Some Things Aren’t Meant to Be Felt Alone

All right, and welcome back. Some things aren't meant to be felt alone.

So this phrase I've mentioned before on this podcast and it's something that came to me a couple years ago and that I've been living day to day these last couple years through some pretty intense personal experiences with my family and my own growth and just the world at large. And it's a really important piece. Some things aren't meant to be felt alone. So as humans, we are mammals and we are social creatures.

We are wired for relationship. Literally, as I've mentioned before, and as many of you know, there's an entire bundle of nerves that come from the base of our brain down all the way through our body called the vagus nerve. It's a bundle of nerves and the vagus nerve is basically how information travels from the body up to the brain. Your body is like a sensor and those sensors shoot information up into the brain.

Now what's important about the vagus nerve and how many of us have come to understand it through these last years of personal growth, trauma, and all the places it's been showing up are certain signals can come through our body which then hit our brain and tell us it's safe and it's okay. And then our body, our brain, they can co regulate and downshift as humans. Relationship is one of the primary tools for co regulation.

So eye contact, voice, breath, literally face to face. Connection sends all kinds of signals into our body which then travel up the vagus nerve and tell our brain it's safe, you can relax, it's not time to fight or flight. Now why is that important? Well, I've been doing men's work for decades now myself, and I've been leading men's work for almost a decade.

And in my own journey, and in the journey of a lot of men I've worked with, there's a good chunk of men who can't feel who wonder. You know, I've heard this many times I want to cry, but I just can't quite do it or I can't really do anger. These feelings can often be hard to access on our own when we're not feeling safe. However, part of the power of a therapeutic relationship, coaching relationship, or as I've Talked about many times on this podcast.

A men's group is creating that safe relational space so our body gets the signal, it's okay, you're safe here. And as soon as we get the signal, it's okay, you're safe here. Often we can emote, emotions come through us. Now, classic example I've shared before is you can go to YouTube right now and you can Google, you know, deer almost gets hit by a car. And what happens in those situations?

Or deer escapes a predator. So the animal runs away, and then once it gets to safety, so once it's in a safe place, then and only then does its body process what happened. You can see this in deer specifically as they shake, they like shake it off, kind of like bounce and shake, and their whole bodies vibrate as they're integrating the intensity of that experience. It's kind of like that ripple of energy that came through them in the fight or flight moment gets to wash away.

Now, one of the most powerful ways we can access that safe state as men is by being in relationship with other men, is by coming together in community and safe, trusted community, where that safety, that container then allows things to move through us. Old traumas, old pains, current traumas, current pains in a way we might not be able to access on our own. And one of the wild moments we're living through right now is that particularly here in the west and in a lot of the.

The modernized world, modernity, the industrial revolution, everything we've been through was about personalization and privatization. So it was about the person, not the community to a large extent. And as someone who grew up here in the us I think this is a big part of why our country and so many people here are in so much pain. Everything was divided up.

This bullshit concept of the nuclear family was literally invented in the 50s and 60s to promote suburban housing and growth. And it's not at all natural or normal. Being so atomized, split apart, living in our own little private bubbles. Then you add on automobiles on top of that. Where we drive to and from work alone, most of the time, separate, most of the time, has created a tremendous amount of disconnection in our culture.

We don't spend nearly as much time in relationship with other people as we once did and as we naturally did in most of human history. And I think it's one of the reasons that so many men are suffering these days from a crisis of loneliness. It's off the charts. Suicide numbers are off the charts. Most men are reporting being lonely, and it's dangerous, actually, Impacts your health as much as smoking, the equivalent of heart disease.

One of the things that's thankfully starting to come back is a lot of wisdom from different indigenous cultures around the world, where lots of people have gone in and studied how do these cultures work and what are they getting right that maybe we left behind and need to re include. One of the things a lot of those cultures have are rituals for dealing with the hard stuff in life.

Birth, death, depression, tragedy, natural disasters. In all of those occasions, communities come together and communities process together. We are meant to process emotion socially with our voices, with our bodies, to rhythms, to movement, to touch. And that's how it was for most of the human experience until just this last hundred years or so, when everything started getting atomized and divided, like I said.

And where emotions in most families aren't something that are welcomed, aren't something that people know how to deal with, and there's no tribal elders around to help you integrate that. Whether it's death of a loved one or the loss of relationship or any kind of physical injury that drastically changes someone's life, that drastically changes someone's life. There's so many things that we have accumulated in our nervous systems as human beings in these high stress times that we actually can't process all alone because we need those social cues from outside, those safety cues to tell our brain it's okay.

And now you can let it out. I've experienced this myself, doing the work, right? Having a sense of, for me, oftentimes grief or anger deep down inside of me that I can't quite touch on my own. But suddenly I'm sitting in circle with other brothers and men. The tension is put on me. Sometimes I'm physically even held. And that touch, that attention, that creates the structure where suddenly my body gets the signal, it's safe, it's time to let this out.

You got to shake this off, you got to move this, you got to feel it to fully process it, feel it to heal it, is what they say, right? The trick is, oftentimes we can't fully feel it alone. We need others to loan us their nervous systems. As I've talked about before, they can hold the structure of the moment and we can just let go into the feeling completely. Grief and anger are two huge ones that I've seen here in my own journey and the journey of so many men I've worked with one of my teachers, he often phrased it as anger and anguish.

And these are two sides of the same kind of coin. They're connected. One Often leads to the other. And sometimes one's a portal to the other. And this is often the kind of work I love to do with men in person, is to help them get into those spaces and get into those energies so their body can actually release through shaking, through noise, through anger and rage, through grief and tears and snot, whatever it might be.

There's an actual purge that. That the body has to release. And it's so much easier to do in community in particular. What I love about doing it in group work in a group setting is there tends to be an energetic field to the experience. Meaning as one man goes deep and moves energy, it starts to by itself, unlock and move energy for other men.

Right. This is where a lot of indigenous cultures actually grieve together. There's one book I was reading that talks about. It's basically a professional wailer. So it's someone that comes in to your life when you've had loss or tragedy and they start crying with you. And their wailing, their crying often allows our body to go in there and release its own.

And that happens in the group. As one man sees another man go in deep and get real raw and authentic and touch oftentimes very painful places inside themselves or feel really intense emotions that they didn't know they could do, it unlocks something for another man. And when that man steps into the circle, things go even deeper. And by the end of just a little bit of time, a couple days, it's incredible what a group can have cultivated together.

It's incredible the actual healing that can happen when we have others holding that space for us so we can feel completely. Faster we can touch an emotion, the faster it will dissolve, which means we gotta go right into it. It's much easier to go right into it when we're being held. And yes, I often mean that physically, literally being held. So many men I've worked with come in stuck, numb, not feeling frustrated with their life lost, whatever that might be.

And we get them down on the floor, we get them on a mat. Suddenly men are holding their feet, holding their shoulders, and their bodies just intrinsically know what to do. The wails come, the tears come, the shakes come. And yes, sometimes real rage and anger come as well. And it's safe. It's safe. They're being held at attention. They're being attuned to something that so many of us men have never experienced.

Not always our parents faults. They just didn't have the tools to be present with us and welcome our emotions and let them move through us in a powerful way. I consider it part of my mission right now to get men into these types of circles so they can start feeling more deeply, so they can feel that brotherhood around them. The thing about men's groups and community is it's not like it makes all the problems in your life go away.

The stresses keep coming, the hits keep coming, the challenges keep coming, but it makes it so much more easy to deal with it. That's that community piece. And some of these deep things, they aren't meant to be felt alone. So if you've been wondering or avoiding or not sure how to touch something in your life, in your felt body, experience that you've wanted to, but you've been trying to do it alone, that's part of the problem.

You need to come together with other men who can hold you and invite you and welcome you down that road, down that journey, into that process. Do whatever it takes so you may know or just have a sense. There's something inside of you that needs to move so you can feel more free in the world, so you can show up more fully in your power, in your sensitivity, in your leadership.

It's on you to find the spaces where you'll feel safe, to express those things, to feel those things, to explore those things. That's your responsibility as a man. This day and age is one of the most important responsibilities you can take on as an integrated conscious man. I take responsibility for finding safe containers and places to feel the things I need to feel in my life so I can be conscious and present out there in the world.

Want some help? Please check out my new program, the Heart of Shadow, which starts January 3, 2023. I'll be co leading it. My brother at arms, Luke Adler, who's an incredible doctor of Chinese medicine. We're going to be doing some very deep shadow work. Join us.