Greetings.
Do you know how little time it takes for a human to die from lack of oxygen?
Just a small handful of minutes.
How aware are you of the air you’re breathing right now? Do you remember a time when it felt more precious, perhaps even questionable?
Breath is one of the primary building blocks of life.
So, when big change wants to occur (or is occurring!) in your life, you have so many options available—amongst them: avoidance, denial, repression, victimhood, rescuing or hurting others.
Another available option is to turn inward, develop your awareness of what’s happening beneath the surface, and begin to map the territory. To light the torch of your awareness and walk into the darkness.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Many men would go to war before facing their internal landscape. This can only be for one reason, as far I as I can tell:
War feels safer.
While I don’t know your experience, successes, failures, or your particular flavor of suffering, I have helped many men over the years discover and begin to navigate their own infernal monsters within. Many of them have remarked that the work they’ve done and experiences they had with me changed their lives.
Over that time, I’ve developed a framework for those ready to approach their own darkness, shadow, unconscious, pain, and ultimately, internal freedom.
Maybe you’re far along your path, or not quite at the beginning yet. Doesn’t matter.
The practice is the same.
Weekly posts will flesh out this framework in a nuanced and hopefully meaningful way. Wherever you are in your inner journey, see what of this resonates, and leave the rest.
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Medicinal Men’s Work
The following outlines the themes and core principles of my work. It is structured into four main pillars:
Groundwork
Structure
Expansion
Integration
Each pillar encompasses essential practices and principles designed to cultivate connection, depth, resilience, and transformation within your body, relationships, and your life.
Over the next few posts, I’ll describe each pillar in broad strokes and offer basic practices for you to engage. Each post thereafter will go up in a more assorted order, each with references to associated pillars.
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In Groundwork, we begin at ground zero: what is it like to breathe air in and out of your body? What is it like to pay attention to yourself breathing?
Not even talking about meditation, yet. Just try paying attention to your breath for a few moments. Standing up, eyes open, whatever. It’s possible that nothing profound will come of it (if that’s the case for you, practice this more often).
We’ll expand from the breath into paying closer attention to the rest of the body, if or when it’s safe to do that. If you carry some form of PTSD in your body, this may or may not work for you at this stage. Also, lots of numbness can be a clue to lots of energy being stuck in the body, perhaps something that’s not quite safe to feel yet.
The idea is specifically to not accomplish anything, but simply to practice being aware. If you want the science around this, please refer to Dr Dan Seigel’s book Aware, as well as the plethora of awareness practice lineages in Eastern traditions across the millenia (more on that later).
Developing awareness is so important to working toward whatever version of freedom, healing, reconciliation, inner peace, improved relationships, a better life—that it is essentially the only thing we’ll focus on in Groundwork.
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Next week, we’ll dive into the second pillar, Structure.
Among other things, we’ll talk about Values, Feelings, and Purpose, as well as how to come into relationship with those things in a way that, if integrated over time, may result in others perceiving you as a more trustable partner, friend, lover, co-worker, manager, brother, son, uncle, father, grandfather, leader.
Thank you for this text. Indeed, presence and awarness are the most important things if you want to experience a difference in the quality of your being in this world. Then you can learn the lessons and do the inner and outer work.