of shadow moment of I saw this process of shame kick up in me and an unwillingness to kind of move towards that, which many times in my life I would just deny it or ignore it or lie or, you know, go around it. But it was still an edge for me. Like, that whole process came up instead of, you know. The other funny thing I forgot to mention was I had identified a couple of days earlier. I think I should have a conversation with her that I don't want this pregnancy to go to. The same as the last one where I go hypo around our sexuality because we can't have sex. Like, I want some kind of eroticism to be online. I was like, yeah, that'd be a really proactive, great conversation to lead. And then I never let it. I just totally, like, ignored it until that moment, like, confronted me with it and then, you know, we got there. But for me, it was a great example of, you know, yeah, this kind of shadow material in my nervous system, this belief, this way of being and this relationship to shame that I really had to come forward. And, you know, I've been doing this work a long time. You and I have facilitated some deep, dark. And I was terrified to have this conversation. I mean, terrified of, oh, my God, this is so awkward. What did I do? She's gonna be so upset with me. I've totally betrayed her trust. And it ended up because I went towards it head on, actually not being a thing and creating a deep possibility for connection for us on the other side. When she was like, wow, I can see you have this need. How can we play with that? And created this really fun role play for us that we're actually due to have again, I'm realizing. But, yeah, that was one that. I think I even forgot to share that with our group because so much was going on maybe a couple months ago. And I was just like, to me, that is the outcome of 20 years of work. It's not that the old patterns in my nervous system didn't come out. It's that I was able to take a different action. Right. I was able to finally have a different response in this context I'd kind of been stuck in for a long time. And to me, that is what is possible in this work we do. And, you know, it's not like it magically fixed it. Some of those patterns have come up again, and I'm going to have to reconfront them. This is part of my lifelong process, but it is getting better and easier. I think that's the other big win for me is like, wow, that's something I would not have been able to do four years ago.

Luke Adler: That is fantastic. That is a fantastic story, tale and journey that you had. And, I mean, that moment on the couch, that whole. I could feel the youngness in me, you know, as you shared that, just. God, I feel that little boy who's like. And the little boy going like, well, if I didn't get caught, I'll just kind of keep it down there. You know, I think. I think that moment, Jason was like, that is such a radical moment of growth. Because, you know, the negotiator in there could have just said, well, let's just sleep on it and see if there's a vibe in the morning and kind of play that game of like, maybe she. Yeah. If she didn't see it, no big deal, right? I'm like, many of us would be, you know, many of us would be like, well, that's fine. You can do that. But I think what you. What you did is you're like, no, this isn't aligned with my values of. Of. In my relationship and my values of myself, of my own love for myself and myself as a. As a model for this work. So I. I really. Yeah, I really commend you for that. It's just, um, such a powerful move. I mean, I'm just listening to that feeling, like, wow. You know, I. I think the gift in a story like that is it makes me reflect. And anyone who's probably listening on, where am I not leaning in? You know, not catching it? Where am I going? It's fine. You know, it's whatever. It's not a big deal. You know, it's. Who cares? Just, you know, you're just blowing off some steam. You're just resting, whatever. You know, we could create tons of social context around that to normalize it, but in. In the context of. Of your commitment to truth, flow and vitality, you know, vitality in your body and in your relationship. That's just, just an awesome example of, of catching. Catching the shadow. Catching where we want. Where we want to go to sleep. Yeah, yeah.

Luke Adler: The shadow that it's hitting up against for me that's related to the stuff around my daughters is that sexual energy, use the word eroticism, that living force that when we're in relationship to it can be really vitalizing, particularly in the context of kind of awakened relationship or a willingness to turn towards our shadow in ourselves and in our relationship and in whatever enterprise we're a part of. And when sexual energy is not online there. If sexual energy is not online, it means the energy is most likely in our head. It could also be in our heart. We could be very heart oriented and very head oriented. So there could be a lot of going on around our head and our hearts and just not much happening down in our pelvis. And again, I like to come back to classical yoga and these kind of mystical traditions that really villainize sexuality and say it's a distraction and it's, you know, a place of even evil. In certain traditions that should. There should be all kinds of rules around it. But the actuality of it in physiology and energy is that if our sexual energy is not online, we will Lose vitality pretty quickly because the genitals and the kidneys are tied in together around endocrine function, around hormone function. So if you don't have cortisol and pregnenolone, the building block of hormones and testosterone and progesterone and estrogen, if these aren't being vitalized through your system, not just through the monthly cycles, but through sexual energy that we're in touch with in a healthy way.

Jason Lange: Right.

Luke Adler: And this is kind of the moral of your story is getting, at least in an energetic level, let's stay in a healthy relationship to sexuality. The truth is, is that we're forced to. This is. Well, at least in terms of physiology, we can't get away from it. So the point I'm trying to get to, I'm, like, going on a rant here about energetics and physiology, is that my tendency, and my wife's, too, is to get the energy more centered around my head and my heart and to really lose touch with our, you know, my. My pelvis. Same for her. So we really can go to this kind of asexual place where we're very happy being of service to the people in our careers, service to our children, and even service to each other to a degree. And what happens for me is I start to go a little mad because I'm serving my patients, my clients, and I'm coming from my heart, I'm coming from my head. And then Emily comes home, and she wants to give me the daily report, and she wants me to listen to her for now, 30 and 40. 30, 40, 60 minutes. I've just listened to people for seven hours. Counseling, coaching, guiding. And I can feel my nervous system just shuddering as she shares. And, like, if we. Sometimes we can interrupt that. We can start to kiss and hold each other. And my whole vital, vital system, like you said, comes right back online. I feel so much better. But she and I both have some shadow around this, where we just kind of lose touch with that center, and it becomes kind of, I guess, numb. Numb is the feeling. And there has to be some work that gets put in there to reinvigorate it. And where I start to get in trouble, personally, is I start to search for that vital energy again. And I go into extreme sports. So I'll put myself in dangerous situations, whether it's whitewater rafting or mountain biking. All of a sudden, this. This pusher in me comes online where I start to want to find that energy, and it starts to get a little dangerous in my mind, body, where I'm I'm, like, hunting for it where really it's. It's right there with her. But it's a place that we have some. Some blind. Blinders on in our relationship. It's. It's another part of this whole edge where I just. I just kind of forget about my pelvis. And the truth is, Jason, that when I'm in touch with my sexual energy or my vital force down there, my facilitator work and my. My work and my career is so much more fun. You know, it's one of the reasons why I love Heart of Shadow with you is because we. We have to have that center online to do the work we do, because we've got to be present at all levels with people. But I. I can feel that resonance in what you're sharing from this deeper perspective, that if you're not in touch with your sexual energy in a healthy form, you're going to get tired, you know, and you're going to reach for porn or you're going to reach for an extreme sport or sugar or something, because we have to feel. We crave that kind of living experience.

Jason Lange: Totally. I love how you frame that, that need for a sense of aliveness. So right when it ended up happening in that moment, when I leaned in and we had this wild conversation and we're talking about my, you know, my history as a teenager. And, like, it was radical in a sense, but I felt very alive. She felt there was more energy in her body, in my body, and we were like, here with each other. Like, wow, this is like a. This moment is alive right now. It's not a routine. It's not a habit. It's the vital unknown, in a sense. And we've been together for many years now. And here's something new, right? Here's a vital energy between us. And I, you know, you. It struck me in another sense of. I can actually feel how the cost. Had I not brought that forward, I would have been holding that anxiety and shame and, like, distancing myself more from her the next day. And that would have been like, that kind of stagnation in my body. I would have been holding. Would have completely changed how I showed up with my daughter. And it would have completely changed how she experienced seeing us the next day or two. She'd see me being really distant from my partner, which teaches her all kinds of lessons that she's gonna, you know, she's already, in a lot of ways, absorbed about what a relationship's supposed to look like, that I'm always mindful of. And that aliveness, that energy, liberation that came on the other side, it allowed me to be more present for her. And it's so true. When. When Violet and I are online in that full capacity, I have so much more energy to be present for Ruby. Like, I'm. I'm just. It's connecting for me in a way where I'm like, wow, there's actually more fire in the system, because it's not all just being generated from my head or my heart. I'm actually allowing it to circulate up, and it kind of powers my ability to be present for her. But when I neglect that and I go hypo, like, to me, totally, I dissociate in that same way. I have so much less capacity to be present for her and for Violet in my life. So it's cool to kind of feel these connections and realize just how important that is and how, you know, at least in my life, how utterly lacking sexually connected models of parenthood have been for me of, like, wow, these are responsible parents. And it's totally clear they're still boning. Like, you can feel the, you know, the connection. It's not something I've witnessed a lot in the world, you know, and just, I think because it is rare and it is hard, and it takes a real devotion to. To this deeper aliveness that I think you just evoked.

Luke Adler: I mean, you're. You're kind of hitting this, like, pay dirt shadow wound that I think probably many, many people have. Like you said, clearly we haven't had models for this. That's in a large part why we're not aware of it. But is it just habit, Jason? Is it just hardwiring, you think, that we just forget about our sexual vitality.

Jason Lange: That.

Luke Adler: We'Re so focused on being of service, or we're focused on making it in the world that. I mean, obviously that all makes sense in terms of fight or flight, nervous systems and. And nourishing nervous systems. But here we are calling ourselves out on the carpet on this podcast, and now I feel like I'm really confronting this.

Jason Lange: Like.

Luke Adler: Like, if this is an edge for us, which means it's an edge for lots of people, and I know it is. You know, How do we stay aware of it? You know, what is that blind spot that. I mean, we're looking at the social factors, the genetic factors, but there's a lot in there. There's something in there that we just. We're not seeing it.

Luke Adler: We're hitting this kind of blind spot in humanity around healthy sexual energy and how when that's not online, a significant part of our being is not online.

Jason Lange: And.

Luke Adler: You know, it, it hits up against massive levels of socialization around sex, sexuality, the purpose of sex. I mean one, one of the things I've been contemplating the last three months is all of those drivers, like particularly drivers around porn or drivers around like an attractive woman. At some level it's a baseline biological driver to just want to procreate, to just want to. The body wants to perpetuate the species and then we add on all this meaning to it around power and prestige and self worth and that's all the meaning making of the mind wanting to put significance around it. But at a base level, our bodies are just looking for something attractive to genetically reproduce and keep this species going. And then, and then we kind of, you know, have all of these conversations about sex and sexuality and sex culture. But at a, at a primal level, that's all that we're here to do in terms of biology. Now here, here you and I come along and the spirit of Transformation comes along and says, wait a second, we're here for more than that. We're here to grow and to heal and to evolve as beings, as souls inside of these bodies. Then the conversation becomes much more dynamic. We're looking at what we're attracted to, why we're attracted to it, how having sexual vitality flow through us is this wellspring of energy that can continue to serve us. And so there is this really. There's a vast invitation for us to keep exploring this. And I think I can tell this is a place where, you know, you and I will be likely making some very specific offerings. Although we do that in Heart of Shadow. We work on this quite a bit. But even outside of that, I could see us making more specific offerings on this topic as, As a live evolutionary edge in, In. In the work. Because this. This really is the driver of polarity between masculine and feminine. And there's so much shadow in it, you know, historical shadow in it, that that keeps us kind of bound up and confused and then not making that big courageous move that you made, you know, that says, you know what? I have the consciousness. I have the consciousness and the skill to have this conversation, and I'm going to do it. As opposed to the shadow experience of this, which I want to offer a phrase here. When we're shadowed around our relationship and definitely around sexuality, we start to make choices that feel and look like a Hollywood movie. They're like scenes right out of the rom coms and the dramas out of Hollywood. They're the best shows. And all of a sudd. Sudden we find ourselves making those same statements or behaving in the same way we see on tv. And it's because we're acting from the most unconscious place. That's just a perpetual story in humanity. And Hollywood is this great server of our shadow reflecting back to us. And so I sometimes find myself. Sometimes find myself and Emily will say things that sound so cliche, sounds like they came right out of a. A terrible Zac Efron movie. And I'm like, there's no living energy in that. It's just this asleep phrase that I've heard occur over and over. The cliche in your moment would have been to just not say anything. Like it's. It's just so uncommon to really catch those moments and be courageous and feel life force return and to not go have to crash your mountain bike down a steep thing or surf the big wave or bury yourself in work, but to pause and interrupt the unconsciousness, that's the big Move that we're offering in Heart of Shadow is catch yourself. See that you have a choice. Try to make the courageous choice. And if you don't, at least you can book. Bookmark it and go, yeah, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna work on this. Bring it to my men. Let's. Let's keep. Let's keep fighting for freedom. Luke Adler: Come out and play with us, guys. It's amazing work. And I think Jason's story really. And my story, to some degree, catching those moments. It's catching moments where vitality can come back into our lives and moments where we can just keep losing it. And there's not a supplement, a surgery, an intervention that's going to give that to you. It's really the design of the soul, that we have to be responsible. We have to have our own volition to respond to moments where we get to be free or not. And having a group of men who are committed to that, it doesn't just make it twice as more doable. It makes it 10 times more doable to have a life that really starts to flow. And if you're resonating with what we're saying, sign up for the next cohort. You want to do a discovery call with Jason or I? We're happy to do that.

Jason Lange: It's.

Luke Adler: It's been an amazing journey, and it's only continuing. So, yeah, come find us.

Jason Lange: You're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world? Just go to evolutionary men. Apply.