The Power of Moving Toward

All right, and welcome back. So, on today's episode, I want to talk about a pretty simple concept that has the potential to basically revolutionize your life.

And in short, it really comes down to this simple idea of the massive difference there is between moving away from something and moving towards something. And there's two really specific areas I want to drill into around this. First off, I just wrapped one of my shadow retreats where I do deep shadow work with men in our Heart of Shadow program. And that's a space where I really see this first manifestation in its strongest.

For many of us men, and frankly, human beings, we spend our entire lives moving away from emotional pain, sometimes even physical and even spiritual pain as well. But this idea that there's some kind of sensation in my body that is scarily overwhelming, right? It might be grief, it might be anger, it might be frustration, it might be disgust.

There's a lot of different emotions, right, that we can be avoiding. And so we'll try to move away from them to get away from the pain of that. For a lot of us men, what that means is we try to dissociate from that pain by replacing it with something else, right? So, okay, I don't want to feel that pain, so I'm going to jerk off, or I'm going to drink beer or I'm going to smoke some weed, right?

Anything to try to get away from it. The problem with that strategy is it just doesn't work long term. As one of my teachers once said, the only way to dissolve a feeling completely is to touch it and be with it 100%. And so the more we try to avoid certain emotions or pain, the stronger they often manifest in our life because we can't outrun them.

We can try to stop the feeling, but then we're just holding it in our body. We're literally holding that emotion in limbo. Emotions don't go anywhere unless you feel them. And so for so many of us men, we. We will spend literally our entire life trying to avoid feeling certain things because we're just scared or we're overwhelmed in shadow work. And in some of the deep emotional, somatic work I do with men, we flip that on its head, right?

And what we find is that the most Powerful way to dissolve that energy is. Is just to go right towards it, right? To actually lean into the raw sensation and fully feel it and be with it inside ourselves. This is so counterintuitive for us men. And as I was telling guys at my least most recent retreat, this is one I still up and I make mistakes around myself, right where there's a point of tension or something I'm feeling a little shame about in my relationship or life.

And so I will expend a tremendous amount of energy to try to not feel that, to try to move away from that raw emotion. And inevitably, thankfully, I'm in a bunch of meds groups, some of which do shadow work, some of which just really drop into deep presence with each other. I'll be called into that space. And for a couple of minutes, maybe I have to feel sad, maybe I have to feel angry, maybe I have to feel incredibly disappointed in myself, but I feel it, and then it starts to release.

And though this has happened to me many times, every single time I think to myself, what were you doing? You just spent weeks or months sometimes avoiding that feeling. And guess what? It only took three or four minutes. That was so much easier than all the energy I put into not going there, all the energy I put into resisting what was true in my body, mind.

And we do this so frequently as men, and it catches up to us, particularly as we get into our late 30s, 40s, and beyond, when our kind of just natural abundance of overwhelming amounts of chi starts to cool off, we can really feel these held emotions in our body. Fatigue, depression, listlessness, lack of motivation, or just an overwhelming amount of tension and discomfort in our body will result from moving away from our pain.

It is one of the biggest shifts in your life you can make to just take the new perspective. I just gotta go right towards it. Now. That's so easy for me to say here on a podcast compared to when it actually comes in life. And that's where something like a men's group, something like coaching and facilitation and guidance can be so important. Because sometimes we don't feel things always because we don't know how, or we feel scared.

And the power of community and guidance is that it can make it a lot easier to go there. But you still gotta go there, as so many men did with me over these last weeks in my shadow program. And here's the deal. By going straight into the pain, you have the opportunity to feel different in your body. I know that sounds so simple, but multiple times this last retreat, I Heard guys say the phrase, I have never felt that in my body before as an adult.

To me, that is tremendously exciting. That hints to a lot of transformation and change that's in process because it's not a cognitive thing. It's an experiential thing. When we enter into our pain like this and finally deal with these things that we've been carrying with us sometimes for decades. And on the other side of it, I consistently see this in men.

Their physiology looks different, maybe not permanently, but at least temporarily. And the more they do it, the more it shifts. Faces relax, bodies relax, breath deepens energy, and vitality and joy start to bubble back up to the surface. Because suddenly there's room again. When we're constricting and holding and avoiding our pain, it makes it really hard for the good stuff to come through too.

So it's time for you to step in, right? To move towards your pain, not away from it. That is the path of awakening, to go right towards the feelings you're resisting and to be with them. And in that, a real magic happens where that feeling, that sensation gets to move and come to completion and really transform back into vital energy we can use for what we want in our lives, to create and to move forward on things, which takes us to the second area, right?

So we often move away from our pain in life emotionally. But I see this in much bigger ways as well in terms of the Just the direction of men's lives. In one way to think about this is you would be shocked at how often it is men don't take the time to slow down and figure out, where am I going and why, right?

We get kind of catapulted onto this escalator of life where you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this to keep up with the Joneses, right? And pretty rarely do we get the training or the guidance for, hey, pause, figure out where do you want to end up so you can kind of reverse engineer from there. And so instead of moving away from the pain of, I feel so broke right now, or I feel so lonely right now, I gotta get a girlfriend, One of the biggest shifts we can make is getting clear about our vision, getting clear about what do we want to move towards.

So my partner Luke and I, who do the Heart of Shadow program, right, we were talking about how deep and profound an experience we're having leading that program and how lit up we are at bringing it to men. And there's a part of us, right, that just wants to scale to grow it as fast as possible. And he and I had some really great talks about, you know, what, what if we take the time to instead figure out where is it we want to go, where do we want to be, what is the lifestyle we want to be living, and then reverse engineer from there.

In our hyper capitalist society, it's always about growth, growth, growth, growth, Right? He and I got very clear. What's really important to us is to maximize the time we can spend with our families. We both have young kids and they are growing up fast now. We still care about the work we want to do, we still care about growing our businesses, but that's first. So the question then becomes, what's the lifestyle we want to be living with our kids?

How much time do we want to have? And then we play it backwards from there of, okay, and what's going to fit into that the best? Right? So we don't want to overdo it. And now we have a super clear vision of what we want to move towards. And that is highly energizing. And all the work we can put in now fuels this greater vision for our lives. And it's really rare for us men to just stop and do that.

We have to do these audits and really get clear about, wait a second, what do I want? Where am I going? So many of us fall for this myth I've talked about of, well, work hard now and enjoy your life later when you retire. Great in theory, terrible in the fact. We've then spent our years of greatest vitality and health not enjoying our actual life. So what would it look like to shift your life to enjoy it more now?

Right. This doesn't mean blowing off all your obligations, but it means taking a really hard look at, wait, what is it I want my life to be? Where am I going? Oh, I want to travel the world. Well, am I going to wait till I'm 80? No, I want to be 80 and have traveled the world. That means I got to start now. I gotta start taking mini trips every year. Right. This capacity to kind of move towards a plan is so energizing for us men.

And that plan can change, but it has such a different experience to it than just moving away from the pain. Right. And in my program, Pillars of Presence, I lead with Melanie Curtin. We work with guys specifically on relationships. The same thing happens there a lot of times. Guys just are tired of being alone or tired of horny. And so they just want to get into something as fast as they can without taking the time to really Feel into envision.

Well, what do I want my relationship to feel like? What do I want it to look like? How do I want us to share our values and our vision for life? The clearer you get about that as a man, whether you're single or already in a relationship, the easier it's going to be for you to guide your life there and then it feels totally different because you're inviting a partner, new or existing, into a vision rather than running away from something else.

This idea is so transformative. You really get it in your nervous system of what am I moving towards? Not what am I moving away from that. I really want to hammer it home here with another kind of analogy that one of my teachers once gave to me. And it's the difference between really acting from pain and hunger, right? You might not think of hunger as a great sensation, in a sense is maybe a pain of its own, but you can really feel there's a difference between acting out of pain.

I got to get away from a threat or a situation and following our hunger, I'm moving towards that which sustains and vitalizes me. I'm moving towards something, right? And so we want to cultivate hunger in our lives. Hunger to feel our full emotional experience more deeply. Hunger to move towards the lifestyle or the vision or the plan that's going to ignite us the most in how we show up with ourself in our relationships and frankly, for the planet.

And this won't just happen. You have to take the time and figure this stuff out when it comes to your planning. And often we need the support to actually slow down and drop deeper into our emotional experience. Guess what? Does both of these things really well? Men's group and men's work both provide us really potent spaces to both move towards our pain by being resourced by the nervous systems of the men around us.

The more resourced we are, the safer it is for us to fully feel and drop into our experience. Those same men can then help us shape and hone and get clear on what is it we want to be moving towards in our life, right? What is our vision? Where is there the most energy when we're talking, when we're sharing? Sometimes it's not always obvious to us, but other people can see it immediately.

Wow. When you were talking about that, I just felt like your whole heart was on fire. Go towards that, right? That seems like a good plan. That seems like a good vision. Now how are you going to do it? The other thing that men's groups can really be helpful for is decoding that plan into step by step actions where we know, okay, as long as I'm moving towards my vision, I'm succeeding, right? It's not about getting there, but it's just about moving in that direction.

It's an absolute game changer to stop moving away from our pain, right? And to start moving towards it more explicitly in emotional and shadow work. Because that's what's going to liberate us and to move towards what gives us the most energy in life when it comes to our vision and our plan. This is such a different directional energy and, and it's highly polarizing.

Right? When we move towards our emotional pain or our wants, desires, our vision, it makes us incredibly fucking appealing to be around nervous systems. Relax. When we can step forward in this way as men, Whether it's a woman, a man, your family, your kids, the more you start moving towards things, the more people are going to experience you differently.

So I want you to ask yourself, what have you been moving away from in your life? What pain are you avoiding and what are you ready to move towards? What are you ready to just say? Fuck it, let's feel this emotionally and wait a second. Here's what I want to do with my life. I've been so caught up in the day to day, I forgot to figure out where I was setting sail for.

Do both of those audits. Shoot me an email at jasonvolutionary men and let me know what you find. And when you're ready, get yourself into a men's group to accelerate both versions of this moving towards. All right, until next time, if you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to evolutionary men.

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