The key to growth as a man isn’t to get rid of parts of yourself, it’s about learning to relate to those parts and to wake up from whatever matrix you’re in.
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Today, I want to talk about one of the most important shifts you can make as a man.
This stems from something I hear over and over again with guys I work with in a coaching capacity or in the many men's groups I lead. And it stems from this idea that they want to get rid of of some part of themselves. There's some part of their experience they want to get rid of and not have to feel anymore.
Something oftentimes things like anxiety or anger or grief. And this is an incredibly important shift. I have to be super firm with guys around. And the idea with these things is not to get rid of parts of ourselves. That never works. I've never seen it work. There's no such thing as getting rid of a part of ourselves.
What we want to do is deeper than that. We want to shift from relating from these parts of ourselves to relating to these parts of ourselves. So when guys come to me and work with me in my programs, whether it's around dating and relationships or purpose or getting direction in their lives, big part of what we work on is presence.
So the capacity to show up in our bodies in the moment. Now, oftentimes we can't do that and something else happens. We lose presence. We disconnect, we explode with anger, or we collapse in shame, or we disappear in numbness. There's a whole range of things that men go through. What's happening in these moments is we are collapsing into those pieces of ourselves.
We are relating from the anger, so it comes out as explosive aggression. Or we're relating from our shame, so it feels complete and entire, and we collapse into it. Or we're relating from the depression in our bodies, and it feels hopeless, and then we want to get rid of that. Get rid of that part of ourselves.
The shift here I'm talking about is we want to start to relate to those pieces of ourselves. This is something that's incredibly important, and it's a term I call doing the evolution, which comes from one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs. And essentially it means making subject object. That is the whole game when it comes to personal growth and development, when we can make our subject object.
That's another way to put the shift from relating from a piece of ourselves to relating to a piece of ourselves. Think of this like the red pill in the Matrix. When we're relating from or when we're immersed in our subjective experience, it's all there is. We don't even know we're in the Matrix. We're a fish swimming in water and we don't even realize it. The important shift here is when we can identify with a larger space.
Suddenly we can relate to those parts of ourselves. We can see those parts of ourselves. They go from being our subject to an object in our awareness. The fish realizes, I'm swimming in a fishbowl. I'm swimming in a fishbowl. How do I want to be in this fishbowl? And so with all of this different work I do with men around embodiment and men's groups, in leading, in relationship and in life, it all really stems down to this moment, which is often connected to how deeply am I breathing?
Can I drop into this moment? Can I connect to something bigger then my subjective experience, which then allows me to see what's happening? And instead of just unconsciously reacting, I can choose what my conscious response is, because I can see it all. I have choice. The fusion that happens when we have no distance between our subjective experience and what's happening in the moment is where almost all trouble happens.
It's where almost all danger happens. For the masculine, it's where all the pathology often lies when those things are flattened together and we don't even know we're doing this thing. This is one way to think about the concept of shadow or cleaning up that I talked about on previous episodes. We aren't aware of the experience we're immersed in, so we're relating from it rather than to it.
The power of men's groups, and even a coaching relationship and relationship in general, is other people can often see what we're immersed in more easily than we can because they're already on the outside. They're seeing it as object now, when they can help us see that firsthand ourselves. That tends to be where transformation and magic happen.
Without that, we can stay immersed in the same patterns over and over and over again. A huge part of what our life is as developing humans is becoming aware of and outgrowing our patterning and conditioning. This is stuff that is woven deeply into our nervous system. Incredible grooves of how our body moves and breathes and then the thoughts and the emotions that all spring from that.
Again, often stuff that starts when we're pretty young and we have experiences that are beyond our capacity to self regulate at that time. And we don't have someone else step in to help us co regulate in that moment. When that happens, some part of ourselves has to kind of step up and take on a role it doesn't normally. The problem is it then thinks that's its role forever and it doesn't know how to put that to the side in the future.
Waking up through our patterning, making our subjective experience object, it's also the goal in so many ways of meditation and most masculine practice is to identify with the space bigger than whatever's happening. You want to learn how to be a powerful, sexy man. That's it. It's the keys to the whole kingdom right there in the moment.
Can I stay connected to my body while also staying connected to something bigger than it? So I'm aware of that experience that's unfolding in my awareness. That's where we lead from, that's where we make love from, that's where we connect from and that's where we create from. It's one of the great gifts the masculine part of all of us can offer the world.
We all have access to this masculine part in that ability to shift our identification, the space we are identifying with, to something bigger, more whole is the key. That moment when we choose to make that shift. Holy shit, a pattern is happening right now. I'm reacting, I'm reactive. I just checked out. Wow, where was I for the last three minutes?
Whatever that experience in the moment is of seeing your subjective experience become object, that's the key. That is the key to transforming as a man. And there's all kinds of ways to cultivate that on a personal level in your community and men's groups. That's a big part of what I help men do. It's a big part of what I'm still doing as a human myself.
Stuff doesn't end. There's always some more patterning. And when we can liberate ourselves from the patterning, from relating from these parts of ourselves to relating to them. Wow. There's a part of me that's sad right now. There's a part of me that's anxious right now. The second we can do that, we're identifying with a bigger perspective. We're including more, we're seeing more and seeing that which sees is the masculine.
And we want to cultivate that part of ourselves that sees, sees our own conditioning and patterns, sees other men's conditioning and patterns, sees how it shows up in our bodies and in our languaging in our relationships. That's a capacity that there's no shortcut around. Just takes time, like so many of the other things I've talked about. And learning to relate to all aspects of yourself leads to being a free man.
And I don't mean that in the sense of just financial freedom or being able to do what you want. I mean that in the sense of having freedom of choice, of where your awareness is in the moment. When we haven't done this work, when we aren't able to make subject object, when we're stuck in the pattern, when we're still in the fishbowl and we don't know, the same stuff just perpetuates over and over and over again in our lives.
They literally call it waking up, right? I was in the dream, I thought the dream was real. Now I realize it was just a dream. There's so much power in that. There's so much freedom in that. Because suddenly I'm not just fused with the moment, reacting. I'm able to be a step away from it while still connected to it. That gives me so much more choice in life.
And what I love about this capacity is it can be accelerated by embodiment work. You might think, well, how does being in my body help me get distance? What it does is it makes you more aware of sensations in the present of the objects in your experience. If you're not in your body. It's really hard to be aware of things when we're in our body, we're getting more of an unfiltered feed to all the sensation in our experience.
It's a big part of what psychedelics do do. Well, they often change our filter so we feel more raw data, which then causes us to take a bigger perspective, right? There's so suddenly so much objective data running through us that we normally close ourselves off to that. Now we're open to. So this is where the work begins. To make subject object, to wake up from your matrix, to have choice in how you're responding in the moment, and to realize it's not about getting rid of parts of yourself.
The anxious parts, the scared parts, the disgusted parts, the fearful parts, the angry parts. It's not about getting rid of those. It's about relating to those parts of yourself. A dangerous man is a man who is unable to relate to those parts of himself and only relates from those parts of himself. A liberated man, a trustable man, can relate to all those aspects of himself. They're not running the show for him.
And in fact, because he can relate to those parts of himself as men, when we do that, we're not afraid to relate to those parts of others. Bring your anger. Bring your frustration. Bring your rage, your sadness, your grief, whatever that might be. And I can be with you in it, because I know what it's like to be with that in myself. So I can be with that in you. If you want some help in making subject object and breaking out of your matrix, come on over to Evolutionary Men events.
Join me for a drop in men's group. If you really want to do a deep dive, check out my free training Evolutionary Men webinar about how to bring all of this into dating and relationships. It's an intensive men's group program I co lead with Melanie Curtin. Until next time.
