Why Men Think So Much (with Luke Adler)

Jason Lange: Luke Adler: So stoked to be back with my dear friend, teaching partner Jason Lange. And we are diving into the experience that all people have, but we see this in men a lot. And certainly there's been time periods when I've embodied this, and that's this. This kind of marriage, this vow to have to understand, to want to understand everything and in a certain sense, be very resistant to feeling. And, of course, what keeps. Keeps anyone kind of stuck in their head, stuck in the confines of the headquarters and avoiding the heart quarters, avoiding making that core great leap from your head to your heart to your body, to your guts, is usually the emotion that seals it all off, which is fear. And if fear is strong enough, there's even a kind of numbness there. But subconsciously, there's just a resistance to feel and then this profound kind of survival instinct to understand and. And it can play out like just an incessant need to want to understand, to want to know the reason why. So let's do it, Jason. Here we go.

Jason Lange: Yeah, I think, you know, this. Obviously, it's not limited exclusively to men, but I think it particularly shows up in men. This. This thing will often label as I just want to understand. I think that's part of what we're pointing to here, is there's like a. Well, if I just got it conceptually or understood, it would all make sense, and I'd be okay. But underneath that oftentimes is a resistance to connecting to the direct experience in our body, which includes our emotional experience. Right. These things are deeply related, and it's amazing how easily we can gravitate there towards men. And it's one of the things in the work you and I lead, in the groups we lead, we have to really emphasize that left to our own devices, will kind of float back up there often conversation. Even a group that's deep, we'll kind of go there to that just more heady, conceptual level. And, guys, we love to talk about concepts of things, or we love to report on our experience more than actually feel our experience, right? So this is something we often see with men, is they can talk kind of about something, but there's like a little removal from it versus actually slowing down and connecting to that sensation underneath. And this ties in you know, with rumination, Nice guy syndrome, so many different things. And I've maybe used this. You know, we're just talking imagery before, but I think of the brain. Thought is kind of one of those old arcade pinball machines. So it's like we shoot the ball up and then we're slapping the paddles, trying to keep the thing bouncing around to make sure it doesn't fall through the hole at the bottom. And I find thought in rumination are often like that. And what the hole at the bottom is is what happens when we feel, when we connect to our actual bodily experience, which for a lot of men means, yes, slowing down, just actually slowing down and turning towards the moment. And oh, I'm feeling this. And that is so scary for a lot of men because A, they've never done it before, B, there's sometimes days, months, years, decades worth of unfelt material on the right there. And it's like, oh my God, if I. Something we've certainly heard is like, I'm afraid to go there because I don't know what will happen or if I'll ever come back. Whether it's my grief, whether it's my anger. Guys fear that. And you know, culturally, we've talked about kind of the man box and the patriarchy before, but a lot of men who were just mocked for showing any kind of vulnerability or weakness. So there's all these forces that are kind of trying to keep us away from that experience of connecting to our bodies. And one of the best strategies to do that is to think and to stay in the realm of the conceptual. One of my teachers once said, you know, the purpose of thought is to stop feeling in action. So like a thought literally stops emotional action in our body, which, you know, has a lot of pros. It's why we don't just club our neighbor and take all their stuff. We have like, we have this prefrontal cortex, right, that allows us to not just be at the whim of our primary impulses, but that as a culture and particularly as men, I think we now over rely on that. And then we kind of keep ourselves stuck in the moment of not really feeling and just kind of constantly running the pinball machine of rumination.

Luke Adler: An example in my life recently, and I've mentioned this in some recent podcasts, my wife and I were doing a shadow work session a couple session, and she wanted me to apologize for leaving her with the kids when our second was maybe seven months old. And I went to go teach a training and I left her for Four days. And she was kind of entering, like, the beginning of a postpartum depression, and we weren't aware of it yet. And so, you know, fast forward here six years later, and she's. She said, that was really hard when you left me. And, you know, in my mind, I'm going, well, fuck, we agreed. We agreed on this. And, like, you know, we made sure there was some support. Like, what am I apologizing for? And, you know, the facilitator was like, luke, can you see that your wife's in pain? And I'm like, well, yeah, I can see that. But what was in the way for me of getting into her world was this thinking, this thought of, I don't want to look like an asshole. I did not fuck up. Like, I did, basically, I didn't do anything wrong. You know, I was just feeling. I was justified. And that thought, which was pinballing in my head, wouldn't let me feel. And it wasn't so much feeling my own shame, but it was more like feeling the remorse of having not seen that, you know, not recognizing that my wife was really vulnerable. And I didn't want to feel that. I didn't want to own that. I. And so what I said is. And you just gave this example, Jason. I said, well, honey, can you describe. Can you describe what it was like when I was away? Like, what the. Like. Like, I need to know that. But there was a way in which I. I was deflecting. I was trying to. I was trying to find a way to feel okay about what I had done. And in the end, when I was able to just see her pain, which, honestly, I took me about 15 minutes to just see. All she wanted me to do was join her in her pain and acknowledge really had nothing to do with me, you know, my competence at all. Then I could drop into my heart and drop into being with her. But for me, there was really, at least in that example, there was a real block of this resistance to feeling incompetent or to being seen as incompetent. Just a couple other examples. I've been working with a few men lately, you know, in healthcare stuff, and for them, there's a fear of. I guess, to put it plainly, just a fear of death. Like, not wanting to consider that this health issue might lead to something more fatal and really looking for me to want to reassure them and. And kind of say everything's going to be okay, and in a certain sense, not want to consider that this could be serious. And so, again, bouncing around in the head wanting to kind of configure their understanding in such a way. And, you know, I have so much compassion for myself, for these men that I'm working with. And there are these realities. What we're pointing to is there are these realities we just don't want to face. And in not facing them, there's, there's, there's some impacts, like we're just not actually being accountable to what's in front of us and maybe not making the best decisions in my case relationally, my marriage, in their case, relationally, in terms of their health. And that's, you know, that's. That in either case it's not going to lead to the most optimal outcome, you know, so just a personal share there.

Luke Adler: Yeah, that, that piece of, you know, seeing, seeing it for yourself, seeing the truth with your own eyes, feeling it with your own body. And it's why, you know, you and I have both really put a lot of our effort into shadow work. Compared to more of a kind of an intuitive base or not an intuitive, but like a psychic style work where you're, you know, you're telling the client, you're telling the person, hey, this is what you need to work on. This is what I see as, you know, you need to kind of face in your life. And although that, that can be useful, it's often short lived for that exact reason that if you don't discover it for yourself, you're always going to be dependent on me. The, the coach, the healer, the, the, the, the advisor to guide your life and for periods of time that can be useful. But ultimately our goal is sovereignty. You know, our goal is certain kind of self sufficiency. Even though our work's very relational, it's being able to, to land within your own inner teacher, within your own. That, that's, that's a little bit two steps above but your own inner knowing. And it's why in our style of work like we will never, we will never lead with advice or guidance. We're always going to lead with feeling. And basically we teach people how to feel. We teach them how to begin the process of that descent or that great traverse from head to head to heart to guts. And that, that can be a very, that can be a very long journey for some people, you know, to make that transition, to get from the head, you know, down to the throat where like just the beginning of all the feeling lives. And gosh, I was working with someone recently and I said, I said, hey, let's do some work. You, you seem to be really fused, really identified with your inner critic. And they're like, well, how could, what, how could this not be true? How could the view that I'm a piece of shit and a burden to society not be true? And I'm like, well, it's not necessarily whether it's true or not right now. What's the. What the issue at hand is that you're fused with it. You can't see any other possibility. And so, you know, this person was trying to bat it back to me, but I don't understand. Can you explain it to me? And I'm like, I can't really explain it to you, but I can help you feel your way, you know, kind of apart or a way out from being kind of stuck with that point of view. And I think when we look at, you know, when we get stuck in our head, it can happen to anyone but any one of us. But when we're really in our head, we're really fused in some ways with a. With a critical perspective, a perspective that's really stuck in polarity and division and wanting to further delineate, right, further separate out yin and yang, good and bad, black and white. Differentiate each shade, each color. And. And that's a. It's interesting. In Sanskrit, they call this mayiya mala, which is the. The. The obsession with distinction. And it's a place that the. It's a place that the identity can get stuck in. Let me just. I just want to understand it more. Let me understand it further. Let me understand it further. And it. What it is, is it's a distancing from your core. And it's a way in which we just. We trying to cling on to a piece of reality that, you know, like I'm using. I'm clenching my fist right now. We're trying to clutch onto something for dear life because we don't want to let go and feel the bottom of that is a feeling of. For me, I use that word incompetence, but it's this feeling that something is wrong. Something is wrong with me, with life, with my relationship. Something is just fucked up. And we really don't want to feel that. We really don't want to feel that. But the cool thing about feeling that which you said, like, if, you know, I've experienced this, if I feel that I think I might die, is on the other side of that feeling is actually this. This access point to our wholeness and our integrated, connected self. It's an interesting paradox, it's an interesting phenomenon about reality that the doorway into our wholeness and connection is this kind of sphincter. You know, it's this. It's this occlusion, this kind of tight nut of something is deeply up here, something's deeply wrong. And, and because something's wrong, I'm sensing something's wrong, it must mean that I. I am wrong. I am not okay. And of course we know the truth is anything but that. There. There is a. There is a core that is. That is, you know, strong and connective and, and whose nature is to feel. Feel reality. So, yeah. I mean, there's something you said in a. In a show you put on Jason maybe a year ago, that, that the big. Which is connected to this idea that the fear, we all have a feeling is that the core of feeling is just the. The ephemeral experience of feeling that you can't hold on to anything. And so, you know, that that's the energetic mechanism of, like, oh, if I let go of my grip, then all I can do is just feel the changing weather, the patterns. And the beauty of that is that it doesn't mean you're. You've disappeared. It's more like you're in a flow state than a fixed state. And that's, you know, in our experiences, it's a really beautiful thing, even when the weather's not, you know, favorable.

Jason Lange: Yeah. For some reason, it's bringing up this phrase we've all heard, right. Of mind over matter. And what that's evoking in me right now is, you know, thought really is incredibly powerful to redirecting our attention. And whether it's fantasy, thoughts, rumination, it's a pretty effective tool for taking us away from our pain. Right. If we just really think about that, and that's often what we're doing in what men are cultured to is I'm going to move away from my pain by going up into this highly conceptual place of wanting to understand. Because, you know, the hope is, well, if I understood, then I'd be safe and there wouldn't be pain. Right. Then I won't have to deal with the pain. But, you know, the, The. The pain is inevitable. And, you know, I love this formula. Right. The meditation teacher Shinzen Young came up with of, you know, suffering equals pain times resistance. Right. Just kind of a simple Buddhist concept there, right. That it's like pain is inevitable. It's just data from your body, but then you ampl by resistance and oftentimes and then that leads to suffering. Right. Thought is often what we mean by resistance. Right. I'm just going to try to think my way out of this pain or explain it, or sometimes get. Just ruminate on it over and over and over again, where it's like, conceptually I get myself so wound up in my head about how angry I am, but I'm not actually moving that energy through my body. Right? And something we talked about on our last retreat that I'm using more and more is this idea that the type of healing work, this deep feeling we're talking about usually involves breath, sound and movement or some combination of those three, right? And when we see guys step into that one part of that or multiple pieces of that, they tend to feel more. Right. It comes out of the conceptual head place. And they have these embodied experiences that they've never had before that are hard sometimes, that are overwhelming sometimes. And that's where, you know, we're such big proponents of the group is. You know, one way I talk about men's groups or, you know, even intimate relationship, in a sense, is at its best. We get to loan each other our resilience and our nervous systems. So if I don't have the capacity to feel that all by myself in a group, they can hold it with me. You know, there's a. I always have this image for. From nerds who saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy at the end, there's this like super powerful crystal. And if one person holds it, they're like literally burn up. But when everybody holds hands together, suddenly that same amount of energy is actually being held in the collective nervous system and they can do it. And that's kind of a big part of. Of why the group thing is so important. And what men are just often not taught to do is, well, fuck, it can be hard to feel that much grief alone, but what we find is when we hold it in connection, there's so much more resilience possible, so much power possible. So the willingness of men to kind of step in and start to feel in community, I've seen also just resources us at a total different way to take this stuff on. And when we don't have that community, I think there's sometimes a little bit of an internal wisdom there of like, I don't know if I could just feel that alone, because there's a lot of things, you know, as I say, some things are not meant to be felt alone. We are communal co regulatory creatures. And for most of human existence, you know, loneliness wasn't quite as possible as it is now. Like, you couldn't just live alone for most of human history. You had to have some kind of interaction with other people. And in those interactions, you know, habits and routines and rituals formed to help people process emotions communally. Right. And that's something that's kind of been wiped away, that our work and other work, I think, is trying to create some spaces to bring back online because it is overwhelming. And so this tendency to kind of put our foot on the break of feeling and just go right up to the thought and the understanding or the, you know, I used to do this all the time, even from a different level of the, well, if I just read another book or listen to another podcast or understand more, then my behavior will change. And I cultivated a lot of awareness, but without the embodied felt experience that we're talking about, that's just information that goes nowhere. The transformation happens when it's the awareness coupled with the feeling, the catharsis, with the actually becoming directly connected to what is. And then things can change pretty, pretty fast.

Luke Adler: And just to emphasize what you're saying about, you know, the power of a group, why we need men's groups really, is that our modeling for most of us, not all of us, but when I say Most, I mean, 90%, maybe 95% of us as men didn't have the modeling for emotional co regulation with our fathers. The modeling was more about the traditional man box. Men are tough, men are impermeable to, you know, weakness, men need to be strong, etc. And so on. And so there wasn't this teaching of feeling. In fact, we were taught the opposite. We were taught not to feel, bury that down, persist, move forward. So when we get with other men energetically who've been trained that way, it amplifies that kind of behavior. Let's stay in our heads. And then we act like that. We act that way with women. And of course, women will only put up with that for so long before they're like, will you listen to me and be with me and quit trying to fix me? I mean, you know, she, your woman might like that in the, in the beginning because you're strong and you're a protector, but she wants to feel your heart at some point. So the group process is so important to, to model for each other and to. The phrase we've been using lately, co regulate, you know, the, the, you know, to use polyvagal theory, the dorsal vagal response to the. The ventral vagal response to the fight or flight to the, you know, I call it rest and connect or rest and digest. How do we make that transition from these various states of consciousness? And it's tricky because if you're in fight, flight or freeze, right, that's a, that's either a really inactive or incredibly active part of your nervous system. So to get from there to, you know, connect, rest, soft, soften the parasympathetic response. That takes some training. That takes some templating. And of course, that's what you and I offer when we lead and shape these groups. We teach people how to move from those states. But when. When you're stuck in your head, when you're. When you're really, you know, committed to stay in your headquarters, for sure you are in a fight or flight state at that point. And it's. The characteristic of it is that you are not feeling right. There's. There's a state of numbness. There's a lack of attunement. And again, I'm not saying it's wrong or bad. I'm saying this is the nervous system you're in now. Do we just want to be in. In rest and. And digest, connect all the time? No, we want. What we want is fluidity between the two. How do we go from, hey, get your. Let's get our ass in gear. Let's get to work. Let's get in the car. Let's, you know, wake up and show up. And then how. How do I soften? Oh, I'm soft now. Oh, I need to kind of move my body. Mobilize. All right, let's get up. You know, enough softening time. Right. And so that. That's a very advanced skill to move consciously from these. These states of. These states of being that. That are kind of varied within these two aspects of our nervous system. And that skill is actually very learnable. And it's much easier to learn in community because we get triggered into flight or fight because of community. Right. We get triggered into rest and digest because of community. Right. What is the energy that masculine people love? They love a beautiful, zoftic, feminine flavor of energy because it softens that kind of get up and go and move. Right. And so this is why in some ways, these. The polarities between the two. The two states, they balance each other. And if there's consciousness to them, you can really have a lot of fun. It really gets to be a fun thing. So when we're stuck in our heads, guys, it actually keeps a lot of stuckness in our relationship. It doesn't allow there to be flow between. Between any relationship. Right. And so being able to soften into these other parts of ourselves, or not necessarily soften, but flow into parts of our being is a skill that. It just makes every part of our lives flow and feel better, you know?

Jason Lange: Yeah, we'll just close with. Like I said, when we learn to be with whatever is happening in our experience emotionally at the gut level, we become more trustable and easier to be around and frankly, more attractive. That's something we've seen when we're just stuck in the ruminating head. It gets pretty old. I think we've all felt it. It's hard to be around that in others. And there's a sense of just kind of getting stuck there. And we can feel when other people aren't feeling, even if we don't always have the language for it. And there's always a little bit of relief when the true feeling comes through. Doesn't mean there's not going to be conflict or tension because of it. But at least we're connected in reality now, right? What's actually happening? And we know the cards are stacked against a lot of you guys and men, for all the reasons we've talked about in this episode and before, just know that it's worth it. Coming down out of the headquarters, as you put it, into the heart quarters and into the gut quarters, the payoff is extraordinary. And change, real change, comes from doing that. It can't just be up here in the concept, in the conceptual. It has to be embodied at some point. And so, you know, you can certainly come along, work with us in the heart of shadows sometime, but you gotta find a place where you can practice getting out of your head and into your body and your heart.

Luke Adler: Lots of love out there to all you men. And, you know, we're.

Jason Lange: We're.

Luke Adler: We have several cohorts out there, men, who are in groups and that are practicing this right now. So there's a growing community that's here to support you. And if you're listening to this, you're likely interested in this work. Jump in, we're here for it. And you'll be pleasantly surprised and likely blown away by the freedom on the other side. So check us out. Heartofshadow.com we'd love to meet you. We'd love to work with you.

Jason Lange: Take care. If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men. Apply.